Goinglean Race Report
We do not make life easy for ourselves, 1 week before the race we had a Fountain that worked, was reliable & did 97mph.
Monday before the race two new engines were picked up from Heatrow by Nik Keyser & delivered to Drivers at 1pm. After much discussion with Dave we decided that it would be foolish to swap the engines so close to CTC, 2 hrs later we were ripping out the old 600's to fit new 700's that were supposed to be identical..... not a chance.... extra bits poking out all over the place. Dave worked non stop to get them in, they fired up & ran sweet but we had no interface with the gauges & had no data. 24hrs later Dave had worked his magic but we had just missed Cowes 100 race.
Saturday we tested the boat only to find that our fuel burn had gone up 40%.... disaster, we were 400 litres short for CTC..... we had to pull out and do CPC.
Morning of CPC Jan had to quickly put the course in to the GPS, and a quick look round identified some fast boats and hardened racers... crikey
Out to muster at North Head bouy, pretty big sea about 1.2 metres & we were 20 minutes early!.... Yellow flag, we all lined up fine then from the port side a large (60 - 70ft) sunseeker & rib drive in to the start line... along with two yachts travelling west about 500m ahead.....had to take avoiding action... now up to 40mph..... no Green flag.... 30 seconds... still no Green flag..... we could not see the flags on the start boat.... they had merged in to the roof of Maxwells Rib.
Then Dave shouted.... Green..... Max Throttle.... the boat quickly ran upto 80.... but as we approached Fairway the sea got very lumpy & made the turn exciting.... on the way to Two Buoys Jan shouts GPS down.... I already had the engines alarm going off for an ' overspeed' so we decided to stop, switch off the engines, restart & follow another boat, upon restarting, the GPS rebooted & we were away again, running towards Poole was still bumpy & we were struggling to hold 60 - 65 mph, once we turned towards Boscombe Pier the sea reduced to a nice 1m following sea & we went up to about 100mph.... right up to the point where we noticed the mark just off the bow on our Port side, at this speed we had no chance to correct and ended up scrubbing off the speed & completing a rather large circle to make sure that we did not pass the mark on the wrong side... another minute lost and a close look at Bob Eddings in his mark boat.
From here on in the sea was fairly flat & we powered in between 100 - 107 mph up to the chequered flag...... waiting at all times for one of those pesky Cat's to take us on the line.
The new power allows the boat to really push through the rough
Funniest moment of a very long week was hearing Martin Napier announce that the CPC boats were on there way back..... half way through my second Bacon sandwich & coke standing in the Haven
The CPC may be the ' small race'.... but nobody remebered to tell the sea..... hats off to the class 3/basic racers who got through it Sunday
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