Day 1 was a nervous yet exciting start to our voyage. We started by catching the coach to Portsmouth from Chippenham, Warminster or Salisbury. When we arrived, we had a chance to have lunch or explore a bit of Portsmouth (mainly to the toilets!). After a long wait we got to find out our boats. We then boarded our boats and got to meet our crewmates.

On the boat we had briefings on how the boat works on the top and bottom. We were split into different “watches” to do the jobs and chores throughout the ship. Straight after we set sail! We put the Yankee and Staysail and tacked a few times. Finally, we arrived in Cowes.

Port watch then made dinner while starboard packed away the sails we all enjoyed our meal at 7:30 and had showers afterwards. After, hopefully we can go and socialise with the other boats!

See you soon!

Jaylen Patel, Ben Woolley and Artie Mitchell – Port watch

Today, we sailed form Cowes to Weymouth (52.59Nm). We hoisted the mainsail, yankee and staysail. 

On the way we did a man overboard drill and successfully recovered it. We sailed through Hurst Narrows on a close haul, and the sea state gradually began to build. 

We saw the needles and lighthouse on the western side of the Isle of Wight. The wind also increased slightly. We all sat down together and sang songs and danced especially to the song YMCA.  

Our speed remained constantly between 8-12knots throughout the passage, and we then gybed towards Weymouth. As we neared Weymouth the seas were choppy and the boat started rocking which was slightly scary. 

We dropped the mainsail outside the entrance to Portland harbour and motored into Weymouth. We turned around in Weymouth and moored with another boat alongside us. We packed the boat up and cooked pasta bolognaise (It was very good!!).  

We started the day with a well-earned lie-in, followed by a hearty breakfast of scrambled egg baps and a selection of cereals. After breakfast, we took on the challenge of the 80‑foot mast in strong, gusty winds. The views from the top were incredible, although the descent proved eventful — Artie managed to get stuck twice (and nearly a third time).

Later in the morning, we had some free time to explore the streets of Weymouth, giving everyone a chance to stock up on personal supplies and enjoy the town.

In the afternoon, excitement ramped up with the prestigious Beach Olympics. This kicked off with seven rounds of knot tying, where we pulled off a strong comeback after a shaky start to claim victory. Next came tug of war, which we won convincingly once again.

To finish, we moved on to dinghy racing. After comfortably beating the competition in the first round, the race was oddly declared a draw. In the second round, we accepted defeat—until we later learned that the opposing team’s boat had been assisted by a rope held by their leader. Unfortunately, with no VAR available, the decision stood. Despite this, our earlier successes meant we were still confident of our overall performance.

Another busy, competitive, and memorable day for Challenger 4!

Today is Wednesday. We left Weymouth at 8:00 with an early start compared to yesterday, we hoisted all the sails nice and quickly being efficient. The morale was high and even though there was an early start, everyone was happy after some cereal.

In Weymouth Bay, there was quite a few lobster pots which had to be spotted by the crew otherwise there could be a problem; we had to alert the helmsman about it. There was also a surprise man overboard drill which was good and we did very well on response.

Port watch then cooked us some lunch which consisted of chicken goujons and sauces inside a wrap. After that went down well, we had to get the sails down as there wasn’t much wind. This helped that we had had a man overboard drill earlier so didn’t have to do much to get down the foresails.

We then also got down the main sail as there wasn’t much wind (2 knots!). We motored in the rest of the way into Lymington and had to move the boats along to move up at the request of the harbour master so that another boat could moor up .

We got free time and also free ice creams and then had an hour or two in town to spend time and hang out. We then cooked up some chilli, and everyone liked it.

Today we had a very early start at 5:30 to catch the tide and set off at 6:00 (we were all very tired and looking forward to breakfast which was cereal).

The morning view was amazing with still sea and not many ships about that created a very tranquil and beautiful scenery.

A little later we put the spinnaker pole up and we all took turns climbing up some did better than others 😊 (Ben, Elliott and Rupert were by far the fastest).

After that we all ate some cake on deck and prepared ourselves for the staysail race (Port watch was the best by far as always) and won even though Edward cheated and still lost 🙂

Before we could get into Cowes, we had to anchor up and get our yankee sail down we also put the main sale cover on and prepared to dock, this time we were given more responsibility and successfully docked without any problems.

We got a lot of free time in Cowes to go to any shops we wanted too and we had an amazing chicken tai curry prepared by port watch head chef Ben sue chef Jaylen! With the addition of triple T socks being purchased.