JOG St Vaast Race 2019 - Lots of wind and surfing

Reviewing the data collected for Jengu racing to St Vaast using Rockit over the bank holiday weekend.

There was a lot of debate before departure as to which weather model was going to be right GFS or ECMWF. A lot of time was spent reviewing the maps from Predict Wind and Wind Guru; pretty inconclusively, there comes a point where you just have to wait and see what will happen.

The image above from Predict Wind shows the two alternative forecasts for today and you can see the different potential outcomes from the different models… maybe you get 15knots from the North East in the Channel maybe a lot more..

For the bank holiday weekend there was a similar split in opinion. The race started at 7pm from Cowes, the GFS model was predicting 30 knots from the North East by 0600, ECMWF suggested we would have a much more pleasant trip.

Our crew split into two watches from 2100 onwards doing 3 hour watches of 4 people. The first watch got a sloppy sea off Bembridge to contend with, the second watch got a pleasant force 3-4 flat sea, the occasional star in the sky and phosphorescence in the boats wake. Pretty good really.

We changed again at about 0300. All was well in the boat and we were making good progress South towards our destination.

Then the wind arrived.

In the space of 30 minutes our pleasant force 4 was replaced with 20 then 25 knots of wind. The watch crew did a sterling job reefing the boat first to 1, then 2 reefs in the main. We had taken the spinnaker down earlier in the evening as it started to get dark. Jengu is doing the Fastnet race this year and we didn’t want to destroy anything we needed for that.

The next image from Rockit shows the wind building and the crew reefing the boat. You can see the boat luffing up and bearing away as the reef goes in. Not bad given it was dark and the first reef we have had to put in in ages; such was the sailing last year..

Then it started to rain…

The crew coming on duty at 6am were presented with a grey sea, rapidly building waves and winds gusting to 30knots. The crew coming off watch had surfed Jengu at 14 knots beating the previous records of 12.6 knots, but had definitely had enough.

The wind continued to build and the boat speeds with it. The numbers from Rockit are an average for a period of time. So for Rockit to be displaying 36.3 knots true wind (at 0600) that means we had on average 36.3knots for the whole 1 minute long sample period - the reality is we probably had more than that.

As the wind went up so did the waves, the boat speed and the surfing. Cries of there’s another big one coming from the crew to the helm weren’t particularly calming.

The track of the boat closing with the French coast says it all. The logged average of 11.92 knots at 0642 doesn’t really do justice to the immense double figure surfs we did with the crew watching the numbers on the mast instruments climbing towards the 20 knot level. The max we managed for the trip was 20 knots over the ground, 18 knots through the water.

Sadly there are no pictures of Jengu surfing through the waves; everyone was hanging on rather than taking selfies or flying drones ……its not a bad way to spend a Friday night.