Nick Bubb, the young British sailor who’s preparing for the Mini Transat has just finished the L’Odyssee D’Ulysse the doublehanded Mini Transat qualifying race (Antibes and back) in sixth place overall sailing his new boat Northern Computers.

The second leg of the race was delayed for two days due to 45 knot winds and large seas. The rolling swell the following day made it impossible to anchor the committee boat leaving the committee no option but to set a start line from the end of the marina wall to a channel mark.

From the start, 419 Northern Computers kept pace with 316 Pia and by the end of the first day was in third place. At the end of the first day the replacement jib halyard, purchased in Tunisia parted, and Bubb had to wait for the wind to drop to allow him to climb the mast and thread the spare spinnaker sheet as a makeshift jib halyard.

Taking advice from his weather router, Bubb elected to break east as the winds north of Tunisia had dropped. This decision left Northern Computers drifting through the night loosing ground to the leading pack that had headed west in search of better winds. By dawn she was 20 miles off the pace and with day two spent drifting off southern Sardinia, Bubb had again given himself an uphill battle to the finish. However, his break came with 25 knots of winds and a fast broad reach towards the finish. Covering an incredible 200 miles in 24 hours, Northern Computers managed to close the gap on the fleet and despite bending her Windex during a broach in the middle of the night, she finished a respectable seventh place, hot on the heels of five other yachts.