Tales from the Round the Island Race - 2

Olympic sailor Paul Brotherton sails his first Round the Island on a Swan; Tony Harris was on Stephen Bailey's Sydney 40 Arbitrator

Everything was going fine until at 10.30, just east of Atherfield ledge, the boat slowed suddenly. We all looked aft to see we were dragging a bloody great red buoy - we'd hooked a lobster pot. Mike on the helm kept his cool and managed somehow to extract us from our predicament without resorting to using Spike's knife, which he was brandishing menacingly, but this incident cost us some time and we lost touch with some of the Far40s as a result.
As we passed Jeremy Rock at about 11.00 we went for the kite for the first time. The fractional went up not quite as smoothly as we'd liked but, hey, we hadn’t done this before. As our course changed and the wind went more aft, we went for a peel to the mighty masthead, and felt the boat speed picked. Nick's handheld GPS - which was still working - confirmed our speed over ground as10 knots as we flew past Culver Down.

Our next manoeuvre was to be a gybe at Bembridge Ledge. Just Spike and I were discussing whether we could manage it with the masthead kite up (the angle on the new gybe was going to be too tight I thought) the problem solved itself. We hit the back of a wave. The boat slowed but the masthead didn't and we blew the sail. We scrambled to get the shredded kite back on board, before gybing and popping up the asymmetric (told you so!!) and heading for No Man's Land Fort.

By 1.00pm we were at No Mans Land fort (no loud music this year) where we changed down to the heavy No1.again and reached home. We finally finished at 13.51 with the Swan 65 Eva just ahead of us and one of the new Kerr 11.3s just behind us.

We made the beer tent by 14.15 which after a round the island race, we felt was not bad for a day's work. Only three tacks and one gybe but as you can see plenty of incidents. Thanks goes to Stephen Bailey for getting Arbitrator back in the water, and not shouting when the masthead kite blew up! All in all it was a classic round the island race on board a great boat with a bunch of good guys.