Information
News
Race Reports
General pictures

Calendar
Race dates 2003
Fastnet/Offshore
Crew List - offshore
Crew List and Dates

Resources
Directions to the boat
What to bring
Sailing the X332
Fitness
Links

Imagine a long offshore race..... By day three, you're tired, slightly grumpy, and your muscles ache. You've a headache, strenuous activity makes you feel sick, and going below to pack spinnakers is not the joy it once was. Well, we got into training for this by going to a party at Elaine's, drinking until 3am with some wonderfully eccentric neighbours of hers, and then getting up far to early on the Sunday to try and race. Mind you, it appears to be good practice cos we all exhibited the correct symptoms.

Race day was scattered showers (though not on us during the race, even some sun, and for once not a force 8. A variable 12-18 knots was the order of the day, with occasional gusts into the early 20s. The #3 was used, mainly to allow the trimmers to haul it in with less effort.....

A potentially crowded start line of 20 boats at 10:30 (our start) and 10 one minute either side of us (it's a pursuit race, remember, when the handicaps are calculated in advance and you all finish together) was avoided because many crews took the weekend as an excuse for a rest, but our slightly light crew of five were raring to go.

A good start at the committee boat end, with all the sails up (see race 2) saw us sail a reasonable beat with good boat speed and okay tactics. Approaching the windward mark with the tide setting against us, we overstood to allow for the tide and then tacked in on starboard. Then the doubts set in. Would we make it or not? It was starting to look dodgy..... (Learning point: whenever this happens, bail out early. You will not make it, especially with boats above you giving you dirty wind.) So we stuck in there, but then realised that we really were not going to make it. So we looked behind for a gap to tack into, and saw wall to wall boats. And I mean loads of them - there was no space to tack and duck - we were well hemmed in. So we pinched and pinched, and shot the mark..... and were still a boatlength shy of it, so had to bear away and gybe off. A gust caused a delay in the gybe, and by the time it was complete, the tide had taken us away from the buoy in the wrong direction by quite a way. We tacked back to port, found a gap in the stream of boats and went a lot higher, and the only thing that relieved my frustration at my mistake, which I had thought about earlier and so had even less reason to make, was the sight of a few other boats in the same trouble. We had lost a good 3 minutes.

We coasted round the outside, and set about catching the other X's that had got away from us. A decent hoist, good boatspeed, and steady crew work saw us slowly reel them in, but we'd lost loads and were only making metres at a time. A good rounding at the leeward mak and some decent trimming were offset by yet another helming mistake, when we tacked with the intention of ducking a couple of transoms. But with the main fully out, the boat was heeling to leeward and wouldn't bear away, and this time I ducked out early enough to avoid t-boning people by luffing hard head to wind. No collision, but no boat speed either and we wallowed around onto our new tack having lost all we'd gained, and then some.

A decent breeze and playing the shifts caught us up a few places, and a good surfing run downwind when we sailed deep and made good speed to the buoy saw us recover slightly, but we ended up finishing within sight, and always closing, of the other X's (eXabyte in particular). Without the mistakes it would have been so different, but then, after three days at sea, what can you expect?

Russell.

Final position: 25th out of 47, 3.5 minutes adrift of eXabyte (6th X-Yacht out of 8). And really the helm's fault.