We finished our years racing with the OYC Holiday Regatta. While a lot smaller than many of the other events we took part in my expectation was for some competitive racing in a mixed fleet and it turned out that way.
Going into race one I wasn't sure who our competition was exactly. Could be Kookaburra, a rapidly improving Shock 35, our old Nemesis Pole Dancer as J/120 or perhaps Powerpoint, a Henderson 30 that I crew on (Joe Cramer races on Kraken too and has been instrumental in our improvements over the last few years).
It was going going to be a mixture of crew, courses and conditions that would push the favor one way or another overlaid with tactical goodness, or badness. After a long week watching light air predictions (Powerpoint would romp all over us) I woke up happy to see it up to 10-14kts - enough to neutralize their light air prowess somewhat without being too much to have Pole Dancer steaming over the top of us.
But going into that first race it was hard to tell the main competition. We got a good start, on top of Powerpoint, nicely to leeward of Kookaburra and with PoleDancer forced to tack away to the potentially favored right. What to do? Pinch up in front of Kookaburra to establish that position while keeping enough speed to make sure Powerpoint couldn't get in front of us and hope the right shift didn't happen. Tack on layline, first around the mark and force the reaching powerpoint take the long route around us and waste enough time.
Wasn't sure we did get enough of a bite at them and didn't get an accurate time difference count but turned out we did! First.
And starting to get a feel for the competition now.
Second race was a long random leg race. Horrible start.
Horrible.
I blame John Sivak for not being on board. His starts have become somewhat legendary.
Problem being he wasn't on board.
Only nice thing, Powerpoint started dead last after problems. So we worked on getting a route out of trouble and staying ahead of PP for as long as possible. A lift (a 10 degree righty) to the first mark didn't quite give us a lucky freeby but we weren't too far out of contention at the rounding and then got a lucky break hoping for more right as the sea breeze exerted more influence and getting it. At the leeward mark we'd overtaken Kookaburra (just) and were close behind PD with PP a little ahead of them. Two legs hard on the wind followed and we all held station then a final downwind to the finish and with a quick recovery from a spinnaker sheet rigged the wrong way kept close behind the two faster boats.
Close enough, another 1st on corrected time. Pleasant surprise when results came out as we couldn't hear the finish times for the first two boats and thought we were probably second.
The last race caught us by surprise. Literally. I was down below looking at at spinnaker rip when Charlie called down that the horn was called and we were going into sequence. We just had time to get back past the committee boat and get the course. Running a bit early I did a big wiggle down behind Kookaburra and as I did so the horn went. My watch was fifteen seconds out! So rather than winning the boat end and getting a juicy blocking move on Powerpoint we found ourselves tacking out of trouble again. Third around the top mark we were closing down Kookaburra for second place but didn't quite get it, five seconds off in the end.
1,1,3 for the day and overall win (Powerpoint got 2,2,1 so we beat them on number of bullets).
With a nice favorable wind direction Wolfie and Aaron got to practice some spinnaker trim on the return to the harbor. Another bonus as I've been feeling bad about the lack of practice time put in this year. With our performance levels going up its actually proven harder to get people with less experience into the more nuanced roles, something that I hadn't expected.
No comments:
Post a Comment