Becalmed in Cowes

I took some clients and guests racing on a Farr 65 today in Cowes Week, with the ever-reliable OnDeck.


Initially there was a nice westerly breeze, but the Eastern Solent turned into a millpond as the afternoon progressed. Understandably, given the boat we had, we kept moving long after some of the yachts taking part in other races around us had formed involuntary, but cosy, clumps.


Eventually, however, even we had to accept the inevitable and retire. For all that, Cowes Week offered a great day out for a nice bunch of people, including Lloyds TSB, who had kindly taken me along last year but who - for obvious reasons - were not chartering yachts themselves this year.

Third Time Singlehanded

Well, so much for the "BBQ Summer" that the Met Office promised us. As Positive Weather Solutions put it: "As with 2007 and 2008, the position of the jet stream is unfavourable, and current projections show it may well stay there, meaning, we had our Summer at the end of June and start of July."

So I grabbed what seemed like the first fine day in weeks - or the Friday afternoon at least - and headed out in the hope of beating the next front to come passing through on Friday night.


Not much to say really. It was just a relaxing sail, enjoying my increasing confidence in sailing singlehanded, the spirit of which I've tried to capture in the vid and its soundtrack rather than wittering on about it. You can, incidentally, see the next batch of cloud already building ahead of the looming warm front, as the trip progresses.

One more day's sailing next week - in Cowes Week on Wednesday - then I am off to Italy in search of SWMBO and the bambini...and maybe some reliable sunshine...The long range forecasts say that the weather might improve from late August - fingers crossed.

Conditions: SSE backing E, F3 - F4, mixed cloud and sunshine. Sea state: slight
Distance covered (GPS over ground): 12.4 NM
Total distance covered to date (2009): 124.1 NM
Engine hours: 1.6 (total for 2009: 9.6 hours)

Arabella's Kid Sister

Chris Waller sent me this great pic of his Pandora International on her first sail of the season, back in April. Arabella's sail number is 535, and as you can see, the sail number on Chris's Pandora is the next in sequence.

RTIR 2009: 50th overall

Arabella came in 50th overall this year - not as good as her best result of 30th overall in 2007, but if anyone had suggested beforehand that we would manage two top 50 placings in three years, I wouldn't have believed them. We should have done somewhat better, in fact - but that's racing for you.

Above: Some fun ArabellaCam (tm) footage captured us surfing under spinnaker between the Needles and St Catherines Point. To view all Arabella's vids, go to Arabella's Movie Gallery or her new YouTube Channel.

We drifted over the start line on the tide, in no wind at all, but as the breeze filled in, things began to speed up.

Above and below: A civilised start-time for a change, but no wind!

As the GPS track below shows, we picked up the tidal conveyor through Hurst just right, and had a tremendous run round the back of the Island - surfing down the waves under spinnaker at up to 9.4 knots - and rolled over what looked like hundreds of boats.

Above: Rounding the Needles, quite a long way back in the fleet........(image copyright Sailing Scenes, used with permission).

Above and below:...to find rather a lot of boats in front of us....(below image copyright Sailing Scenes, used with permission).

Below:...although thankfully not too far ahead of us...

Above and below: ...and after a few hours of surfing downwind, rather of lot of them now seemed to be behind us :-)


At this point we were beginning to entertain thoughts of a very good result indeed, but it all went wrong for us on the final leg up the Eastern Solent. We found ourselves becalmed in a sea of much, much larger boats squeezing round the easternmost marker post for Ryde Sands. In all the dirty air, our sails flapped uselessly, while the big boats with their taller rigs proceeded to sailed over us, and we went backwards on the tide.

Above and below: The marine car park at the eastern Ryde Sands post (visible centre) and what it cost us in terms of progress.

We wasted an hour like that, first heading out into the main channel to see if we could get clean air but finding that the breeze had died off. Eventually, we got brave and headed back inshore, passing through the marine car park once again. We then tiptoed along the edge of the sands, once touching them and (luckily) tacking back off, until we picked up a favourable eddy right up against the Island shore. With what little wind there was, we and a few other brave souls that had stayed close in managed to pull back some of the places we had lost.

In the circumstances, we decided that getting 50th overall was a better result than we had any right to expect. But we also learned some important lessons which we will try to apply next time:

• Arabella sails so much better to windward than before as a result of her new sails. But they can't save her when she is trapped in the dirty air from larger boats. To a point, at least, clean air matters more than a fair tide. After the debacle at Ryde, we learned to cover our windward side, agressively if necessary, by sailing so far inshore that anyone bigger would have been suicidal to follow us. That policy paid good dividends as we worked up the Island shore, recovering some of the tens of places we had lost.

• Sailing inshore is not free from risk, but as well as encountering less adverse tide close in against Ryde, we also picked up a favourable eddy close inshore between Norris and the Shrape, while competitors further out were visibly still stemming the tide.

• At the relatively late stage at which we tend to reach Ryde, the flood is well established but with a few hours of rise still to go. That does mean we can have two or more metres of tide under us, with which to scrape over the sands. I think that I will recce that area in more detail in the coming months, and see whether the fabled inshore route is viable for Arabella on a rising tide. It would be handy to have that knowledge in our tactical toolkit for next time.
  

Conditions: NW backing SW, later veering W F1 - F4, mixed cloud and sunshine. Sea state: slight to moderate.
Distance covered (GPS over ground): 76.3 NM
Total distance covered to date (2009): 111.7 NM
Engine hours: 3.9 (total for 2009: 8.0 hours)

Final Preparations

The last bits of deck gear were installed on Arabella with two days to spare before this year's Round The Island Race...

Above: New halyard winch fitted to the mast.

Above and below: New Harken adjustable genoa track

In addition, a new outhaul had been fitted, which now gave a decent purchase when the time case for hardening it up. With new sails and all these go faster bits on board, and with her interior stripped out, Arabella was starting to look like a proper little racing yacht - if, that is, you were prepared to ignore her twin keels.