Well it was supposed to be an official race but it ended up being just for fun.. lol which is just as well as Sea Puppy came in second..
Winds were supposed to be 15 to 20 and instead were closer to 4 to 10…
Sea Puppy raced against LC Marie a Catalina 36, Runnaway a Cabo Rico 39 and Diamond Girl a Hunter 29, In the light winds Dimanond Girl and Sea Puppy did much better than the bigger and heavier LC Mari and Runnaway.. In the first race Sea Puppy and Diamond Girl were neck and neck far out in the lead 🙂 We ended up not finishing that as the with the light winds it would have taken all day and part of the evening to finish the course. By decision of GPS distance from the mark the race went to Diamond Girl.
The second race was a shotgun start from where all the boats gathered and ran to a upwind finish accross a line from the Sea Bouy at Little River and the red marker on the mouth of the inlet. Sea Puppy was in a bad position at the start of the race.. We were eating the bad air from all three other boats… Diamond girl took an early lead while Sea Puppy struggled to run to windward of Runnaway and LC Marie and pull up on them… After about 10 or 15 minutes we worked our way far enough out from behind them to get semi clean air and caught up to LC Marie….. at this point we were side by side with LC Marie on the upwind side of them… Richard on LC Marie called over a suggested sail trim change and we pulled away quickly….. 10 minutes later we were pulling up on Diamond Girl… Were we were stopped cold by eating their bad air……. Finally after giving up some speed and distance to point higher than they were we were able to clear their wind shadow and quickly pulled up beside them and then passed them maybe 40 ft to windward off their port side. In the next 20 minutes we gained about 150 to 200 yard lead on Diamond Girl…. We were now about half way to the finish mark…. At this point there was a large wind shift and both we and Diamond Girl tacked to the right…. With my only crew being my sister who was a first time sailor 🙂 our tack was not the most gracefull and we lost a lot of boat speed till we got settled on the new tack… Diamond Girl picked up some distance….. then maybe a minute and a half after that tack the wind shifted back to where it had been coming from and Diamond Girl tacked just before we did.. again they gained some distance on us.. Back on the first tack this had allowed them to gain enough on us that we were again in their wind shadow…. Also the wind picked up and it looked like they turned on the afterburners. They shot ahead till they had a 1/4 mile advantage over us…. We were doing a steady 5 knots over water and they must have been hitting 5.5 and 6 for little bit. Finally we again cleared their wind shadow and started to catch back up… we were pointing higher than them and to cross the finish line had to tack and sail about 200 yard on the opposite tack to finish accross the line…. We aimmed for the bouy at the end of the line and were planning to just duck it to save time…. This almost worked.. we were within a hundred yards of them when they crossed the line……. we continued up and made our tack just past the layline to the bouy…… and blew it… again we lost a lot of speed on the tack and I hadn’t taken into account the 2 knot current that carried us into the bouy….. at the last second I had to duck the bouy and come around again to try and cross the line……. 🙂 I decided I didn’t want a red racing stripe. This time we made it without problem as the wind shifted and we were able to just power over the line at 5 knots……. The wind was very fluky at the end of the race with 30 and 40 % shifts observed. So second race to Diamond Girl with Sea Puppy taking a Close 2nd…… I have to hand it to Diamond Girls crew.. they made less mistakes than I did…. and it paid off.
The moral of this story 🙂 any day on the water is a good day 🙂 We had a great time racing with everyone, win or lose..
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