GBR44 round the island

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

We gave the Needles a suitably wide berth and settled down to a 100-90 degree true wind angle reach. With no specialist reaching sails all we could do was sail straight to St Catherines with our upwind sails, making 11-12 knots boat speed. This was not that impressive, but this is not a point of sail that these boats are designed for.
Other than eating lunch (a strange feeling while sailing on these boats) all that had to be done was bail out the water we had taken on down below. Since Yarmouth there appeared to be a constant stream of boats ahead of us but as most were much much smaller than us we passed them like they were stationary. Once round St Cats we bore off and set a small asymmetric chute and this proved to be the only real challenging manoeuvre of the race.

There was sufficient seaway to have plenty of water rushing over the bow and having lost a bowman over the side in training just recently we were careful setting the chute and dropping the jib. No lifelines, a foredeck the size of a Mumm 30's, five guys and water everywhere made for some entertainment at this stage, but all went well. As the wind came progressively further aft we peeled to a medium-sized symmetrical chute, eventually gybed and ran down to the turning mark of Bembridge.

Hardening up to the Fort we had another jib reach at about 120 degrees true. Again we were still chugging by a massive line of all sorts of boats. It would be interesting to know how many we passed. I would guess well over a thousand, and it’s not every day that you get to do that. Round the fort we came up some more and on to another long fetch that took us to the finish. I think we were the second fastest monohull behind Mike Slade's Skandia Leopard, probably due to the fact that he had several GBR Challenge sailors on board!

So all in all it was a good day with pleasant, easy sailing, especially when compared to my vision of us wrestling around the Island in a vessel not exactly suited for the race.