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July 21, 2008

Haven Series Britannia Trophy

On the weekend of the 12th and 13th of July Jan and I took part in our 1st Haven Series race, the Britannia Trophy. The race starts just outside of Harwich and runs directly to Lowestoft. There are a few navigation marks in the course however these are all found in the final moments of the race.

Jan and I were the only two handed entry in a fleet of 12. Given our track record our sights were set low for this one, in short we just wanted to get there without incident.

Our start was fantastic, we ran away from the line for 2 minutes under main alone, transferred the water ballast, tacked and the hoisted the foresail. As we hit the line we were powered up with a tank of ballast.

For the duration of the race the wind strength sat somewhere between 15 and 20 knots with the occasional stronger gust under the grey clouds that frequently rolled in. Most of the fleet opted for spinnaker hoists at the start of the race. We had originally thought it would be short kite leg and opted to continue without one. However when the 1st headland was passed and the hoisted kites remained filled the fleet began to leave us behind. In cruising mode at this point, eating lunch and drinking tea it didn’t matter much. However when the distance between us became upsetting we put our asymmetric up. In no time at all we had caught some of the fleet up and were flying along.
We did have one incident, during a luffing match with a fully crewed yacht (yes.. I should have known better !) our kite sheet became detached. It all happened at about the same time that one of those gusts kicked in and recovery was lengthy.

Four hours, forty nine minutes and nineteen seconds later we finished our 1st race 2 handed together.

Many thanks to Malcolm Perrins with Serica of Woodbridge from the Jeanneau Owners Network for snapping this picture of us as we sailed home the following day.

Posted by ninjod at 08:07 AM | Comments (0)