Cowes Week 2013: Return to Form
If you’ve spent the week sitting in a deserted office wishing you were on holiday like your colleagues, or counting down the days until you’re off, you have my sympathy. It doesn’t matter how hard it’s raining at Cowes Week 2013, or how little the breeze blows, the Isle of Wight in any weather is still more fun than the 0705 to Waterloo.
Having spent the day at my desk on the mainland drove that home. Knowing that I would be heading back to Cowes on Thursday should have made it easy to concentrate on the tasks I had set myself, but I made a fatal mistake. One click on the Cowes TV window on our website was all it took for my productivity, (and I have to say spirit), to take a dive as I watched the action off the RYS start line and the accompanied commentary.
Having said that, if your boss is away and you’re getting bored with tracking auctions on eBay, this year’s Cowes coverage is a superb way of making the hours slip by effortlessly. I only took a look to see if the weather forecast was going to cause problems again. Before I knew it I was playing catch up for the afternoon.A building high pressure system and the previous night’s forecast for light and fickle breezes had looked like they could trip up the racing for a second day at Cowes.
Conscious that the decent breeze could be out to the east, as it had been on the previous day, the race committee decided to take some of the bigger boats in the black group classes out into Hayling Bay where the wind was expected to be more settled. As it turned out, for the White group classes and smaller boats in the Black group that raced in the Solent as normal, the breeze delivered more than had been expected to leave these classes with more space than is normal during the week to play in. Everyone, it seemed was happy. Apart from, that is, us at our desks.
