Katie Miller, winner of the Raymarine Young Sailor of the Year, has announced she is to sail double-handed in the JPMorgan Asset Management Round the Island Race which takes place on Saturday 23 June.

20-year old Katie, a student at Southampton Solent University, will be joined on her 21 foot Corribee Elektra by Daniel Monk, also 20, and together the pair will be raising money for the Ellen MacArthur Trust. Daniel was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2002, and is now in clinical remission after undergoing a bone marrow transplant. Daniel started sailing thanks to the Ellen MacArthur Trust – a charity which takes young people aged between 8-18 sailing to help them regain their confidence, on their way to recovery from cancer, leukaemia and other serious illness – and has twice completed the Round the Island race.

Nominated for Raymarine Young Sailor of the Year for her seamanship skills, Katie successfully sailed Elektra single-handed round Britain last year. For that expedition, the most useful device on board was her autopilot. This year, sailing with crew, she has chosen to kit out Elektra with Raymarine’s LifeTag Man Overboard system.

She said, “The LifeTag will give me peace of mind during the race and ensure we are both properly protected. It will be a hectic race with so many boats taking part. There’s always the chance of something going wrong especially when you are sailing short-handed. It’s easy to install the LifeTag, and by wearing the Tag on your wrist, the system gives an immediate and noisy alert if one of us goes overboard.”

Raymarine is a race partner to the JPMorgan Asset Management Round the Island race, and will be helping entrants to plan their race strategy by providing invaluable weather briefing information. From 20 June, competitors can receive free emails and SMS texts containing useful weather and tidal information provided by renowned marine meteorologist Chris Tibbs. A full weather briefing will take place at the Island Sailing Club at 5pm on Friday 22 June. To log onto the weather briefing alerts, go to www.raymarine.com and follow the links from the ‘What’s new’ section to the Round the Island race.