After another good week of training in China I returned home on Friday for the JPMorgan Round the Island Race.
I taxied from the airport straight to Cowes for some Volvo corporate and media racing in J80’s before a Volvo bbq in the evening. Fighting off the jet lag I made it through to about 10pm before I passed out.
The morning of race day, was an early start with a wake up call at 4am!!! Thanks to the jet lag I was wide awake and ready for some racing.

I headed down to the boat I was skippering – a TP52 called ‘Team Volvo for life 1’ – to meet the rest of the crew. I was sailing with some of the Volvo Keelboat squad, 3 Journalists, a TV reporter Tanya Arnold from BBC North and her cameraman, I also had a special guest Kevin Blackwell the mighty Sheffield United manager.

We left the dock and headed out to sea at just after 5am on ‘Team Volvo for life 1’. We started in a building breeze and headed upwind to the needles, after turning the corner and popping the kite we were off at pace topping out at 22.5 knots boat speed. It was a great ride down the back of the Island with a few good broaches, the most exciting of which we charged down a wave flat out and piled into the back of the next wave as the spinnaker exploded and the boat broached out leaving most of the crew dangling from the guard rails.

It took a while to get sorted but the crew did an excellent job of retrieving the broken kite and getting another one ready. While just under mainsail we still managed to hit 19knots down the back of one wave. We set a new spinnaker and we were off again rounding the forts off Portsmouth before beating home to Cowes.

We finished the race at 11:10:53 in a time of 05:10:53, this left us 5th in class 0 and 29th overall not bad out of 1875 boats.

It was a great days or should i say morning of sailing thanks to the team work of all on board, thanks guys….. and thanks to Volvo for making it all happen.