East Coast Race

After a disturbed morning we did not get an especially good start to the race. I could not concentrate and kept Robinetta well up river of the start line so the tide did not take us over.  At least we started in the middle of the fleet, but as normal a lot of boats came past us. Luckily the weather was Robinetta friendly (NW 4 or 5, increasing 6 around 13:00 when we were still racing) and the strong wind helped us keep our place in the fleet of 40 boats.

The race went from Stone to Bench Head on a good broad reach, then we had to tack past Colne Bar buoy and round the Colne Point buoy before returning to Colne Bar then back to Stone. The tacking towards Colne Point was very hard work. There were a lot of boats doing the same thing, against wind and tide, and inevitably we lost time and sometimes distance when we had to avoid boats on Starboard tack. We could hold on into the shallows longer than the larger boats, but it was not much of an advantage, and as we finally approached Colne Point on what should have been our last tack we had to give water to a bigger boat, and failed to round it.


The sail back towards Stone was much easier. I handed the helm to Julian and while we had to tack a couple of times as we headed up river it was nothing like as hard work. We could see other boats not too far ahead, and there was at least one behind us.

After finishing the race we anchored at the far end of the Stone YC Moorings, away from all the other boats. We did not want a repeat of last night. Then we went ashore for the prize giving. To our surprise we won the Yachting World Rose Bowl, rather an impressive trophy, as fastest (on handicap) in the "slow" gaffers class. It turned out that there were only two boats in that class, and My Quest was being single handed by one of her new owners. It still felt like a good result!