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With Cowes Week cancelled (leaving us as custodians of the Commodore’s Challenge Cup for another season), Royal Southern Yacht Club organised a four day regatta over what would have the been the opening of the big event.  The sun shone but the settled high pressure made for mostly light and shifty conditions and racing being abandoned on the final day.  Still, it was the nearest thing we’ve had to a holiday in this Covid-19 blighted summer!

We entered Mostly Harmless in the double handed IRC class but when the class was cancelled because of a lack of interest we opted to race as the only double handed entry in the fully crewed IRC Class 2, accepting the inevitable penalty on round the cans courses that Tom had to rush around the boat even more frantically than ever doing the job of several people at once.  This applied not only at the turning marks but also between races, particularly on between races 3 and 4 on day 2 when the race officer’s enthusiasm to get the fleet away while there was a breeze left us floundering, unprepared and unable to recover our starting deficit.

Other than a glorious race 2, which we  led on handicap from start to finish and secured line honours, our results were undistinguished, leaving us hiding behind our short handed excuse!

This regatta was sandwiched between the RORC Round the Wight race and the Royal Southampton YC Island Double.  We retired from the former when approaching Yarmouth.  It was blowing 20+ knots and, short of sleep after a very hot and sticky night in London, we figured that we wouldn’t have enough energy left to be safe in the second half of the race.  The contrast in the conditions for the latter race could not have been greater and, given the prospect of no wind, we were among the many competitors who decided to stay at home.

 

The forecast suggested 12 knots gusting 14 knots for the second Junior Offshore Group covid-19 compliant race, this time out to the west.  However, we were greeted with 16 knots as we headed over to Cowes for the start, building soon to a steady 20 knots, with gusts of 25 knots after we left the Solent.  It was not a difficult decision either to tuck in a reef shortly before the start or to delay hoisting the spinnaker on the return leg until we reached the flat water after Hurst.

It was a challenging enough day in a 35 foot boat in Class 2.  We take our hats off to the crew of Eros, the smallest boat in the fleet, raced by a crew from Greig City Academy, and winner of Class 3 with the best corrected time in the whole fleet.  Having started 15 minutes later, it wasn’t until Yarmouth that Mostly Harmless passed Eros, which was keeping pace with much larger Class 3 boats such as a Contessa 32.

Mostly Harmless struggles to hold her time upwind in a breeze (especially racing double handed against boats with crew on the rail) and had difficulty until Needles Fairway Buoy staying ahead of the Sunfast 3200s (which rate below J105s).  However, we made good progress on the downwind legs back to the finish at Gurnard, recovering to 5th from 20 starters in Class 2 and 8th from 40 double handed starters.

JOG postponed the Lonely Tower Race, its first race after lockdown, by a fortnight because the weather looked a bit breezy for a fleet that included many crews sailing as families or unfamiliar with double handed sailing.  Instead, with high pressure over the UK, the race finally started in light airs but with clouds already building over the land suggesting a sea breeze would arrive in due course.

Exercising caution with a down-tide start, we didn’t cover  ourselves in glory initially but spotted that there might be some wind on the Hampshire shore and headed for it, overhauling several boats that had made better starts and leaving much of fleet stuck on the southern side of the Solent.  This put us among the first seven or eight in the 100+ boat fleet at No Man’s Land Fort, where Rick Tomlinson was lying in wait with his camera.  With the leading boats reasonably spread out, Rick had time to take 15 photos of Mostly Harmless: the selection above is a sample of the proofs on his website .

Shortly after this, the wind picked up to around fifteen knots and backed with the sea breeze giving us a quick white sail reach on the way out to the Nab Tower.  On the way back to  the final turning mark at the Winner, our effort to hoist the A5 was frustrated by a mistake by the bowman which may have cost us a place or two overall, and then it was a matter of the playing the shifts under the clouds on the beat back to the finish off Cowes.

Our failure to recover sufficiently from a poor start left us out of the chocolates, but we were happy enough to be eighth out of 68 double handed starters overall and first doubled handed boat on corrected time with a lady helm.

When we decided to do a few midweek races to support Royal Southampton YC’s break out of lockdown, I had visions of balmy summer evenings.  But this second trip involved another overcast evening in return for our investment of a 160 mile round road trip!  Nonetheless, it was a nice bonus on top of weekend sailing, even if it left us envious of people with their boats on the doorstep and regretting that neither of the more local clubs where we keep our smaller boats are back racing yet.

