Cowes Week 2009
The build up to Cowes Week 2009 produced many contrasts, the economic climate was in trouble, redundancies were becoming subject of daily conversation and no title sponsor appeared to pump money into the event. However the business of enjoying leisure time, doing things with the family and returning to more simple pleasures was making a stand in people’s lives.
Bellerophon benefited from the desire to enjoy life with a full turnout for every day during the week. There was a small group of crew returning from previous year’s racing and a good show of new comers to our “Try Racing”.
Fortunately for everyone the weather responded with a fair range of breeze without any of the extreme conditions that makes it very difficult for a crew that only met at 9am that morning. Too much wind turns the day into a fight for survival, whereas too little wind can be tedious and boring.
It was not obvious to the average participant of the week that there was no title sponsor as much of the day to day organisation of the races is carried out by volunteers with a small army of paid “back room boys” to look after results. We did notice the lack of corporate hospitality even to the fact that it was possible to get to the front of the beer queue after racing as well as find each other in the far smaller crowds ashore.
Of the 31 crew that came aboard during the week only 5 had been part of our regular crew in past years. This year we welcomed a Dragon sailor who travelled from Germany to be with us for the week, he had a particularly difficult task as he was sailing in a foreign language! Not only was he learning all the English sailing terms but he was keeping up with the banter that flew up and down the windward rail!
For the first three days we had a committee boat start, in the Eastern Solent for the weekend, into the Western Solent on Monday then the next four days from the Royal Yacht Squadron line which gave us a wide variety of courses exploring a number of different buoys in far off corners of the race area.
We managed to fly a spinnaker every day although one did produce some fairly exciting racing as we were on the borderline of our team ability. In an earlier part of the same day we kept those around us amused by flying our Number 2 jib with free luff in the manner of a “blooper” of days gone by. Whilst being somewhat doubtful of its speed advantage it certainly kept us all busy and safe.
The course setting from the shore based team added to the excitement as we found that our mark rounding often coincided with another class that was bigger, faster and more aggressive than us rounding at the same time. On a particularly memorable occasion our crew sat on the windward rail, ring side viewing of a battle of the giants all fighting for the inside position at their leeward mark. The sound effects of fibreglass being crushed heralded the end of several people’s racing on that day and no doubt a long evening in the protest room.
Wednesday had the lightest of breezes and the longest day due to a long run back from the Western Solent against the tide but we were amazed that after nearly 6 hours of racing we finished only 19 minutes behind the leader, just shows how much it pays to keep focused throughout the race. As always had a couple of tactical decisions been different or made earlier then we could have had a better result!! How many people have a degree in hindsight!!
During the week everyone was offered the opportunity to helm at some point during the race and move about the boat to try their hand at the various jobs and experience as much variety as possible. This does not increase our chances of a podium result but we were pleased with a reasonable performance overall and even a couple of pleasing results.
Our overriding aim is to enable people to experience to highs and lows of racing in a prestigious regatta and to encourage confidence so that people will want to compete in future events. We provide training as the day goes by and a debriefing once returned to the berth. Hopefully we have encouraged more people to become involved as a future race crew or even in charge of their own campaign.
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