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With Cowes week over it was time to go home and start unpacking… finally

Getting all my stuff sorted in the new room, get the photos of all you guys back up on the wall and then a phone call asking if I wanted to go sailing on Sunday and Monday to help get a team up to speed with their new boat. Well it was quite a nice invitation from Jochem and I needed to speak to him anyway so why not.

It then turns out it’s the Lutra42 and I also get to sit at the back of the boat. On Sunday conditions weren’t all that nice, 30-odd knots and the tide running with the breeze to the east. With a reef and C4 up we tried our hand at going to windward but soon it was decided to change the C4 for a fractional spinnaker and off we went!

After everyone settled down we were flying down the Solent at a fairly steady 20-21 knots with the top speed at a reasonable 24 knots and it never really felt as if the boat was out of control. The beat back up the Solent wasn’t that exciting but did show the boat is not just a downwind flyer. Afterwards I talked to some guys who went for a practice on board a TP52 (so 10ft bigger) and they topped out that day at around 20 knots on the downwind leg. Very impressive. On Monday we managed to get some more manoeuvres in as the wind was down to 20-ish knots and the boat still felt nice and fast.
I sincerely hope the boat manages to perform well under IRC as it is so much more fun to sail and so much more rewarding and to be fair how many boats are actually used for going out with the family… As far as the corporate side of things, taking people out on a race boat is much more interesting for them!

Anyhow if all goes well you should be able to see a video from Sunday’s session right here:
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Cowes Week 2008 was almost exactly what Cowes Week is these days: a week of sailing (and the racing being secondary).

I got invited by Chris to join Sanguma for the week and we did exactly what the plan was: Have fun both on and off the boat, sail as well as we can and let the courses (and results that go with them) not spoil the week.

The weather wasn’t all that great (especially after two weeks of sun in the Baltic) but it wasn’t too bad either. Everything that went wrong didn’t go wrong for very long or was permanent and watching the fireworks with the Walmsley family from the deck of the Royal Corinthian with some bubbles was a very classy way of finishing the week.

As I was on Sanguma there are no photos from me but Tim Wright has a very nice website that allows you to search per boat: http://www.photoaction.com

I’m not sure what to say other than that it has been another fun week of sailing and that life kept smiling at me even though the result-streak from July (1st boat overall Comedy Cup, 2nd in class for Cork and two leg victories and two seconds to win the BSC overall) did seem to have ended August first.

Life’s good!
Ciao!

ps. Talking about the fireworks:

Didn’t have the time nor the opportunity earlier to actually update the blog-thingy so in small pieces, here goes:

After spending just enough time in the UK to do a tiny bit of laundry and have a fun night in Hamble it was off to Lithuania and what an interesting place that is. It wasn’t until I arrived at the marine I actually saw something that didn’t look to be build in the past two years. It all looks and feels very new and I can’t say I liked it all that much. However meeting up with the team was a great pleasure and the opportunity of more sailing with some great guys (and girls) was not one to let go by. From Lithuania the course took us to Poland and then on to Denmark. The crew worked very well together and they managed to get and keep us in the right positions during the offshores (the inshore we found out had to be our discard and the result showed…). Again a big thank you from here to the entire crew throughout the two weeks with a special mention to our skipper Mike Castania.

I’ve got a bunch of photos but I haven’t had the time to sort them and there are some more on the way so when all that is sorted I’ll put them up as well.

More on the way,
Ciao

ps. We did actually win the event with a 1-2-2-1 score. And a cheecky preview of the unsorted and unedited photos can be found if you look for it here.