This is Round the Island 2019 sailing the RS 21, I'm Rosie, Ella, Emma & Nick
Six minutes to go till our start
Pretty windy and as you can see it's congested as it usually is
Looking good, just looking to get a good start and just pop the shoot and go.
So we are two and a half hours in and the wind has just died.
So as you can see there's no wind
We are just drifting here. Most of the fleet seem to be stuck in this wind hole.
The Island shore seem to have a small gain
We are just spinning uncontrollably here
hopefully we will get some pressure soon. You can see the Needles over there.
And that's where we are trying to go. But it doesn't look like we are going to get there anytime soon
We have wind! Woooooo!
Six hours in, how are you guys doing?
So it's now ten past two
we have been racing for nearly six and half hours
we've lost sight of the Needles which is always encouraging
I feel like we are closer to St. Cats now
The aims of this leg is to catch the tide when it turns
So we stayed out in pressure for the first half of the turn
And now as the tide started to turn in the last hour
We have been heading inshore
and sort of tacking when we are going to hit the bottom
Just to, because that's where the tide has turned the most
Without a depth sounder it is slightly harder to guess so
we are using other yachts as our reference points
the breeze has dropped off a couple of knots
I think we are only in about ten to twelve knots here
and it's good, we are sailing around thirty foot cruisers still
in the middle of the J 70s
So we have been racing for over seven hours now
we are nearly rounding to see St Cats
And as you can see here it is toasty warm
As regards to boat speed, we are now sailing at about 18 knots
Specially for those of you in the BKL, you could be out in this
So we are running lots and lots of back stay
As much cunningham as possible
Not crazy amounts of outhaul
You just feel like it flattens off
But almost as much as you can pull on
Whilst going in a straight line
As for the Jib, we have got cars all the way out
And we are just opening it up to crack it off to limit
the winding in the back of the main
feels quite nice as we are ripping along
probably do with slightly more tension
on the rig, but I'm not changing that now
yeah and other than that a little big of vang to keep some power on when i ease
and reduce the main sheet load
otherwise I'll get tired and we don't want that
Been now racing for nine hours
We are just south of sandown
and the wind has shut down again
we have made good gains on the other RS21
we can now see them
and we have extended from the one behind us
there's not a lot of wind as you can see
starting to test the patience now we are in the second shut down of the race