St Quay

Beautiful sailing today!

After celebrating last night in Guernsaey yacht club it was a v big effort when the alarm went off at 5.30 this morning. This has been a relentless week so far. On leaving the harbour the race comittee made a wise decision to postpone the start due to no wind, so the fleet gathered together and began motoring towards St Quay. On the way there was some precision formation mmotoring for photo oportunities - the result of which will hopefully appear on the website www.offshoresolo.com soon.

By 9am the breeze filled in and we went into a downwind gate start type thing. After some confusion and a couple of tries we eventually got away and I ended up well to leeward of everyone as we broad reached for the finish. This gave me a hotter angle and more spped for the first part of the race and allowed me to pull away from the competition. One of the biggest challenges today was weaving through the minefield of weed out there. Almost everyone at some stage seems to have a story of a brown blow hanging off thier rudder...

The reach suited the asymetric boats and at the moment my guess is the winner will be between Jbellino, Wee Bear and myself. I should maintain the lead overall but things will be tight with Jbelino and Solan Goose the main competition so far.

The tracker link I gave below won't have worked today. I had a technical problem in that I forgot to turn it on onboard! It should be up and running from now on though...

Tomorrow is a rest day(much needed!) and then it's overnight to Brixham on Wednesday.St Quay looks like a beatiful and friendly town - lets hope it's ready for 22 rowdy sailors on a monday night!

Other points of interest so far:
Music=energy. Today was a lot of in rainbows on repeat via headphones
Team Ireland is considering becoming team Cork
There are no water taxi's after 10pm in Guernsey
I am bad at spelling & proof reading

Paddy