Cowes week 2008 day 1

August 2, 2008

The Skandia Cowes week 2008 has started! Winsome and her crew already arrived on Wednesday to prepare themselves for this special event. Thursday there was hardly any wind, so training was not helping us, but usefull, because during one of our four tacks our port genua-winch gave up. Luckily our tackteam of surgeons with Pieter Joose in the lead repaired it instantly. Thursday evening we had beef Rose out of Francois’ magic hands and many bouteilles de vin rouge, while Boj set up a kind of target setting session, which was very fruitfull.Friday the wind was up to 34 knots, so training with our Cowes week material was too risky. We went out, had a shower and went back in. Friday night everybody was looking forward to start Cowes week and at 23:00 all lights were out.Today we started at 11:30 before the RYS with 11 knots of wind. After a short postponement we were positioned excellent, too good to be true! After the startsignal there was a individual recall, and that could only be us, so we had to duck back again and start the race as dead last. We sailed into the west and reached to several marks on both shores, without much potential to catch up other boats. But we seemed to be the only boat with a GPS in our class and sailed straight lines instead of bananas. We rounded the first marks as boat #15.Wind start to build up to 25 knots and so did Winsome. We hoisted our Spinaker #1 and sailed deep into the Wight shore, with only 30 cm of water below the keel. Many gybes followed and we won back a lot on competition. A tough reach with some Chineses gybes and blown up spinakers around us we rounded our final downwind mark. We hoisted the Genoa #2 and just got crossed ahead of a big containership splitting us from the boats behind us.Finishing in front of the RYS we got in on #4 position. Not a bad result for a first day and a really exciting day sailing! This result could have been worse.Keep you posted!Hendrik