First lesson: my head was freezing in the hail so we shot over the Yarmouth and Roger slipped ashore to buy me a hat.
Off down the Needles Channel, the seas were large and surprisingly very large and steep fronted outside. After an hour of pushing on West, and after a minor nosedive and a couple a tail stands at very low speed, we decided reluctantly that bashing on like this to Plymouth was futile.
We rationalised it this way: The race committee wouldn't start a leg with Forces up in the eights, so why should we practice for it! And we decided a circumnavigation of the Isle of Wight would be good, so we turned downwind and trimmed the nose out and opened up.
Lesson 2: The difference between the conditions that a rib can work well in and the opposite is more extreme than a sailboat.
We spent the night in Cowes on Black Tie with Black Gold alongside. We made a call to one of our new ribnet.com friends, Phil Boarer, who is also doing the Round Britain Race in a Scorpion.
Phil has a new 8.1 metre with a 300hp Suzuki. We quickly agreed that subject to the weather being sane in the morning, we'd meet him in Chichester and do a fast run to Brighton and back.
The weather was good and we met Phil at East Head and were soon following him as he leapt out of the harbour in a F4/5 with some big lumps on the bar. What followed was a great run with two well matched Scorpions past the bank where Ted Heath's Morning Cloud sank with loss of life and then on to Brighton for a coffee and croissant.
It was great watching another boat with a similar hull work through the waves and Roger and I were very glad of our Ullman seats although we found the toestraps essential in quartering seas which sometimes caused us to lurch sideways.
Coffee done we went out past the Brighton race fleet and buzzed Jonty Layfield's J39, Sleeper, which had many of our team from Black Tie on board. That done we had an uneventful upwind leg back to the Solent in company with Phil's striking Syncro and start to discuss what we'd learned from this good day out.
First: I need cycling pants or something to stop saddle soreness.
Second: I had cut my hand on the wheel and some sailing type gloves would be good.
Third: We will go for intercoms in our helmets.
Fourth: I need a direction-to-waypoint display in my direct line of sight.
Fifth: Our experiment with Roger on the throttle and me on the wheel worked really well.
Even though he had me screaming for mercy at one point, he was doing a good job. The boat did great and Phil commented on how level she flew.
We need to reschedule Plymouth, but we learnt a lot this weekend and logged 180 miles.
Gavin Sunday April 13
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