With Natalie facing an exam imminently, Tom was joined by David Vialls for the JOG Race to Weymouth in mid May (and return leg of the Royal Southampton YC Double the following day – more on this below) and by Tori Davies for the JOG races to Yarmouth and back on the following weekend.
Coming off the Gurnard start line for the race to Weymouth, the angle for Hurst and the wind strength meant that all of Class 2 headed off under white sails. But within a few hundred yards, Jacana, fully-crewed and the only other J105, flew a masthead asymmetric and showed a clean pair of heels to rest of the fleet. Other kites were broken out as the wind freed and dropped a bit. With a lighter boat than most of competitors and, racing double-handed, no spare ballast to park on the weather rail, we played it safe.
We kept up well until halfway down the west Solent, but were late deciding to hoist our fractional spinnaker and lost ground unnecessarily before working our way back through the fleet as we approached the Hurst Narrows.
The fast reach across Christchurch Bay suited a double handed J105 with a small spinnaker. We steadily closed on Jacana, which appeared to struggle with bigger kite despite a full crew and we were not far behind and well placed overall by the time we reached St Albans. But the wind then dropped and became very patchy. We missed the nice bit of breeze that carried Sunfast 3300 Muzungu through to her Double Handed Class win by no more than a dozen boat lengths and dropped from the prospect of second place in Class 2 to mid fleet after to taking over an hour to complete the last few miles cross Weymouth Bay to the finish.
We emerged from Weymouth Harbour on Sunday morning to a radio message that the start of the Royal Southampton race back to the Solent had been postponed by an hour because of the lack of wind. Looking at the forecast, we made the call to scratch early and motored as far as Anvil Point where the wind picked up for an enjoyable cruising sail back to Hamble. It was the right call, as it turned out the race was abandoned later in the morning.
The following Saturday, with professional bow person Tori on board, Tom demonstrated that his starting skills, somewhat rusty after a dozen years running round Mostly Harmless while Natalie steers, were still sharp, as shown by Rick Tomlinson’s photo below.
The start set us up for a satisfying opening leg to the No-Man’s Land Fort, with a change sheet rigged and constant trimming resulting in us arriving first, ahead of much higher rated boats. We lost this as we played safe on the marginal spinnaker leg to Bembridge Ledge, but recovered much of the lost ground as we headed west after re-rounding No-Man’s Land Fort.
We were heading for a podium finish in Double Handed and Class 2 but for getting the angle wrong (Tom blames misbehaving GPS) on the cross tide penultimate leg when we allowed Jacana through and lost critical minutes that put us back to mid-fleet.
We were apprehensive about the short Sunday morning race back to Cowes, which was going to be to windward in a “wind against tide” Solent chop in about 15 knots of breeze, as we struggle to sail to our handicap when double-handed in such conditions. But we more than held our own and were once again in contention at the last turning mark when we fluffed the spinnaker hoist and had to recover the kite from the water (done very efficiently!) before getting it back up for short down-tide run to the finish line.
(Photos from JOG website, by Paul Wyeth for Weymouth race and Rick Tomlinson for Yarmouth race)