Racing on the Mersey

On the basis that I’ll try anything once, I decided to try a little water sport fun. We have visited the Mersey River Festival a number of times over the years and tended to stay in the docks to capture pictures of street performers and the like. This year we went along purely for the water sport, to try our hand at something new.

There was plenty of opportunity to get to the front of the queue to photograph the Zap Cat racing – in fact, there was no queue. Taking up position near one of the buoys, soon we spotted a fellow Wigan 10 member, whom we were not expecting to see there. As the catamarans come down towards the buoy from the back straight, there were a few seconds of opportunity on each lap to bag a few shots as the crafts came near to each other, or lifted out of the water. Between Zap Cats were some power boat races.

If that wasn’t enough, overhead meanwhile was an air display, so we were busy shooting boats as they come towards us then aircraft ahead. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to alter the shutter speed between boats and aircraft so I messed up the aircraft shots by getting too fast a shutter speed. Hey, ho, we put it down to experience!