Heading into the third night of the 1805-mile RORC Sevenstar Round Britain & Ireland Race, Ireland’s Atlantic seaboard is starting to provide the kind of speed sailing in which the pace-setters in Class 40 excel writes W M Nixon.
With a vigorous southwest wind developing, the leader-on-the-water Corum (Nicolas Troussel) has seen the numbers rising as she makes a finely-tuned approach to the major headlands of the Kerry coast, and at 1800 hrs was clocking 13.7 knots, a good knot faster than Phil Sharp’s Imerys Clean Energy three miles astern.
Once they’ve passed the Blaskets, the kites will be out, and then the speeds will become stratospheric provided that everything holds together, for torn sails and damaged rigs have wiped out many a promising performance along this Wild Atlantic Way.
Meanwhile, back in the Celtic Sea and still slugging northwestward from the Isle of Scilly, Conor Fogerty and Simon Knowles in the Sunfast 36000 Bam! look to be well placed on the west wing of the fleet, provided the wind doesn’t back even more to life everyone up past Dursey Head.
Off the Irish coast, the Class 40 Colombre XL is now putting in some painful windward work south of Baltimore to make up for taking a leeward track in search of speed. But in the same area the Lombard 46 Pata Negra (Giles Redpath) has been freed just enough to give her a course which will enable her to lay past the Fastnet separation zone and hold onto her IRC overall lead.
If that backing of the wind favours Bam’s closest contenders El Velosolex and Game On in the same way, then Bam will still find herself in third place of this close-fighting two-handed trio. But with the way the wind is weaving around, things might yet pan out very nicely overnight for the Howth boat, which is powering along at 7.2 knots, rather better than Game On’s 6.4.
Race tracker here http://yb.tl/rbni2018
