GBR44 round the island

'It was like taking a F1 car round a rally car circuit,' describes Neal McDonald

For those of you who saw the Round the Island Race, you may have thought that choosing to race around in the 80+ft GBR 44, would be a straightforward decision. I can tell you now that the truth was actually very different, especially from the point of view of managing the loads involved.
ACC boats are far from being well suited for that type of race: they are thoroughbred racing machines designed for pure upwind and downwind VMG sailing. They are definitely not designed for fast reaching and the few times I have had time to look up the mast in luffing matches in flat water and relatively light winds with the spinnaker up I have not liked the look of the wired shapes the mast has been distorted into.

Tight reaching with a kite is not an option. You cannot even go to an outboard lead on a jib as the boats are simply so narrow there is no deck there to sheet off. On top of all that they are about as unseamanlike in design as you can imagine. There are no guard rails. Every fitting is made as light as possible to the point of it being at near breaking point at the first sight of misuse. There is no possibility of reefing the main and no engine to get you out of trouble. There is little regard to waterproofing the deck and, to top it, all the smallest, thinnest rudder you can get away with that stalls out if the trim of the sails is the slightest bit wrong. In a nutshell, it is hard to design a worse boat for the Round the Island race! It is like taking an F1 car round a rally car circuit.

Our poor weather girl, Fiona, had a hard week of it as she had to try and let us know exactly what weather we were going to get. If the weather looked bad - strong winds or bad seas - we were not going to risk it. We even talked about pulling out once we got to the Needles if things looked bad.

Having said all that, the day went exactly according to plan. Despite a bit of rain the weather could not have suited us better: just west of south and mostly below 20 knots, kept the sea to a manageable state and got us round in reasonable shape. Compared with most week days when we had two boats out there doing battle for several hours, doing 30 or 40 tacks and gybes, the Round the Island Race was a walk in the park. We had only to do a handful of tacks, one gybe, one kite set, one peel and one kite drop all day - it was a piece of cake.

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