4th Round the isle of Wight, 3rd Extreme 40......

Sailing As team Metherell, we lined up with 1754 other boats to race around the Isle of Wight. Light winds early in the day (Our start gun fired at 05.10!), meant a relatively slow time around the island, but the racing was no less exciting, between the 4 extreme 40's. We finished in 4.34mins some 6 minutes behind race winner The wave and another minutes ahead of Ecover, Oman Masirah was a close second.
It was a great race Ecover lead to the needles after a flying start, We then took the lead at St Catherines point after choosing to sail offshore, but only by a small margin over the wave and masirah who went inshore. The Wave took the lead as we beated towards Bembridge, and held an important lead around Bembridge buoy as after here the tactical options ran out as it was a close reach down the solent to the finish.
Everyone on board the GAC Pindar boat were delighted with our race, it was a great day and really fun to sail the 40's on a long course to truly show there speed, Only Francis Joyon's Huge Tri, IDEC could pip he extreme 40's around the course.

Team GAC Pindar compete in first Extreme Sailing Series Event

(photo:mark lloyd)

Myself, Skipper Nick Moloney, 40 veteran Fraser Brown and new boy to the class Ollie Smith met up in Sete France ahead of thefirst extreme 40 event of the year. We got onto the water two days before racing commenced and quickly tried to gell as a team whilst also trying to maintain our energy levels ahead of a potentially windy event.
The event was great, hugely competitive, 8 great teams fighting for each place. We finished at the back of the pack, but were on a huge learning curve throughout and were very happy with our progress. The Mistral wind fortunately held off untill the final race of the final day (which was quickly abandoned!), The estimated 16500 spectators got to watch a great spectacle in perfect, if shifty 15 knt winds.
We are looking forward to Racing around the island of wight with hundreds of other yachts, with a 5am start time , if all goes well we could be back ashore by 8am! Hopefully we should get a few days training then, before the second round of the extreme series in Cowes.......