Le Havre Race
The bank holiday traffic meant that 2 of the crew decided to go direct to Cowes and we would go up the evening before the race on the tide. Unfortunately 2 other crew plus enough provisions to ensure Waitrose makes a profit this year were delayed on the M3 for a couple of hours. This meant that we did not reach Cowes until around 2330 and by the time we had tied up etc the pubs were closing. We did however recover the 2 crew who had been forced to eat a huge Tandoori washed down by copious quantities while they waited.
This was our first Royal Ocean Racing Club race of the Fastnet campaign and we would be content with finishing safely/ acquiring the qualifying miles. Also in the race was Space Race a first 40.7 crewed mainly by former Wild Spirit team members and we were keen to beat them as well.
After a good start we beat down to the needles then turned on to a spinnaker run which was to last most of the way to le Havre. The wind was better than the light ones forecast and we cracked on with the Asymmetric ‘Flying Pig’ at first, changing to the Radial Spinnaker later.
Some confusion arose at the Finish line and we, plus some other yachts, passed the wrong side of the committee boat, fortunately a few minutes later I realised this and we sailed back on whites rounded it and finished correctly but almost half an hour later. Despite this we just beat Phil and his team on Space Race by 6 minutes and came 81st out of 106.
Our next RORC race is the Eddystone on the Bank holiday weekend.
