Stealth Play

On Sunday morning Simon Hiscocks was visibly distraught when a call from home told him he'd forgotten to gybe, and had hit Africa.

So many people are playing the Virtual Volvo race game that it seems to me that the actual and real race is all but insignificant.

I'm not playing it because if I do, I know I'll do nothing else.

But it does account for why most of the fleet were late getting to the start of the fourth race of the RS600FF national championships at Hayling Island on Sunday, where I was race officer.

Now I have tried to make a habit of being such a bad race officer that I was never invited back. The advice once given to me by a friends father has never left me.

That was: "To make such a hash of the washing up, that you will never be allowed back in the kitchen". It was a signal to me that this was worth considering as his elderly wife immediately replied to him "In that case Tony, I should never have let you back in the bedroom"

Anyway Sam Pascoe won easily and made the RS600FF look a very good boat indeed, freed from the criticism of the "balcony one design" who think they know about foiling, but don't. In fact even I couldn't mess up the racing and the only thing I was left wondering was why its called an "RS" at all, given the complete absence of that company.

Mark Robinson came to stay the other night and we speculated how we too could use the Volvo Ocean race "Stealth Play" function in the Moth class. This is where each boat can activate a 12 hour "black out", which saw the boys on Green Dragon invisibly head west and subsequently take the lead.

The best we could come up with is that, upon a sound signal, everyone but the stealth play boat has to shut their eyes for 20 seconds.

That should do it.

Talking of which someone must have been doing the same when local boy Alex Thompson's Hugo Boss was holed by a French fishing boat at 02.30 in the morning on the way to the Vendee start. Really bad luck and it seems there's always a price to pay for fashion, and having a black boat and black sails has, I suspect, not helped.

I hope they get it fixed.