We completed the course in the Round the Island race in 11 hours and 56 minutes. Ideally a little more wind would have helped us on Emily V which is a heavier boat which responds to wind well but we made it around the course without incident and achieved our main goal of not hitting anything.
We were too cautious at the start and in trying not to be over the start line before our class start we ended up not crossing it until perhaps two minutes after we could have done. We made slow progress until Hurst because of light winds but then enjoyed freshening winds through hurst and down to the Needles. On rounding the Needles many boats chose to fly cruising chutes or spinnakers but we didn’t and were keeping pace with those that did for much of the way. We decided to go offshore in search of bigger winds but whilst it looked like we were making ground over the main fleet we had to cover more water to get back to St. Catherines point. The run up to Bembridge was calm and we were making progress slowly but our main mistake was to go North of the main fleet and we encountered more adverse tide there in addition to making our route longer so in the last quarter of the race we lost a lot of places.
We placed 36th in class out of 52 entries and 605th overall out of 1779
Although Long the day was fantastic and 16 hours on the water has given me my sailing fix at least for the time being.
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New blog post: Rounding the Needles http://bit.ly/wRA3C
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
God, I am envious. I did it once and it is still one of the best sailing experiences ever. The start was bewildering. Some day I will round a crew from over here to charter a boat and come do it. Most likely 2011
Adam I've put a gallery up here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/markhendy/
It was a great day! And you have some lovely photos, I will have a closer look later to see if you have any of us there.
We had a complete disaster at the start, not nearly cautious enough, over the line two minutes early. We spent about thirty minutes trying to re-cross the line, only then reading the rules (a little late maybe!) to discover that there was an automatic 5% penalty and no re-crossing.
With a wasted half hour, and a 5% penalty, under our collective belts we set about trying to catch the fleet, we did quite well on the beat up to the Needles, and were making good progress.
Very considerately, most of the fleet kindly waited for us at Bembridge Ledge which greatly aided our efforts to catch up!
We hugged the Island shore all the way back through the Solent and even managed to find some tide flowing in our favour, this helped claw some time back. We were feeling quite pleased with ourselves as we crossed the line, having made up a lot of our lost ground, at 8:38pm after 11 hours and 38 minutes.
However, our joy was short lived as we learned that due to starting 2 minutes early, we were disqualified! 2 minutes was considered too great an advantage for the 5% penalty to be applied.
Never mind, it was a good day and we did manage to get round, as you say, without hitting anything…although it was close at times.