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.