Rising at 5am to an excellent breakfast, the crew of Seawolf walked through a damp and overcast Cowes to rig the boat early on Saturday morning.

Round the Island race attracts over 1800 yachts, from the slowest 24fters to the jaw dropping sleek canting keelers with their powered winches and professional crews. IDEC with round the world record holder Francis Joyon and Ben Ainslie on Team Origin Extreme 40 were just two of the participating multihulls.

At 0730 Seawolf got a good start on the mainland shore under jib, then peeled to Code Zero, then back to jib, in lightening winds and adverse tide. Progress was slow to the needles, where we avoided the submerged hazards, then hoisted the R1 and gybed back to the island.

Our goal was now to catch and pass "oystercatcher" a very similar although lower rated craft. We achieved this by St Catherines Point, where we peeled to the R2 as the breeze had increased. A weakening gradient wind was battling with the adverse nascent sea breeze and we were surprised to come round the point and sight the becalmed larger and much faster yachts in the near distance.

Gybing to the point of grinder exhaustion, we worked every shift along the shore and reached Bembridge ledge buoy having made huge gains on the fleet and left the raft of pursuing smaller boats on the horizon.

As we reached Bembridge we transitioned into the weak SW sea breeze and beat uneventfully up the island shore. Finishing at 1606, with 100fters Liara and Leopard in sight, we came third in class.
Tom Whitburn

Both tactician Jochem Visser and navigator Pascal Desmarets spend most of the evening prior to the race anxiously looking at the latest weather forecasts. The scenario’s for this race, a zig zag course across the North Sea with key marks roundings at Smith Knoll and the MSP buoy under the Dutch coast of Ijmuiden, looked to be very tricky. The wind was forecasted to be mainly SW/W at the start and forecasted to shift South and reduce in to less than 8 knots later in the evening. Saturday night and day proved to be particularly interesting with different forecast producing quite large different wind directions. For this race we had the opportunity to test Seawolf², a GP42 based IRC racer, against the similar Oyster Catcher of the infamous Richard Mathews. We struggled to get of the start line but found a good lane to the left and managed to minimize damage coming 3^rd around the windward mark onto the first run. What followed was a succession of runs and reaches in which Oyster Catcher and us were remarkably well matched. That was until we struggled to lay a rounding mark on the end of a tight fetch. Being forced to tack we lost valuable distance on her. After rounding Outer Galloper the wind shifted further left and earlier then predicted we made good use of the shifts and Seawolf² showed superior speed and quickly wound in Oyster Catcher. In the late evening/night of Friday we embarked on a duel with Sjambok & Oyster Catcher in the ever decreasing winds. In this run and rounding of Smith Knoll, great crew work and tactics on Seawolf², saw the team build up a substantial lead of 28 min on Sjambok and 38 min on Oyster Catcher. The remainder of the reach across to Ijmuiden was plagued by stop and go penalties. Tricky light winds forced many sail changes and the team did particularly well with the Code 0 up and by dawn no boats were in sight anymore. The final leg home proved to be testing against tide and with the wind to a full 180 degree shift. We got the better of the shift and managed to build our lead to Sjambok up to an hour and nearly 2 ½ hours on Oyster Catcher. We won by hours comfortably from our near rivals but it was hard to judge against the smaller end of the fleet as they had both the tidal gates at Smith Knoll and at the MSP buoy strongly in their favour. The waiting game started with the other boats allowed many hours on handicap. At the end Roark and Split2nd managed to just beat us on handicap leaving Seawolf in 3^rd. A remarkable performance as no other big boat made in the top half of the fleet. Seawolf² is showing great promise and we’re looking forward to her next race.