Another charter boat for the Yarmouth fast cruise

After the January fast cruise, which I thoroughly enjoyed, I decided to charter again for the fast cruise to Yarmouth.

This time the yacht was a Dufour 36 called Jasper and the crew consisted of Anne and Mark Blunden, Mike Bauer and two of Mike's friends, one who had never sailed before, and myself. Anne is renowned for her unique style of navigation. When asked where the next buoy is, she invariably indicates the direction with a banana and so when stocking the boat I had to ensure that a good supply of bananas were available.

I spent an anxious week studying weather forecasts but by Friday lunchtime it appeared that there would be a temporary lull in the wind on Saturday with most forecasts showing between 5 and 10 knots from the SW but with gales forecast for Sunday. On Saturday morning we awoke to around 20 to 25 knots of wind. We slipped lines around 0900 and hoisted the mainsail, with a double reef, by the Hamble SCM and then unfurled the gennny leaving a couple of turns still on the furler and sailed in the direction of the Start line.

Although the fast cruise rules allow yachts to start within a 10 minute window I wanted to practise my starting technique and so we set the countdown timer for an 1100 start. The navigator (Anne) informed me that we were 13 seconds late.  (Must try harder next time!)  we all had hoped that if we started close to South Ryde Middle we would be able to lay Norris but found that the tide was much stronger than we had anticipated and had to tack to lay the mark.

This turned out to be the prequel to a number of minor disasters.  Firstly, on the leg from Gurnard to East Lepe someone noticed that one of the fenders, which were hung on the transom, had slipped so that it was trailing in the water. Before anyone could reach it the knot became loose and the fender fell into the water.  I'm pleased to say that in this impromptu MOB exercise I managed to place the boat alongside the fender within about 3 minutes but without anything to hook the boathook to we couldn't recover it and it was gradually blown away.  We decided to abandon the attempt.

The next "event" was that the port side primary winch failed to work and it became impossible to sheet the genny in on starboard tack. Luckily most of the race was on port tack but we had to use the coachroof winch when necessary.  The final "event" was that the fiddle on top of the cooker came off and hit the cabin sole with a tremendous crash. This meant no hot drinks until we were safely tied up but that is when, by tradition, the beers are opened.

On Saturday night the storm that caused all the damage in France and Spain passed through although we were on the northern edge.  Even so winds were gusting over 30 knots from the north during the night. On Sunday morning a number of LSC members were gathered in the harbourmaster’s office, looking anxiously at the weather on the TV monitors, trying to decide when best to leave. I was aware that the tide would turn westwards around 1030 and wanted to make the most of the east going tide. It didn't look as if the wind would ease for a while so I decided to depart at 0800 to catch the last two hours of tide.

I'm glad to say we were moored starboard side to with the wind blowing us off the pontoon.  However there was not much room before the next pontoon to leeward. When I picked the boat up I was told, quite stongly, that the stern kicked to starboard when going astern. With the wind blowing the bow to port I was worried that I might end up pointing downwind with no room to extract myself from an embarrassing situation. I therefore let the stern go first, let it blow off the pontoon, then with some port helm put the boat in astern and let the bow go. Much to my surprise the stern did not kick to starboard and I found myself at right angles to the pontoons, head to wind, and going backwards very rapidly. I thrust the throttle to full ahead and after an eternity the boat started to slow down, then started moving forwards within about 6 inches from the next pontoon. I breathed a sigh of relief, wiped my brow, and then, in a typical "Tom and Jerry" moment, realised that we were now speeding towards the centre of Day at the Races where a number of heads were popping out of the companionway like meercats. I thrust engine in to full astern and managed to take the way off. Luckily, from where I was standing I couldn't tell how close we came to a collision. This time I managed to take control of the boat and gently turned the bow towards the harbour entrance. Everybody on board complimented me on the 3 point turn in difficult conditions. There was only one person in the cockpit close enough to hear me swearing under my breath when everything went wrong! Outside the harbour we unfurled about half of the genny and had a very fast sail back to the Hamble recording speeds of 9 knots over the ground with the tide.  A thoroughly enjoyable weekend.