Solid Saturday and Speedy Sunday

We pulled out the stops. Talked through everything that came up on the Wednesday night preceding the regatta and some old faces returned to the boat putting us in a good position to have some fun.

So I was a bit disappointed to find us listed in the B fleet - the lowest rating with a sizable advantage over the other boats. Luckily OYC is a small friendly club and we quickly moved over to being the slowest boat in the A fleet, I had fun telling the crew we'd need to live up to this. Five boats in the A fleet included Pole Dancer (j120), Occams Razor (ft10), Shamen and Gringo (Shock 35s) and Kraken.

Wind came up solidly and the sea breeze piped up shortly before the start of the first so I figured on a fairly steady oscillation and for once got the hoped for behavior.

First race everything was a bit rusty, bad acceleration off the start, missing shifts on our second windward leg. We finished in 4th, not out of touch with the leaders but not really scaring them. As the wind built to 11-12 knots for the second race we were going a lot better and thought we might have corrected into second, later proving to be true. For the third race things were starting to come together and get interesting. Coming down the first run we were second in the water and pushing pole dancer in first. A little tussle with Occams Razor who overlapped to leeward and started trying to push up kept us in second at the mark though potentially unfairly if his proper course had indeed been above the mark with a gybe just before rounding it (though I suspect he wouldn't have made it around in time for the zone and we'd have had an inside overlap and the ability to drive down). Our final beat keep Pole Dancer right there with them crossing a boat length ahead half way up but then karma kicked in, we tacked onto the lay line pole up ready to chase and the boat rounding in between us (different class) stalled out, missed the mark and flopping onto a port tack right in front of us. We had to dive below the boat to avoid contact and then gybe around and slowly slowly make our way back past the mark ourselves. Painful and left us in third rather than fighting for the lead. Perhaps Karma?

In hindsight three better options stand out, in decreasing order of how I think it would have worked out in this situation.

1. I knew current was strong and the boat ahead had been slow and pinching hard. One more boat length out (over standing) as we could probably have luffed our way around it. Maybe two boat lengths! 
2. Crash tack earlier, the gybe cost a lot. Though it's possible we'd have fouled incoming starboard rackets we could have claimed collision avoidance blah blah 
3. We could have hooked the buoy behind the blocking boat and against claimed being forced into for collision avoidance. I'm not sure though that we could have both avoided contact and made it around the buoy on the correct side.

End of day we were in third.

One more race was scheduled for Sunday - a longer random leg race. This ended up being 7nm and I was worried that the reaching ft10 and j120 were going to run away with it but we had a solid upwind leg putting us into second place and held that for a while. The middle of the race was a constricted with a mark that needed to be left to port but once past that we were free to work the shifts. Partly we were forced into breaking out from the shore current relief as we couldn't quite clear the pier leaving Shamen (who can out point us and could) hugging the coast while we started playing the shifts but the shifts seemed to equal the current assist and we kept our distance ahead to the end. It wasn't clear how far ahead the faster boats were but in the end we got second on corrected time.

Sailing on both days was awesome and we just got better and better. Third place overall with the one incident between us and second overall.
I'll take that.