Day 1 - May 5th
We started out from Pornichet on a lovely evening with about 8 knots of breeze. I was already regretting not bringing the tonic to accompany the gin that was onboard from our delivery. However by the time we reached Belle Ile the wind had turned off completely. We spent of the night bobbing around with barely any wind. An unfortunate sign of things to come...

Day 2 - May 6th
We spent the next morning battling our way out from behind Belle. We finally emerged into a little W-SW breeze which was what had been forecast. Unfortunately that breeze turned NW as we sailed up the coast and then turned off completely leaving us floundering in a swell going absolutely nowhere. I spent most of the night hand-steering to make the most of the any breeze that was around - something I was trying to avoid so I could get some sleep before crossing the shipping lanes tomorrow.

We have only averaged 3.5 knots so far which is very frustrating given the pressure I am under to finish this sail and get back to London. I need to cover about 1150nm in a bit over 9 days which works out at 128 nm a day or just over 5 knots. We are slipping badly already...

The last two months have been extremely busy so please excuse the lack of updates on the site.

The end of March and start of April were spent continuing to learn how to sail the boat. Over the Easter long weekend I took Rafiki out for my first serious solo spin - a 250 mile round-trip down to Start Point (just near Plymouth).

Then on April 20th Mikey and myself delivered the boat from Gosport down to Pornichet arriving just in time to catch a train and plane and get back to the UK on the Sunday night.

The following weekend was the Pornichet Select 650-my first race. The plan was just to get around the 300 miles course in one piece to make sure I got the race qualifying miles under my belt. The sailing was conservative but we recovered from a horrible start to record 19th out of 85 which was good effort for only my 10th time out.

Straight after the race it was into preparation for my 1000 miles qualifying sail. I left the following day and thereafter followed a torturous 12 days of horribly light winds. I had planned for a maximum of 10 days and was due back at work. I also had my mum due into London for a week so the agonisingly slow pace was immensely frustrating.

There are plenty of new photos in the Gallery.

Next up is the MA Peron (May 25-27) followed by the Mini Fastnet (June 3-10).