Well we went out and kicked butt on saturday. The boats in my class were a Hunter 23.5 with a phrf of 255, Kathey Lynn with a phrf of 171 and me in Sea Puppy at 191.
The first race we had what I think was a bad start. However everyone else in our class must have made some mistakes during the race also as we ended up with a very solid win. The course was a standard triangle with a 1 mile leg to the windward mark from the start.
We lost the second race due to a not great start and not balancing the weight on the boat correctly.. The wind had shifted about 45 degrees so it was a straight up speed race with us making the windward mark without tacking and then reaching back to the finish line.
(Weather was moving in so we did not race the triangle but just did a windward leeward course to the mark and back.)
Achilees Heel which is a Hunter about the same length as Sea Puppy was neck and neck with us the whole way to the windward mark. To be fair they have a PH I could just about have reached out and touched them behind us as we rounded the windward mark. On the reach back I did some real fine tuning on the sails and moved Hans and Mirriam up on the fordeck. All this gained us about 3/4 of a knot of speed.. just moving Hans and Miriams weight forward got us a solid 1/2 knot. We steadily pulled away from them all the way to the finish line, finishing 1 minute ahead of Achilles Heel and 2 minutes ahead of Kathey Lynn. However with a 61 second a minute PHRF advantage this let Achilles Heel take first place.
All in all though I was very pleased with our performance. I spent a lot of time passing th helm back and forth with Hans while I played with tuning the sails and playing with the new roller furled jib. It is cut quite differently than the others I have sailed on Sea Puppy. I think it is a 150. I do need to play with it a little as I think it was cut to actually trim it between the stays and bring it back to the jib car mounted on the side of the cabin. This should actually give me a couple more degrees of pointing ability if so.
Between the two races we followed a shrimp boat for a bit and took some pictures of the dolphins.. in no particular order here are a few of those.
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