The Guingand Bowl

May 23, 2022

On the 14th of May we lined up Winsome of the Squadron line to start the Guingand Bowl. Harry, Geoff, Frans, Renze, Pieter K, Leen, Joppe and myself had the privilege to be onboard this weekend. For myself the last sailing on Winsome was pre-pandemic, so you could imagine how stoked I was.
The day before Harry fixed Winsome’s technical difficulties (with some help) with the compass, not knowing that on race day most of her navigation equipment would not be working properly.
Conditions on the 14th were sunny and (very) light giving us a beat to the Needles. At the start the tide was already running with us at the island side, the favoured side of the line. We anticipated the tide would also start to favour us (more than on the island side) if we stayed in deeper water, halfway down the line. This was the case, however not at the start….. The yachts starting at the island side had a strong current pushing them along, creating more apparent wind …. With 3-4 knots true wind and no tide with us for the first 30 minutes we were struggling. Finally the wind picked up and we got the tide making it possible for us to join the race. Catch-up became the name of the game as we were now convincingly last in our class on the water and on handicap.
When the wind filled in the sailing became enjoyable and we started moving up in the field.
As mentioned earlier the navigation equipment was not working, according to the navigations we were multiple times in the western and eastern hemisphere, routing by computer was impossible despite 20 reboots and joined efforts from Harry and professor ‘IT’ Köhne. So we had to rely on ‘old school’ navigation.
Depsite our flaws and and the navigation software not helping a bit we really had a wonderfull time, conditions were stunning en Winsome sailed delightfull.
After tacking on the line South of Bournemouth we were on our way to St Catherine’s point and after that off to our imaginary mark 34 miles to the East.
A kite ride brought us back to the Solent, passing Nab Tower, No Man’s Land Fort and the finish at Mother Bank. Best sailing I’ve done in years and the results, well, who’s counting (we finished 7th in our class).
We are going to try to fix the navigation and electronics before we set sail for the Round the Island Race. Good to be back sailing on and around the Solent again!

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