HISC Team Complete Rolex Fastnet Race

On Saturday 26th July a crew of eight HISC members competed in the Rolex Fastnet Race aboard the Humphreys 41 'Old Mother Gun'. This was the 100 year anniversary of the Fastnet and the largest ever entry with 441 boats starting, including the return of the Admirals Cup which added to the excitement.

While the boat has been round the rock many times before, only our Navigator, Ollie Holden, had done the race previously, the rest of us being new to serious offshore racing. Preparations had begun a year earlier with three overnight 100+ mile races completed within 12 months to qualify for the start.

We started the race conservatively to avoid a two hour OCS penalty and then worked our way up through the 86 boat IRC3 fleet beating out of the solent, past family and friends waving us off at Hurst Castle.

Portland Bill was the next challenge as we came right inshore to cheat the tide which had by then turned against us. The Tyrell family were there to cheer us past and take some excellent photos.

Unfortunately it was at about this time that our yellowbrick tracking device decided it hadn't signed up for this and completely stopped working. This caused much chatter among our families and supporters as they tried to match the occasional AIS location update against the race tracker positions to work out where we were. At one point RORC incorrectly entered a manual position update which put us not only leading our class, but the whole of the 380 boat IRC fleet!

Once past the Lizard we were joined by dolphins almost hourly. Upwind all the way to the Rock took two and a half days, pretty rough and wet with 20+kts of wind at times. All were relieved to finally get there and turn the corner to go downwind, even though we didn't see the rock at all, it being dark and with terrible visibility.

Two days of glorious downwind sailing followed with the spinnaker up all the way and surfing waves at up to 13.7 kts. We crossed the Cherbourg finish line at 01:15 AM on Thursday morning, taking 4 days, 12 hours and 17 minutes to complete the course. This placed us 23rd in IRC3 and 95th in IRC overall, a very solid performance for a 36 year old boat against such stiff competition.

The OMG crew was Tim Penfold, Will Penfold, Ollie Holden, Matt Alvarado, Oly Curties, Paul Noble, James George and Charlie Tavner.