Vice-Commodore's Report - My Round the Island Dream
The first Round the Island race that I competed in as a crew was on a 1959 Laurent Giles 36ft sloop, a fairly modern boat of that time. I cannot recall our finishing time but from that moment on I have always dreamt of winning the Round the island Race and, on a few occasions, I have come fairly close to it sailing under the old IOR rule in a variety of sizes of boats and latterly winning the Sonar and Sportsboats classes.
However, the Sportsboat class has now been abandoned by the IRC rule makers and there is, consequently, due to lack of support, no separate Sonar class. This prompted me to obtain an IRC rating for Jenny, the Sonar that I share with Ken Newman. The ‘J P Morgan, Round the Island Race’ is classified as a semi offshore race and therefore I needed to comply with the category 4 rule. This required us to have guard rails made and fitted and to ensure that we had all the necessary equipment and modifications, including a reef in the mainsail.
The big day arrived with a rather bleak and windy looking forecast. However, not to be deterred, off we went. Unfortunately, an individual recall then caused us some exciting moments as we returned through the fleet to the start.
The irritation of this soon passed with some close tacking along the Island shore in very strong gusts of wind. About half way to Yarmouth, we endeavoured to put in a reef, which failed due to a broken reef line block on the end of the boom. This meant a long hard flog to the Needles. I remarked that we would have to poke our nose round the Needles just to see what it was like. As we approached the lighthouse it became very obvious that it did not look exactly inviting, however, we decided to carry on and give it ‘a go’ and, as we all know, when travelling downwind things falsely appear to improve – so up went the spinnaker and off we went at a sometimes alarming speed, passing ¼ tonners and any boat of our size and even much larger boats of up to 40 ft! In sailing, as in life, you soon get used to anything and we all settled down to enjoy a very exciting sail.
As St Catherine’s neared, a unanimous decision was made to take the spinnaker down to gybe as the rather large seas could have caused Jenny to lurch into a wild broach – in order to win you have to survive! However, later we were forced to gybe by a starboard boat and unfortunately, the main boom caught our loose backstay and over we went into a wild broach! Recovery was quick and off we planed at speeds of possibly 18 or 19 knots. This was later confirmed by a ¼ tonner who recorded 17 knots on his gps and, as I have said, we left all the ¼ tonner fleet standing. One of the CCYC members, Ian Miller, recorded gusts of 37 knots of wind on his instruments so we don’t have to exaggerate what it was like.
We are now looking forward to next year’s Round the Island Race and the CCYC Forts Race in lighter winds, which will hopefully give us a relatively greater rating advantage over our competitors.
Good sailing and good luck for 2012.
Andy Cassell, Vice Commodore