Yeah it was a great day. The first lap around the island was a blast, especially when drew and i sailed past most of the fleet under our spinnakers, i had a bad start but ended up going from the back of the fleet to catch up and by the bottom mark we had closed in on and gotten to the front of the pack with the a-class and nacra 5.8s. I dropped off somewhat on the long beats to follow, dropping back to mid fleet. On the 2nd lap around, we hit that squall during which, on the beat, crashing through waves at speed, the the force of the waves hitting the spinnaker in the sock, combined with a small amount of the kite which hung out the back of the bag opened up and caught water, like a parachute, pulling the whole kite out through the back of the bag where it then proceeded to open right up under neath my boat wrapping around the daggerboards and rudders and opening up like a big parachute. As such it took me about 20 minutes of sitting in irons to haul the thing back in and after failed attempts to get it back into the back of the bag, i managed to hault it onto the tramp over the front beam where i stuffed it under one of the foot straps. By this stage i was by my self as far as the fleet was concerned with a few rescue boats sticking behind to look after me as at this stage, everyone else was nearly back to club on the main land, the weather was really setting in, the wind picked up to a good 20 knots and it was getting very very choppy as the wind was going against the tide, so i had a very wild reach, with the rescue boats barely able to keep up with me, and a long spinnaker-less downwind run riding 1.5m+ swells (not that by this stage i would have been game to use itl), it was real survival sailing. but i managed to back in without breaking anything, which i felt was in those conditions was a real possibility.

But it was very satisfying to finish and get back in in one piece. Will definately plan to race in it again next year.

Heres some photos of the rigging area. I took about 2 hours of on the water video footage, so ill try and find time to edit that and post a small video.