Paul Goodison around the island

Laser Olympian and skipper of the John Merricks Farr 45 describes his race

The warm up for JPMorgan Round the Island Race this year was pretty special with the Volvo Open 70 yachts leaving from Portsmouth to venture on to Rotterdam. It was a light and fickle start which saw the boats creep up to Cowes and then away into the Western Solent. After watching the boats leave I was ribbed over to Cowes ready for an early start. Waking at 4.30 was not ideal before heading down to the boat, the Volvo RYA Keelboat Programmes Farr 45.

What a beautiful sunrise but unfortunately not so much wind! We started at 6.10 and headed off reaching down to the needles, after a couple of sail changes we were nearly there. We decided to go between the wreck and the needles so we could hug the shore round the back of the island. We bottled it! The DK 46 Dark and Steamy, just in front of us stopped abruptly as they piled into the wreck and ran aground, although this helped indicate where not to go we decided on safe rather than sorry! We gybed around the wreck and headed in shore under spinnaker, this is where the fun began.

From the Needles to St Catherine’s it was a battle between a northerly breeze and a south easterly offshore. Most of the bigger boats had opted for an offshore course while a group of Farr 45s were racing inshore. The lead kept changing as boats picked up breeze raced away and then stopped, tacking, gybing and changing sails to make the most of the wind that was around.

After trying to figure out what was happening we simply decided to head for the next turning point and try and make as much of the wind we had while defending position with the boats just behind. After 4 hours racing we had moments of being the lead monohull catching and overtaking a few Volvo Extreme 40s which was nice.

As we headed back into the Solent under spinnaker we were running out of the wind from behind into a large calm patch before the new Westerly breeze in the Solent. This was the most frustrating part of the race as it seemed to take hours to cross the calm patch as boats were still sailing under spinnaker from behind while we were changing sails and kedging against the tide.

As the new breeze arrived we were off again back to Cowes, we had a great battle with two other Farr 45; Atomic, Rebel but unfortunately a TP52 insisted on ruining our race tacking on us several times. A few polite words from Jamie Boag our tactician onboard, we were off to find new breeze.

We finished the 5th monohull on the water which was impressive for a 45 footer, in just over 9 hours.

It was a good day out and a pleasure to the sail with the crew of Volvo RYA Keelboat sailors fingers crossed for more wind next year!