Niall Dowling and Michael Boyd, the new owners of Slingshot, won the double handed section of the RORC Cervantes Trophy over the weekend.

Laurence and Oliver Mead in Juneau won the RSYC Weymouth Double with Just Acquaholix fourth.

6am on Saturday morning saw 35 yachts line up off Cowes for the 4^th edition of the increasingly popular Petit Bateau’s Round the Isle of Wight Solo, including 2007 Class 2 winner Simon Curwen in Voador and fastest rated monohull of the fleet, Rob Craigie’s beautiful new J/122 Jbellino.  The forecast of light winds and sunshine promised ideal conditions for kicking off the solo calendar, and for relieving many skippers of their hangovers induced by the obligatory Petit Bateau wine, dining and hospitality in the Island Sailing Club on the previous evening.

2 hours of favourable tide had a tightly packed fleet down to the Needles, where some elected for the “inside” route and others less adventurously (or perhaps still hungover) taking a wider line.  With conditions becoming lighter on the South of the Island, by St Catherine’s most found themselves relying on the tide to make any progress.  Those venturing offshore for wind were disappointed when a light but steady breeze filled in first along the shore, spreading the fleet significantly.  Light and flukey conditions presented a few more obstacles on the mostly downwind final leg to the finish at Prince Consort, with many slower boats getting shut out by the tide and retiring.

Split into 3 open classes based on LOA, Peter Olden’s J/92S Solan Goose claimed line and IRC honours as the only Class 3 boat to finish, and an impressive 4^th in the overall fleet on IRC.  In Class 2, Rob Dornton-Duff led in the 4 J/105s in Java closely followed by Oscar Mead in Juneau.  Amongst the Class 1 fleet, Jbellino took 3^rd place on the line and Peter Tanner in Oojah beat sister J/110 Shades of Blue (Ed Holton) by less than a minute.  All of our hats went off to Keith Richards’ arrival in Mini Transat 6.50 Rattle & Hum, just in time for the 10pm prizegiving!

Rob Dornton-Duff

The final race of the Raymarine Warsash Spring Series, on Sunday 27 April, was abandoned, out of time, due to lack of wind. This was a frustrating affair, with rather too much aimless drifting around, and a rather downbeat end to what had been a good series.

With four races to count, out of the five sailed, the final results are:

First: Fay-J (Paul Griffiths) 5 points

Second: Voador (Simon Curwen) 7 points

Third: Java (Rob Dornton-Duff) 12 points

Race 5 for the J105s started and finished in a variable and very shifty N E breeze on a developing spring tide ebb.  Starting near Air Canada, Voador (Simon Curwen), FayJ (Paul Griffiths), Jolene (Jeff Payne) and Java (Rob Dornton-Duff) lead a port tack search for windshifts that resulted in the same order at RYA yachtmaster. 
Downwind past the Bramble bank and round Prince Consort the leaders closed up. Jolene then took the lead in the shifing breeze up to Marinetrack and extended it down wind by sailing unbelievably deep with her new Dolphin kite however at Norris the wind dropped and in the slop of the upwind leg Voador did better and FayJ did best, reclaiming the lead and pulling away very impressively. She made no mistakes in the tricky cross tide beat up to Burgess salmon finishing 1.24 minutes ahead of Voador with Jolene 1.26 more. Journeymaker (Chris Jones) had a good last leg ahead of Java, Juliette (Rod Knowles) and Only Just (Andy Hill). 

Mike Hempstead, Jolene

Time to get ready for the clash of the titans!  The class event of the year - 2008 J/105 UK Nationals will soon be upon us.  NoR and Entry form (in Word and Adobe format) can be downloaded below.

 2008 NATS NoR

 2008 NATS NoR

 2008 J/105_NATS_Entry_Form 

 2008 J/105_NATS Entry Form