Royal Southern Match Cup

After a great summer of racing on the West Coast I flew straight from the seeing America's Cup in San Francisco to Hamble, for Royal Southern Yacht Club grade 3 match racing event.
Myself, Ryan, Luke and Sam joined back together after a few months doing our own sailing around the world. We chose the event to get some racing practice in J80's before the Student Yachting World Cup. Which was 3 weeks later as well as to gain some more match racing experience.

Day 2 - Windless Solent

It had been a while since we sailed together and that was certainly reflected in our results. Racing started in around 10 knots on Saturday and we were straight back in to it. Our teamwork and boat handling was a bit rusty during the first few races of the day.  We lost our first four matches of the day and we were beginning to think it would be a very long day. However we turned things around for the second half of the day.  We improved massively as the day went on and managed to find more and more boat speed in every race while our boat handling became a lot slicker too. We went on to win our remaining 5 races of the day.

Unfortunately that was all the racing completed at the Royal Southern Match Cup as day 2 saw the Solent completely windless for the whole day. We sat out on the race course until the early afternoon before the decision was made to abandon racing for the day.

The overall results were decided from Saturdays round robin results and we came away with 4th place. Although we only got to complete one day of racing we were still happy with our progress.

Our aim for the event was to get comfortable sailing asymmetric J80's and to get our boat handling down before we went to France. Match racing is ideal for improving boat handling due to the amount of maneuvers completed in a short space of time and by the end of Saturday we were pretty happy with out boat handling.

It was also really useful for me to get back into match racing before I headed to Germany for the Youth Europeans the following day.

The Team at the Royal Southern YC with HYC Burgee