The past month has been an adventure into singlehanded sailing. I’ve always preferred the team aspect of sailing doublehanders, and last year really enjoyed racing three up in the Laser SB3. The challenge of getting three people to work as a unit is something that I miss in dinghy sailing, but logistically keelboats are way more complicated to campaign, even if doesn’t get much easier than the convenience of the Laser SB3.

Anyway, what with a young family and many always being away reporting on sailing events overseas, I’ve succumbed to the simplicity of singlehanded sailing. After many years of owning a foiling 600FF, I finally got around to actually sailing it. Having joined Stokes Bay Sailing Club, I’ve headed out into the Solent to see how the foiling 600 copes with the notorious Solent chop.

It has been an incredible learning experience, very reminiscent of those early days in the 49er when people wondered if it would ever be able to sail the Olympic skiff in more than a Force 3.  Some of the rules of foiling a very different to normal sailing, or what regular foilers would call ‘low-riding’. Normally, when you feel like you’re getting into trouble, what do you do? Move further to the back of the boat? Ease the sail? Do either of those things in a foiler and you will only get yourself into more trouble. By trouble, I mean when the boat rises higher and higher out of the water to the point where the foils depart the surface - at which point you lose control and the boat blows out to leeward, dumping you unceremoniously in the drink.

So, what do you do if you do find yourself lifting higher than you’d like? Step forward and pull in the mainsail. Doing these two things feels like the exact opposite of what you should do. It’s a bit like when the ski instructor tells you to lean forward over the tips of your skis when all your instincts are screaming at you to lean back. You know it’s wrong - but you can’t help but do it anyway.

However, despite the scary moments, and believe me, travelling four feet above the Solent in excess of 20 knots is scary, but it’s also exhilarating. I can’t remember the last time I got this excited about just going for a sail. Maybe it was when I was learning to sail, almost 30 years ago, in the Topper, when I just didn’t understand why people went racing when just sailing was enough fun in itself. Gradually, as our level of  competence increases, so does the desire to measure our skills against others in racing. This is the point where the leading some of the other 600FF sailors are at, for example Sam Pascoe, one of the best foiling sailors in the country, and Simon Hiscocks, the 49er Olympic medallist. Simon is the one who is really driving the 600FF class at the moment, organising training events as well as the national championships.

But in the meantime, such is my level of incompetence, that I’m quite happy to make an arse of myself  in the privacy of the Eastern Solent. I’ve had plenty of ‘whoops’ and ‘yee-haas’ from keelboat sailors egging me on as I’ve whizzed past at warp speed, and plenty of cheers and jeers as I’ve come a cropper. Amazingly though, I haven’t hurt myself - yet. I’m sure it will happen at some point, but so far, despite many spectacular crashes landing, on water really doesn’t hurt that much.

The boat is also proving able to put up with some incredible punishment, a testament to the solid construction of the original RS600 and also to the amazingly robust foiling package developed by Linton Jenkins. It was the Weymouth boatbuilder who originally wondered what would happen if you put Moth technology on a standard RS600.

After putting the boat through some destruction testing in the waters around Stokes Bay, I fancied a sterner test. Many years ago, I took part in a round Isle of Wight race in another sturdy boat, the Laser 5000. That was great fun, even if it was rather too tidal and too light to make it all the way round under our own steam. My crew Steve Kyffin and I had a great match race with Andy and Ian Budgen two thirds of the way around, but we had to retire just before The Needles to get a long tow back up the Solent to Cowes.

In the absence of there being a RTIOW dinghy race these days, I thought I’d join in with the 1700-odd keelboats and multihulls competing in the J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race. The weather forecast leading up to the big day was perfect, a moderate breeze blowing from the North. So I got up early that Saturday morning and arrived at Stokes Bay around 5.30am. It hadn’t even occurred to me that there would be others doing the same, but just as I arrived, a Hobie 16 was heading out, and there was a Laser trolley sitting on the shore, with a note in a plastic bag telling me that a Bulgarian Laser sailor called Valentin had already set out.

When I pulled the cover off my 600, I was met with the sight of a badly warped flap on the main central foil. The way that I’d left the foil in the boat the previous time I’d sailed it had led to the flap becoming distorted by the heat of the sun, and probably meant the boat was not going to foil as it should do. But the Solent looked beautiful, with hundreds of brightly coloured spinnakers ranging from one side to the other, from Cowes all the way across the Southampton water. I’d come this far…

After a last look at the weather online, I made a decision to use the small rig on the RS600, one of the great design features by Clive Everest that soon fell out of use in the standard RS600 but which is an absolute godsend for us foilers.  By the time I finally got on the water it was about 7.30am, and the keelboats were long gone. The breeze was light  but at least the tide was with me.  My plan had been to average 10 knots, which if I could get foiling should be easily achievable. For a 50 nautical mile course with a bit added on for upwind work, I was hoping to complete the rounding in not much more than six hours. However the warped flap was doing me no favours and the reduced rig began to look like the wrong choice.

As I was sailing past Yarmouth and Lymington, the breeze picked up to a Force 4,  and even with the small rig I should have been foiling easily. But I didn’t, and by the time I’d covered the 20 nautical miles to The Needles, three hours had already passed. This was decision time, whether to sail the 20 nautical miles back up the Solent, or to do the 30 and a bit miles round the back of the island. In for a penny, in a pound, I decided to carry on. It was worth it, just for the next phase of the course, the 13 miles of beam reaching from The Needles to St Catherine’s Point, the southernmost tip of the island. Now at last the boat was travelling fast enough to overcome the inefficiencies of the warped flap and I was properly foiling in flat water, stealing occasional glances of the incredible backdrop of the cliffs that tower over Freshwater Bay.

It was proving to be a very benign circumnavigation, although the washing machine waters that I encountered off St Catherine’s Point were a little bit concerning, and it was of some comfort to see an RNLI lifeboat motor past me at this moment. From here on however, things started to get tougher as the wind came on to the nose and hours of upwind work ensued, beating past anchored commercial shipping and some of the smaller, slower keelboats in the race.

Again I was back to a state of half low-riding, half foiling, even though the breeze was a solid Force 4. But least the small rig was proving to be the right choice after all. My hoped-for time of six or so hours was beginning to look ridiculous, and having consumed the last of my bananas I was looking forward to that bacon and egg sarnie back at the sailing club.

Eventually I got back to Stokes Bay just before 4pm, bedraggled and knackered. My GPS told me that I’d covered a total of 64 nautical miles (rather more than my estimate of 50 nautical miles and a bit!) in about eight and a half hours. The Hobie 16 sailors who’d set off earlier, arrived back at almost exactly the same time, and so I shared circumnavigation stories with Phil and Dave. I never got to see the Laser sailor that day though, although by happy accident I did get introduced to Bulgarian Laser sailor at Hayling Island a couple of weeks later. It was the very same Valentin Nedyalkov, who has now been around the island twice in his Laser. This year he set off about 3am and completed the course (properly, it has to be said, from Cowes to Cowes rather than my Stokes Bay to Stokes Bay course) in a time of 10 hours and 20 minutes. Impressive stuff.