Leftabout

Until this year, the biggest fleet I’d sailed in was a 92-boat World Championships – the Laser II worlds in 2001. It was my first big-fleet experience and it felt huge – necessitating gate starts rather than line starts (to begin with) and feeling particularly massive on the day when we had 91 of them behind us. Nice.

Looks like I’ll be going bigger in 2009. So far there are 1,082 entries for the JP Morgan Round the Island Race, with two weeks yet to go until the entry deadline expires. It may be down from a record 1,875 last year, but any race with over 1,000 boats is a big deal. The race runs anti-clockwise around the Isle of Wight, and last year’s start was carnage, with rockstar helmsman Alex Thompson (crewed by Olympian Ben Ainslie and formula one racer Lewis Hamilton) taking out one of the locals with his Open 60 at the start. (Pic of the resultant damage here).

Having never been a fan of handicap/big boat racing, I’ve never actually raced in the Solent, and I’m told I’ll be navigator for the 50-miler, with some of the trickiest tidal waters in the North Atlantic to figure out. The video of last year’s race is below – enjoy.