WNR - Series II - Race 1

Competitors: 247, 244, 550, 158, 484
Crew: Mark, Brian, Tim

With a few crew known to be out for this race, I was delighted to hear from Xa that he would be able to joon us. It was a good steady 12 kt breeze out of the SE,, and the weather was beautiful.

Unfortunately traffic kept Xa from making the race and he apparently arrived just as we were starting. We were bummed.

We started in the middle of the line, which since we didn't have time to siight the line, made it difficult to be right on the line. Towney and TC started above us at the boat end, and I thought we'd have them, since we could lay the mark from our spot. (We had course B, which is take a left at the spider, head toward Hacketts, round a mark to starboard, then round the usual mark to atarboard.)

What I failed to recognize was:
1. there was a line of boats (some of which faster than us) to windward, which would blanket us, and
2. TC and Towney would have a bit more speed as they bore off for the mark.

So, TC rolled us by the time we got to the spider. We had Towney by about one boat length, and there was a Cal to windward right in front of Towney.

We made an interesting mistake at this point. We kept a bit below Towney and the Cal (L'Orange, of course) but on the rhumb line. We had good speed and were able to keep them in check. However, at the mark, we had to give L'Orange room. When we did that Towney was right behind him, and was able to cut inside of us.

To make matters worse, there was a parade of boats behind him that as they came arouned were all on starboard. We were completely tracpped and actually had to sail to the layline. Before we could really tack.

Of course we had other mishaps. We forgot about the snatch block when we rounded the markl. There were spinnaker setup snafus that made it tough for us to tack.

After rounding the next mark in 3rd after 247 and 550, we got the chute up and followed everyone in. Brian did a great job of spinnaker considering it was probably his 3rd time ever doing it. It made me rerealize that we should really consider using WNR races for switching tasks around and cross training..

I had a blast!

--Tim