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The ‘Capitell RUND HELGOLAND’ race is the short distance race of the IDM, but also covers a good 40 nm when racing as planned. As can be seen here, the start is to the east of the dune, then the cours leads clockwise around the island to the waypoint north-east of Helgoland (where there is a cardinal buoy) and from there a SW course back to the start line. Normally this is followed by an up-and-down course, back to the previous north-eastern waypoint and back to the finish-line. However, this year the race also suffered from weak winds , so the course was shortened and the final up-and-down was cancelled. This meant a total of around 30 nm on this glorious Sunday.

Apart from the sometimes weak wind, it was a great sunny sailing day - but not with conditions where SNIFIX can play to her competitive strengths.

It was particularly tough at the beginning, with very light winds at the start and for the short southerly course to the first mark. In our "usual tradition", we we stayed away too long defensively from the starting line and then didn't get there in time in the light wind, which meant we were a little late into the race.

On the following westerly course after the first mark, a nice gennaker run followed with a slightly increasing NNE until the wind picked up at the south-westerly mark. At first it looked as if we would have to tack to the next mark at the north-western point of the course, but the wind shifted (as forecast) to the left to NNW, so that we were tactically correct on starrbord tack and were able to get along with one tack when the wind shifted.

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From there, another nice gennaker course to the east to the next mark followed in the NNW breeze. It was a great picture in the early afternoon with many colourful spinnakers and gennakers under a blue sky and the sun from astern. We had a nice encounter with the majestic GERMANIA VI which first wanted to overtake us to windward, but we luffed aacordingly and didn't let her pass and thus forced her to an extended detour to the lee.

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The final course to the SW to the finish line was possible with a very close hauled gennaker or full genoa, depending on taste. We opted for the safer second option and could observe in the distance that HINDEN sailed quite fast under gennaker, but also lay spectacularly on her cheek. Whether she was faster this way than under genoa - who knows?

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As far as our ranking is concerned, we didn't cover ourselves in glory here and ended up in 15th place out of 17 yachts in our ORC A group - it can happen :-).

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Back in the harbour, we found a nice berth next to the ALPHA LYRAE right next to the rescue cruiser HERMANN MARWEDE - it made us feel really safe. The evening programme in the North Sea Hall didn't make such an inviting impression on us, and the weather had become a little more unstable and cooler. So we had a nice evening below deck, and as we were off duty on Whit Monday morning - like most or probably all ‘Skagen sailors’ we skipped the ‘Helgoland Eight’ race on Whit Monday and concentrated on the start of the long-distance race on Monday afternoon - we were able to sleep in comfortably.