After getting In late the day before I thought I would sleep in a bit but no 🙂 race day excitement and I was up at 6:30 starting to clean up the boat and checking rigging etc…. I found a keeper ring on one of the stays that needed replacing and also loosened the inner stays a bit to let a little more pre-bend into the mast.. Kevin came by and we introduced ourselves… He also came over with his loos gauge a little later to compare its settings against my gauge.. they showed within about 10 lbs of each other the best we could tell. Mine uses lbs and his is on a numeric scale that equates to lbs. I had my uppers at about 600 lbs.. He said that he was running his there also.
At 8:30 the regatta threw a nice breakfast for all of us and at 9:00 we did the captains meeting.. For some reason during the captains meeting me and all the other captains in C fleet got the idea that the race would be a rolling start. With D fleets start being the start of our 5 min sequence. lol… this will be important later..
As all the boats started leaving the marina it looked like someone had upended a bag of sailboats and was letting them spill out of the marina enterance.. in twos and threes they would come out and turn left or right depending on what fleet they were in. C and D fleets turned right and headed torward southport. We were goin to use the 14 and 15 bouys for our marks in a upwind/downwind course.
Leaving the marina the wind was blowing about 8 to 10 knots but as the morning progressed the wind steadily picked up.. The race committe moved the start line twice because of changing wind and strong currents (around 2.2 knots)
Finally about an hour and a half after getting on the water the start line was set. Everyone in C and D fleets are making practice runs on the line before the race sequence started. This is where the first interesting (as in the chinese may you live in interesting times interesting) thing happened.. One end of the start line was over not to far from a sand bar that came right out of the water. We and a lot of the other boats were pushing over close to there and tacking back to run the start line from that direction. on the third or fourth time we did this all of a sudden sea puppy came to a sudden halt. For a second we were shure we had run aground.. but we still had 6 feet of water under us. Looking behind us we could see a 1 inch nylon rope rising to the surface. We had hooked it with the wing keel. We are not sure what it was tied to on the bottom.. an anchor or some other very large heavy object.. The other end we found had a very small little epirb/strobe unit on it. It was really hard to see. The wind by now is blowing about 15 to 20. We had a full reef in the main and the 100% blade up. With our keel wrapped in the line the boat quit responding to the helm and turned broadside to the wind and using the line as a pivot pushed us aground on the shoal/sandbar. As you can imagine things were hopping on the boat. Many things were happening at the same time. I got the rudder up to take the pressure off of it where it was grounding. (the rudder is about 6 inchs deeper than the keel when in the down position) Patty got on the radio and called the race comitte to tell them we were wrapped in the rope and aground. Jim went forward and brought the jib down and all of us then got the main down. I cranked the engine up and we tried to motor off but by now we were around pretty hard and the rope was still wrapped around our keel. Now the chase/pin boat from the race committe came over and we tossed them a line and they after some difficulty were able to pull us off the shoal and then a minute or so later get us untangled from the rope. (it was real close me going in the water with a knife and cutting the rope) Thankfully this ended up not being needed. After some sincere thanks on our part 🙂 we got sail back up and rejoined the fleet before the race start.
You would think we had used up our allotment of bad stuff for the day. Remember me mentioning the rolling start to the race? Well there was no rolling start except in our heads.. lol what it was supposed to be was a seperate race sequeance for C fleet after D fleets start. Coincidently they started our sequence 5 minutes after the start of D fleets start. We all thought that D fleets start was the start of our sequence so when 5 minutes after that we got the next horn the entire C fleet started. Of the 7 boats in the fleet only one heard the race committe on the radio calling to say we were over the line early. several of us had our radios set to the international setting and since we were using channel 78 we could transmit but 78 internation recievies on a different frequency than the US setting transmitts on. We latter learned that several boats had this problem.
We saw the boat that heard them turn back, but it looked like they were having equipment problems so we just thought bad luck for them and kept going. By now also the wind was starting to hit closer to 20 solid with gust above that. Even in the sheltered bay area we were getting seas of about 3 and 4 ft so we didn’t have a lot of attention to pay to it. The boat that we thought was having equipment problems was our closest competion. Kevin on Lokahi the other beneteau F235. We screamed… we blew by all the other boats in our fleet and even caught up with some of the D fleet boats that started before us. It wasn’t till we had finished and were heading back torward the marina that we started hearing rumors that everyone but Lokahi had been marked OCS (on course side) for the start and didn’t even place in the race. Lokahi went back and crossed the start line after the start horn and sailed the course to finish as the only boat to do so correctly. ( Go Lokahi 🙂
Up to this point it had been a challanging day sailing. With strong winds and Me, Patty and Jim sailing the boat but we hadn’t sailed together as a crew more than once or twice. With me on the helm it left Jim and patty handling lines. I had recently moved some lines and added more so it was confusing for them a few times on what to use. Sunday I let jim helm and I handled lines since im much more familiar with them. Anyway so the race is over and we are headed back to the marina hoping to get there before a thunder storm front rolls over us. After we finished racing and had a chance to look around off the the south/east of us a storm front was rapidly moving our way. We lost this race also. We were still about a mile from the marina intrance when it hit us.. We had pulled th jib down but hadn’t gotten the main down yet when it hit. Jim told me later that we were getting winds in excess of 40 knots and this seemed to hold true for the published recordings of winds in that storm. All I know is that the rain was sideways and hit so hard it felt like someone was throwing small rocks at us. Also visibility went to about 200 ft instantly . We were in the channel with restricted manuverability. Luckly our course to the marina up the channel seemed to be about dead upwind. The main though was not happy it was starting to flog baddly. Later we found that all the telltales were ripped off of it. jim dumped the main halyard and patty tied the end of the boom to the toe rail and all of us jumped on the main sail and bundled it up and tied it down any which way. Then we motored for about 15 or 20 minutes holding our course and hoping we wouldnt hit anything or run aground. The gps wouldn’t find the satelites so it was useless. The storm front left as fast as it came. In a period of about 2 minutes it went from 40+ winds to almost calm and light rain and then no rain. We found we were still dead on course and about a half mile from the entrance to the marina. Sadly during all this one of the smaller boats got pushed aground in the storm.. luckly no one was hurt and no damage was done to the boat. The marina had sent a power boat out during the storm to help them. My hat is off to them.. that was some scary conditions to be out in a little power skiff going to a sailboats rescue.
after that is was all anticlimatic.. easy into the marina and docking. Straightened up and then it was time for the dinner/party 🙂
I will tell you later about sundays racing where we sort of redeemed ourselves and ended up getting second place for our fleet for the weekend 🙂
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