After flying home for a few days of work between our practice weekend and the regatta, we arrived to once again find very little wind. We arrived down at the boat around 8:30 AM and found the parking lot about empty? That kind of surprised us as we were anticipating the lot to be full of activity and we were hoping for some tuning partners.
We quickly launched anyway and left the dock to get some practice in, we still needed to work on tacking and dousing. We also wanted to look at the new mainsail that was just delivered. We again headed over towards the Navy's yacht yard and found two marks that we could sail between and started doing laps. Things were going very well and we had improved and things were looking good.
The morning breeze started to die after about an hour so we headed back to the dock and over to the Boat Yard again for lunch. After some good food we heading back to the dry sail lot and tried to find a dance partner for the afternoon. We finally got Curtis Florence and Suzie Wulff on the water to sail against us. As most know I have sailed more miles with Curtis then either of wish to admit, we have won many many races with each other. This is Curtis' first foray in boat ownership! C and S were quite smart in choosing Bill Abbott Jr. to drive Devil's Play for them.
So out we go and line up against another boat for the first time! We were quite happy as we had some great speed against them and pretty much controlled the tuning. It was nice to match up against them. Bill told us the boat looked great sailing the through the water and was very balanced looking. I have to agree, I really felt good about how we were going.
Devil's Play was having some winch issues, this was their first day on the water as well. C and S had bought this boat about 4 weeks before this event. So off to the dock and of course back to the Boat Yard!
Race Day #1, or should I say rain and no wind day #1! Nothing to report, other then the picture above.
Race Day #2, again the day arrived and the wind was nowhere to find. We sat out on the course for some time before the breeze finally came up and we were able to get some races off. In the first race, I had a shocker of a start, not a great first beat but on the run we were quite special. We passed about 7 boats on the run, by finding a bit of breeze down the middle and quite a good bit of pace. We continued to chip away at the fleet and ended the first race with a nice solid 6th place. (Of course out tuning partner ended up winning the race!)
Race 2 again saw a horrible start on my part, I was surprised how off my timing was on this boat. When I thought I was 1/2 lane off the line and the guy 1-1/5 boat lengths ahead was over, I was actually way late and he was perfect? So I need to work on this as well. We sailed OK this race, it was light and shifty and we missed a couple shifts up the first leg and again passed some boats downwind. We finished 16th. Not real bad but not where we felt we should have been.
Race 3, I do not remember! Must be the placing of 21 that causes temporary memory loss :)
We finished the day in 15th place about 7 points out of 11th. We were OK with that, we were knocking on the door of the top 10 and still had a day to go.
Sunday came with the breeze! What had been taking us an hour to sail to the course was taking like 15 mins, so we ended up out there really early. We took the sails down and just drifted around, watching the breeze and watching some of the boats that were sailing. We kind of formulated a plan and then after a hour of just watching we tuned the rig, raised the sails and went sailing.
The boat felt awesome! This was the first time we had sailed in any breeze at all and it was very very cool. We had some great wheels and make our race plan. Because I was starting so badly I decided to just play up near the boat so that I would have an escape if needed. Well I got a better start and was able to sail for a good hunk of time in clear air. We did want to get to the right so we tacked out and stuck to our plan. We sailed very well in this race and had great upwind speed, our downwind was not as good as we actually got passed by a couple boats. We were as high as 6th but finished with a 9th.
The last race of the regatta saw our best start. I could not believe the lane that I had! We were launched about mid way up the line and going very fast. Just about 2 mins after the start a big right shift came in and allowed Pete McChensey to leverage into a great spot on me and I could not live so we had to tack out. We sailed up the first 2/3 of the beat in the top 10 again. As we approached the top mark, we had three bad tacks in a row and got flushed out the back. This race was very disappointing as the wheels kind of came off. We lost a bunch of boats right at the finished and ended up with a 23rd.
That put us in 17th for the event, 4 points out of 13th. Not too bad, we accomplished our goal of a top half finished, but left us all disappointed because a much better result was easily achievable.
The team will get better and the results will improve. The most important thing was that Roger and Ned had a great weekend and had a ton of fun. Till next time
Tac
No comments:
Post a Comment