Leaving one of the prettiest stages of the Tour Voile with our second-best result of the regatta, with a rest day ahead lent itself to a pretty good feeling in the Team Maverick SSR camp.  Little did we know what was in store for us in Marseille! (I’ll save that one for another day)- So, a lot of my blogs have been focusing on the general feelings and experience of the event- but to start with this will be a little more sailing focused.

The coastal race in Grau du Roi was pretty interesting, to say the least. A decision by the race control to postpone the start for a couple hours, waiting for a thermal proved to be a wise move and left us starting in a pleasant 10-13knots, set to build throughout the day.  Ollie tee’d us up for a brilliant start! Starting is one of the areas that I feel has experienced the biggest improvement this regatta. We comfortably won the pin end of the line, maybe not closest at the gun, but certainly with one of the highest speeds. My quick glance at the velocitek indicated we were going at about 13knots at the gun. Getting bows out in any large one design fleet is exceptionally important, so this really set us up for a promising first leg. However unless you take an early consolidation to center up in the fleet, being the most left boat on the start will give you problems if you commit to that strategy until the windward mark. A last minute course change, that we did not read well over the VHF, caught us out and thinking the next mark was a rounding, not a passing. We ducked several boats instead of taking the high road, and over-standing the pass mark as we should have. This cost us dearly and we spent a lot of the race trying to recover from this.

The rest of the race basically can be summed up as one reasonably short upwind, about 4-5miles, surrounded by about 25miles of tight, spinnaker reaching in 17-20knots of breeze! Maybe not the most tactical course but this is often the way with pre-set coastals. It was however great fun! Taking the boat to the max and really pushing how high we could take the gennaker. We only had a couple of scary moments; the bow taking a threatening plunge towards the bottom of the sea as we tried (and failed) to roll over Helvetia, Normandy Elite Team. So quite tactically uneventful but a pretty fun ‘blasting’ race none the less. We did however struggle with pitch and tacking- this could be attributed to the 60L of water we found in the bow section of the main hull after racing… Tracing this back it looks like the spectre of the repaired crack I talked about in Jullouville has struck again. The original repair had lost its water integrity and caused us to subsequently take on quite a bit of water. It’s annoying to say the least, to feel that a problem feels largely out of your hands re-appears and affects your sailing performance. Logically it’s frustrating, and emotionally it can give you a crutch or an excuse for bad performance, potentially ignoring other areas for improvement. We’ve been conscious of this and feel we have a better fix in place now for the remainder of the event, but it’s another thing on our very full plate; adding to the stress levels.

The next day provided some EPIC inshore racing. I’m a big fan of the heavy air racing, and the stadium format really suits it. Fast, exciting, no time for errors- it’s a great formula. I felt that with our fix in place we were a relatively quick team in the heavier air against our colleagues in the general classification. We had a couple of good starts and it summed to our second best day of the regatta. The finish was pretty spectacular too- you had a tight two sail reach down, hitting up to 21-22knots, before the finish line only 4 boat lengths or so away from the harbor wall. It was a ultra-quick bearaway gybe round there to get in safely too! Keep a look out for the round up video from this day- it should be a good one with some big weather, lots of spray and lots of waves!

As I write this in the assistance village in Marseille, the Mistral is howling and it has already cost us day one of the stage- however the forecast is improving and we hope to get our for some more windy stadium races tomorrow. Bring it on!

A Bientot, Piers HS

AUTHOR - PIERS HUGH SMITH

PHOTOGRAPHY - ELLIOTT GODDEN