Round the Island Race 2016 in pictures

TAGS: boating isle of wight Round the Island

Organisers of the J.P. Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race said this year will go down in history as ‘a windy edition of the event’.

This year marked the 80th race and its 85th anniversary year – as the event was not run during the war years.

The MOD70 trimaran Phaedo 3 shattered the multihull race record in a time of 2 hours 23 minutes, 23 seconds, with owner Lloyd Thornburg and skipper Brian Thompson on board.

They smashed the record time Sir Ben Ainslie set in 2013 by a stunning 28 minutes.

The largest monohull in the fleet, Mike Leopard’s 100ft Leopard, took monohull line honours, but failed to beat the record time he set in 2013 by 13 minutes.

Despite the unusually testing conditions, only a small percentage of the fleet retired from the race, with the overwhelming majority of competitors – some of whom saw gusts to almost 40 knots – successfully completing the course.

The Dubois half tonner Alchemist yacht sank after it hit a shipwreck in the race. The Mudeford RNLI inshore lifeboat rescued all the crew in a dramatic rescue, seconds before Alchemist sank in 17 metres of water just east of the Needles.