Cowes-Dinard (St Malo) 2010

July 9, 2010

This race was meant to be our initial preparation for the Sevenstar Round Britain & Ireland Race. The entire crew i.e. Richard, Reima, Frank, Leen, Floris, Joost Nijhoff and myself, plus reserve Wout were on board.

The Race started quite well to the West and we were in a very good position until the Needles. There I made a mistake by breaking my own rule “never do anything else than we always have done” by asking the helmsman (Wout) to keep the Buoy Bridge on starboard, effectively crossing the bar between the Needles Light House and the the Buoy Bridge. This has cost us several positions, thought not dramatic.

After we left Needles Fairway Buoy at port, we headed for .. well which place we headed for .. say the Casquets, not our much wanted destination in this race. We had little choice though we gave height away as a result of a discussion with too many navigators at the same time. A lesson for the next race perhaps (?).

Coming closer to the Casquets it was a terrible choice to continue going SE or tacking. Foggy Dew was some 3NM ahead of us but more to the East so my calculations showed he was effectively only 1,5NM ahead of us after having crossed us. It all turned our differently since Foggy Dew went all the way South towards the  Casquets where he got an enormous tide to the West, giving him certainly 2-3 knots advantage in speed.

Coming closer to Guernsey the wind dropped and we could see on the AIS both Foggy Dew and British Soldier getting close to the SW point of Guernsey until the moment Foggy Dew switched off her AIS. British Soldier had to anchor, like Winsome, whereas Foggy Dew probably could take the advance of the tide gate created by the tide turning along to West Coast and East Coast of Guernsey. There the race was lost for us. We had to anchor 3 times. The 2nd time at 11:09 UTC and it continued for some 3 hours.

The wind never came back really and though we were sailing under spinaker as from the moment we passed Les Hanois at 15:30 UTC , we never had more than 7 knots tws. Arrival at the Finish 03:12 UTC and then we had to wait several hours until we could get into Les Bas-Sablonas Marina.

11th place out of 43 competitors. Not a good result but nevertheless we could keep several of the Archambaults boat  behind us in this light weather.

During the race it appeared one sheave of the Genoa halyard was broken so we used the reserve one on sb.

Back in Cowes, Leen took the broken sheave out of the mast and brought it to Sea-Tac where they will manufactor two new sheaves for us to be installed on Thursday 22nd of July plus a new spindle to keep the sheaves.

Next Race RORC Channel Race.

Best regards