Cowes Week 2023 – Day 6, Tricky Thursday 3rd of August

August 3, 2023

The good news; the weather prediction was spot on.

The bad news; the weather prediction was spot on.

We started off the RYS line close to the shore, being excited to go racing again after a full layday on Wednesday. The main issue was the weather forecast. A NW gradient, with at some stage the Sea Breeze kicking in, killing the gradient and then slowly take over. Too bad for us, the killing of the gradient came when we just hadn’t finished yet. The tide pushed us 1.6Nm back and we had most of the other boats overtake us. While we were leading the fleet around the last mark, we were only 9th on corrected time; 2.5 hrs(!) after the first two boats in our class had made it JUST before the wind died.

The weather forecast at some stage

At the start we were a little bit late, but we hugged the shore like we wanted to, giving us some current advantage.

We were second to last boat for the first part, but we rounded the big green Gurnard Buoy (we would see more of that mark) in 3rd place. By the time we were up the beat to Lepe Spitt we were leading the pack again (like it should be). A fetch to a laid mark, a great beat unto ‘The Boss’ and another fetch to Salt Mead. We were thinking of a short course and an early beer, but then the above pictured scenario kicked in.

Seabreeze killing gradient. No wind for us, but little wind for CETEWAYO and J’RONIMO just to the North of us. We were (painfully) overtaken, but the worst was yet to come. Only the two earlier mentioned boats made it. With us 0.5Nm from the finish and FRANK-3 0.17Nm from the finish the whole fleet started drifting backwards. Avoiding marks now coming in from behind at 3.0Kts. We drifted a good while back (1.6Nm) and the race started over again. Check our painful track.

Our very friendly but fierce competitors FRANK-3 (with whom we had a beer at the beer-tent) sailed out further than we did, and luckily we managed to beat them on the water. It was kite up, kite down, dropping, Genoa up, Genoa down, we did everything to make WINSOME sail backwards as slow as we possibly could.

We are all very proud of the WINSOME team, who kept spirits up and were able to make the best of it. Despite leading for 80% of the race, we came 9th, but we overcame.

Tomorrow looks more solid in terms of breeze. We are planning on showing the competition our full potential. However, overall it looks like we are in a solid 3rd place.

So well done WINSOME team, well done CETEWAYO and well done J’RONIMO.

Up for another great race tomorrow!

Cheers,

Boj