Well, not according to this site, but it works and you can get it from here! (it’s pretty quick too!)
Well it was another good race round the island this year – we didn’t do quite as well, but it was just as eventful!
We started at 0750 on saturday morning heading west from Cowes with very little wind and an easterly tide, but staying south and close in to the shore we managed to catch a back eddy on the tide witch gave us an advantage most of the way to the needles where the wind strengthened and we had to work hard to stop the boat broaching.
Rounding the needles, our spinnaker work from the day before paid off and we were able to sail almost the entire south side of the island with the spinnaker up, but here our course was further out and we lost a lot of distance on the front runners. On getting to bembridge, the wind stalled and chaos pursued as 500 boats (with another 1000 behind us), log jammed ,trying to round the buoy, flailing helplessly with no wind and no progress!
Eventually the wind picked up and we sailed as close to the shore to avoid the tide – other boats weren’t quite so lucky, with many getting bogged down in the shallows and many completely run aground – at this point there were a lot of shouts for ‘water’/'starboard’ and some close calls (check the pics!)
We made good ground on the last leg, but after 12 hours (!) we still only managed a measly 18th out of the 65 in our class 
(not quite the 5th that we did last year!).
See the pics here.
Not really sure what’s going on with bikers today – perhaps it’s the sun? Every single moped rider I overtook on the way to work seemed to see it as a challenge to prove that they could get through the traffic faster than me – even if that included cutting up lorries, skidding towards the backs of cars and generally weaving around the road like a total twat…
Whilst on the subject, it’s not just moped riders – most bikers don’t seem to like being overtaken by someone on a ‘little’ 650.. leave the ego at home – it doesn’t mix well with not being dead.
As part of learning how to use wordpress for work (we are switching all our sites to it) I have decided to port all my websites to the wordpress CMS in order to learn a bit more about it – so at the moment everything looks like a revised version of the old site, but as I get to grips with wordpress I should be able to do a lot more than the totally inflexible (yet mostly reliable) bloggger.
I am more than a little bit excited about this weekend – there are nearly 1800 boats signed up to take part and the weather isn’t looking too shabby either! Last year we came 5th out of a class of 60 boats which was a great result for my first time and I had only just done my day skipper course the week before – so no excuse for not doing better this year.
Again, we will be on a Sunsail 37 and this year it’s boat #38 – you can watch the live feed and live results times here. Of course I’ll be putting photo’s up the week after, so check the gallery.