Month: July 2020

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.