Andy Rice

Sailing is a capricious sport and the chance to go from hero to zero within the space of minutes is extremely high, as Andy found to his cost

One of the questions we should all be asking ourselves is which of the things we’ve had to change during the pandemic are things we’ll want to keep once we get back to a ‘new normal’? A year ago, our resident pro-sailor in the Musto Skiff fleet, Pete Greenhalgh, instigated the Corona Cup events. Like an open meeting, except the Notice of Race and Sailing Instructions are little more than a hundred words on a shared WhatsApp group, £20 paid online to Pete, with two ribs manned by willing volunteers, one crew operating as committee boat and the other as rescue boat.

We had our first Corona Cup of 2021 on the Solent in mid May, with the permanent racing buoy, Fastnet Insurance, as our windward mark on a simple windward-leeward course with the leeward gate the same as the start and finish line. Super simple setup. Back-to-back races run on a 3-2-1-start sequence.