Hurtling through the night, surfing down waves with the heavy weather spinnaker flying in 25 knots of wind is not everyone’s idea of fun, but if it is yours then the Eddystone race was superb. Andy and I checked our navigation; we were still south west of Portland Bill at 2300 and heading for home on a spring tide with 25 knots from WSW, if we passed the Bill close in we should just make it round Anvil point and past Swanage before the tide turned, but any problems and we could end up at St Albans Ledge with wind against tide—not a good place to be. We opted for a safer margin and laid a course 5 miles off shore knowing that we would then have to fight more tide on the way to the finish line at North Head at the western end of the Solent. With hindsight I believe this was still the correct decision although it was to cost us a place, first place, so just another second to add to this seasons tally. One of the difficulties about racing is how much food to put on board. We like to eat well and make sure there is plenty of it so I try and work out how long the race will last just before the final provisioning. The Eddystone (Myth of Malham) race has been dogged by either Gales or not enough wind for the last few years and on the Tuesday before the race the forecasts predicted a period of very light winds, on the Wednesday they showed almost perfect winds then changed back to light winds. Thursdays forecast was for stronger winds but it was clear that a dying low pressure meant unpredictable forecasts. During the race we had 3 gale warnings but I decided on plenty of food and at the end we had 24 hrs of spare on board. Our start was not brilliant, but by the time we reached Hurst at the west of the Solent we were reasonably positioned as we tacked down to the Needles in 20 kts of South westerly. A period of lighter winds was forecast for the night so we went deeper into the channel to avoid the strongest adverse tides coinciding with light wind. When you are struggling to make any headway a Gale Warning is a mixed blessing but at least it was due to come from the South. In reality it was never a full Gale but we saw 30 kts a few times and had to reef the sails as we sped down to the Eddystone rock off Plymouth rounding it just under 24 hours after starting off Cowes. Not the fastest I have ever done this, which was a few years ago when we had 48 kts of North easterly and the ‘through the water’ record of boat speed was for Wild Spirit was set at 16.4 kts, but still pretty good. Given the relative inexperience of some of the crew and the large seas we gave the rock a good clearance before shaking out the reefs and heading home under white sails. We sped up the channel past Start Point and experimented with the Heavy Weather Spinnaker before deciding that the following seas were still too large. We laid a course north of the Rhumb line to pick up stronger favourable tides later on and gybed on to it before gybing back a few hours later and then in still quite large but more predictable seas flying the spinnaker which gave us an extra 2 kts. Passing the Bill we exceeded 11 kts speed over the ground and sometimes through the water but the extra disturbance to the wave patterns meant we had to drop the spinnaker and finish under whites. We crossed the line at 0430 just 16.5 hours after rounding Eddystone but with only one other yacht visible assumed we were near the bottom of the list. Only after arriving home did we find out we had achieved 2nd in class –we were actually the first in class to cross the line but the 2005 overall Fastnet winner Iromiguy beat us on corrected time.