Biscay Challenge

Dateline: Ocean Village, June 17, 20.45

This is the first of what I hope will be regular reports on the progress of the 2011 BNY Mellon Biscay Challenge.

As I write this from the comfort of the Admiral’s Room in the Royal Southampton Yacht Club, it is Friday and the day before the start of the race to Hondarribia.

The day before the start can often be quite frenetic and stressful, because this is when the race boats all have to be here and the crews have to register with us and provide all their requested paperwork, such as proof of qualifying passage, safety and medical certificates and well as IRC rating certificates where necessary.

In 2009 a Spanish boat arrived without an IRC certificate and there was absolute mayhem as she had to be measured and application made to Paris for a certificate – all on the Friday. The certificate arrived the day before the boat made it back to Hondarribia.

Then the boats have to be inspected by either Mike Short or Dave Giddings, to make sure that they are properly equipped and prepared to undertake the race according to the check lists that skippers had been sent in advance. You can imagine that this is not quite the straightforward exercise that it might seem, with many boats failing on some small point or other. Fortunately Mike and Dave are very experienced at this routine and apart from sending a couple of crews to the local chandlers for some additional safety items, they have not had any major problems that might cause them to disqualify a boat from racing.

One of the new features of this race is that we are going to track the race on the internet and this has meant that Mike & Dave have had to install Yellowbrick tracking devices on every boat as part of their inspection and make sure that they work, which touch wood, they seem to. Having said that, we undertook quite a lot of due diligence on various tracking systems before plumping for Yellowbrick and all the signs are that these guys know what they are doing and lead the field.

So from 14.00 tomorrow (Saturday), you will be able to follow every boat simply by plugging into either the RSYC or Biscay Challenge websites and looking for the link, which as I write, has not been put up on the sites. However, tomorrow all will be revealed.

I have also just been persuaded to sign up to Twitter. As someone who may well have reached his sell-by date, I was rather hoping that I might have conked out before I succumbed to this, but alas it was not to be and I have been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, as appears to be happening ever more frequently with ever changing technology.

As a part of my initiation to Twitter, I have had to upgrade my mobile phone in order that I may ‘tweet’ from all parts of the globe. Actually, I was quite happy with my old phone, although not as happy as I was with the one before that, which was brilliant at making and receiving calls, sending the occasional text and receiving messages, which is really all that I want a telephone to do.

Now I am into the frightening world of “Apps” and I am looking forward on Monday to receiving my amazing new touch screen, all singing and dancing phone, with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.

Have I a hope in hell of understanding how the wretched thing works, let alone use a fraction of the myriad options that it offers me? The lovely Alexia in the office here, who is of the right generation to know about this things and has been holding my hand throughout my initiation into Twitter, tells me that in no time I will be wondering how I ever lived without my new aptly named “Wildfire”. Time will tell!

But right now, I have no real time to worry about mobile phones. All our concerns are focused on what the weather is going to do tomorrow. There is much talk of a Force 9 coming through the central Channel tonight, which must be concentrating the minds of both RORC and JOG, both of whom have cross Channel races scheduled to start this evening.

The big question is, what is it going to be like at lunchtime tomorrow. We are avidly scanning every weather website we can find and the consensus is that the winds will die down to the low 20 knots in the Solent, but one has already heard forecasts of 45 knot gusts off St Catherines tomorrow afternoon. Sunday looks like a better day, but then there is another low likely to come in on Monday, so whatever, it is likely to be a pretty windy first few days of the race, come what may.

CRO Dave Giddings has already drawn up contingency plans to postpone the start until Sunday, but of course this has a knock on impact for our sponsors BNY Mellon, who have chartered a 200 ton pleasure boat to take 50 of their guests out to the start tomorrow. I have had to think of contingency plans for them, because clearly they cannot cancel all those arrangements. The crew Briefing this evening should be interesting and I do not envy Alexis Green, the BBC South weather girl having to give her forecast for the next few days.

With the rapidly changing weather patterns, our current thinking is to delay any final decision until breakfast tomorrow, when all the crews will be joining us. You will be one of the first to know, by whichever of these amazing networking methods you choose.

If you are local regional radio fans, I have done a piece on the race for Wave 105, which will go out at various times over this weekend and this evening I am doing an interview live with Robin Knox Johnston on BBC Radio Solent H2o programme, scheduled for 19.55.

Meanwhile, threatening weather is no excuse to cancel a party and so the BNY Mellon Reception and our Pre-Departure Supper proceed as planned this evening, when we have approximately 75 souls attending what promises to be a great evening. Perhaps we may have to re-brand the Supper, the Pre-Pre-Departure Supper, but if anyone has a better notion we are open to suggestions.

So, the long and short of it as 15.00 today is that we are all dressed up – and we just hope that we have somewhere to go!

Keep tuned!

Roger Townsend