The price of doing well on 4 June was that we carried a bigger handicap, starting a minute and half later than last time in the pursuit race format.  However, with the boat going well and few good tactical calls we pulled through everyone ahead of us apart from a handful of sports boats and were overtaken only by NJOS (painted a lurid green this season), to finish 6th out 21.

First, a big thank you to the Solo Offshore Racing Club for offering a start for double-handed crews alongside its opening race after lockdown.  Ten boats came to the line, in gorgeous sunshine and a 10-12 knot breeze from the west.  Mostly Harmless made the best start of the fleet, only to squander it in some short tacking up the Island shore before finding a gap to head over to the slacker tide off Lepe and take a lead that we held for the rest of the race, winning both on the water and on handicap.

Rick Tomlinson was out and took some great photos.  The one above is now the lockscreen image on Tom’s PC.  The proofs below follow the order of the race.

 

Such is our desperation for competition that we headed down the M3 for the first race of Royal Southampton’s “Family Double Handed Midweek Series”. The heatwave of May had given way to a northerly in Southampton Water but nonetheless sixteen sports boats and cruiser racers turned out for a 90 minute pursuit race.  Starting almost a quarter of an hour after the first boat and a minute and a half ahead of the J88s that were the scratch boats, we made our way through the fleet only narrowly failing to catch a couple of slower boats and being pipped on the line by one of the J88s when the jib sheet snagged as we tacked for the finish line.

The government lifted restrictions on watersports on 13th May.  Tom celebrated with a short sail in the National 12 on the Thames on 15th.

We advertised to the IRC Double Handed WhatsApp group that we would organise informal race training for anyone who turned up at Hill Head buoy at noon on 24th May, but nobody else seemed to be ready at this point.  We headed out anyway for a gorgeous afternoon’s sailing in a remarkably empty Solent.  The number of boats out was more like midweek in October than the Spring Bank Holiday weekend – take a look over the co-skipper’s shoulder, below.

This was a strange season in many ways.  The original plan included a Fastnet campaign, with Natalie using the excuse of exams to avoid committing to qualifying races.  Tom smashed up his shoulder very thoroughly on a ski slope at Christmas and wasn’t fit enough to race double handed until the end of April, so sailed the JOG Nab Tower race fully crewed.  We bailed out of the Cervantes Trophy because one of the prospective Fastnet crew was laid low by mal de mer.  A slog to windward for the Myth of Malham reminded Tom why the Fastnet, with two thirds of the course typically to windward, wouldn’t be that much fun in a J105, besides which, with 18 Irish Sea crossings under his belt, he’d already got the tee shirt.  Nonetheless, with Natalie’s exams over, we did the RORC race to Dieppe in mid June and once again sailed the Round the Island Race with guests who had bid for their berths in a Versus Arthritis charity auction.

Otherwise, Tom and Natalie did plenty of double handed racing with JOG and Royal Southampton, with some decent results but not quite good enough to win either series.  The highlight of the season was winning the double handed class, admittedly from a small entry, in Cowes Week and also picking up the Commodores’ Challenge Cup, for the highest placed former commodore of a British or American yacht club in the regatta.

Greg, Guillaume and Pierre joined us for this year’s Round the Island.  Greg’s routing model showed that it didn’t really matter where you started.  Arriving at West Bramble, it looked like the Hampshire shore would be favoured.  However, watching the IRC 1 start twenty minutes before we were due to head off, it became clear to us but not the rest of the fleet that the wind had started to switch to the south.  So we opened up the throttle to get over towards the Island – and the sequence below, from the race video, shows how it paid off:

We remained in good shape at Hurst, in company with boats rating above us, and carving a swathe through the large competitors in the cruiser class that started 10 minutes before us:

 

At the Needles, we came close in and gained the tidal advantage, and made a good job of crossing Freshwater Bay and rounding St Catherines, avoiding some horrible holes in the wind, and almost certainly leading our division on handicap by a big margin.  There was another big hole the Bembridge – where we kept our cool – and got away before almost all the boats who had come in behind us.  And then there was another very testing hole at the Forts where the wind stopped again.

 

We were probably still leading the division as the wind finally filled in off Ryde Sands – we were certainly still ahead of the eventual division winner at the stage, but it all ended up very close at the finish and somewhere on the final beat we lost a few critical minutes, dropping back to seventh.

 

 

Back in November, John Stageman made the winning bid for a day’s sailing on Mostly Harmless in an auction at the Arthritis Research UK Lantern Opera. John, three family members and one of the directors of the charity joined Tom and Natalie for day on the Solent, exploring the Medina and Beaulieu, and feasting on boat food, including strawberries and cream from offshore racing dog bowls.