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.
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.