The original plan was that Tom would race the Round the Island Race double handed with Ben Rogers, but we finally raced three up because Natalie was available after all and Tom’s shoulder is still not fully recovered from his bike accident in February.
Everyone was speculating that the race would be slow with little wind. This was certainly the feeling at the start, with only a few knots of breeze from the south west. Despite her scarred memory of the 2015 Fastnet when Tom put Mostly Harmless the wrong side of the line in a drifter and we took two hours to get back to the right side, Natalie asked him to helm the start. We secured possibly the second best start in the 90 strong Division 2 fleet, bettered only by Shirley Robertson (who demonstrated that she hasn’t lost the touch that secured two Olympic gold medals) in her Sunfast 3300, Swell. The photo above, taken from the shore a couple of minutes after the start shows Mostly Harmless (circled) with most of the Division 2 fleet behind and to leeward and already about to overtake a fleet of larger boats that had started ten minutes earlier.
The wind built slowly as we headed west down the Solent. We remained generally in good shape, along with some of the other J105s who were more than holding their own against bigger and theoretically faster boats. We picked up more places at the Needles by going inside the Varvassi wreck (these days we have three waypoints, very close together, to help us find the way through) but, being shorthanded, were overtaken while hoisting the spinnaker by a gorgeous vintage Colchester smack that briefly rolled us to windward. We later switched from A2 spinnaker to our code zero to good effect and soon realised that, far from the race being the slow one predicted, we were well ahead of the normal schedule, arriving at St Catherine’s before lunchtime. Frustratingly, we could see at least one J105 ahead, William Newton’s Jelly Baby, which we tailed as we headed across Sandown Bay to Bembridge Ledge under spinnaker again.
We dropped the kite at Bembridge Ledge although others flew spinnakers for part of this leg, before a fast close reach from the Ryde Sands posts that demanded hard work from Ben and Tom trimming jib and main respectively through the shifts and gusts coming off the Island. We remained just over a minute behind Jelly Baby and four minutes on corrected time behind Swell at the finish, but over eight minutes behind Andy Roberts’ Jin Tonic which once again led the J105s home. 13th in Group B and 7th in Division B2 was not our best Round the Island results by any means but, with an elapsed time of 7 hours 51 minutes, the predicted slow drifter turned out to be one of our quicker roundings.