The Olympic series - Round the Nowhere Island race

During the Olympics, Weymouth sailing club were scheduled to not have any club racing during the Olympic racing but true to form, our Vice Commodore, Jez Rees, couldn't resist organising a couple of interesting and unusual  themed races to put together.
For the last week we have had the interesting and inspiring bit of artwork known as Nowhere Island which was until recently resting in Bowleze Cove. After our jaunt and adventure on Round the Island race in the Isle of Wight we chose to do a similar themed race called  Round the Nowhere Island race which simply involved going round the island twice. On Board Farr out we Had me, Jez Rees and Stephen Homan-berry, also known as the "A-Team". On this race night it was my turn to have my go on foredeck. The last time i had even sat in front of the shrouds was almost a year ago so i cant say my hopes on doing things correctly were that high. We set off with an all in start which made things awkward to try and head down wind so we could put the spinnaker up. Eventually, after battling with a Merlin Rocket sailing Dinghy, managed to get the right point of sail to hoist. Started off great, pre-feed was successful, started to hoist the kite when discovering the spinnaker halliard  was pre wrapped around the kite, drop, fix, start to hoist again, spinnaker halliard stuck between the shroud and boom. This seem to take 5 mins to sort out because of miscommunication, finally the kite was up, along with a big huge wrap which was soon spun out. Finally we were in are comfort zone and starting to get in our groove, the kite was great for the 5 mins it was up for. Rounding the island gave us a nice close up view of the artwork and with many exclamations of it looks a lot smaller than i thought it was going to be.  We then beated Quickly to the line and launched our asymmetric spinnaker, the "Spongebob" while reminiscing about the crazy idea and film of turning the asymmetric kite into a symmetric spinnaker so we could go a bit deeper downwind - How to turn an Asymmetric spinnaker into a Symmetric Spinnaker Also watching  the Dehler 33, Rocket get involved in a 5 minute chinese Jybe with there symmetric spinnaker.

After we eventually crossed the line we decided it was time to put the engine on....ooops!
Turns out our port spinnaker sheet had been previous to this trailing in the water for which it had now taken prime position wrapped round the prop..... oh dear. So desision was made to sail down the harbour and onto the mooring, easier said than done in my opinion. we decided it would be easier to moor up facing down the harbour rather than up which made getting onto the mooring less awkward. After avoiding a near escape with a sigma 33, Scoline,  and involving some quick fending work from me, we were finally on the mooring. After all this rough and tough, we got a result of 5th position out of 7, not the best result we've ever had but as my mum allways says, its not the winning that counts, its the taking part.