If things go wrong when racing double handed, it’s pretty hard to recover. This was the story of the IRC Double Handed Championship for Mostly Harmless, despite all the omens for us being pretty good.
We made the starting area on the Saturday in unusually good time and well prepared, but still managed to be late at the line and at the wrong end, got most of the shifts up the beat wrong and were unable to recover offwind. Race two, in a bit more breeze, was going ok and we then made great progress (keeping higher than our immediate competitors) on a marginal spinnaker reach, only to mess the drop sufficiently thoroughly (in common with a number of others around us) to call it a day and head home.
Notwithstanding the feeling that we might have been jinxed by our preparations and being in good time on Saturday, we were in unusually good time and well prepared again on Sunday. But Natalie made a great start this time, on the line at the favoured end. Our strategy for the beat was slightly compromised by higher rating boats being reluctant to tack on a shift, but it was sufficiently sound to put us ahead of the other similarly rated boats in the fleet at the first mark. Then Tom discovered on the spinnaker hoist that he had rigged the sheet wrongly and, despite recovering several places on the second upwind leg and subsequent run (even though a coaster got in our way) to improve on our result in race 1, we decided to give race 4 a miss and return to HYS for a bit of bimbling in the autumn sunshine.
Perhaps we might have received more attention from photographer Paul Wyeth if we had looked a bit more competitive. He took some great photos of other boats, but the only appearance of Mostly Harmless in the gallery was a glimpse of a big white and red kite in a very crowded finish on Sunday morning.
