LinGin Wins Race to Queenstown

With a family-based crew (Andréa, Darcy and David) along with the capable Brian Palmer, LinGin had a fine race to Queenstown, taking the gun at the finish. (It was a real gun. Imagine!)

The wind was a steady 10 kts. out of the south, so the course was pretty much a straight shot across the bay and up the river. Like many years before, there were no tacking legs in the course. Good for family racing, I think.

The start was a bit hairy. T.C. Williams (Argo) was barging and his spinnaker hit our spreader. Unfortunately, Larry Morris was coming up underneath us and with T.C. in the way, we couldn't get out of Larry's way and he very nearly hit us (there was some good fending off that went on). T.C. did his turns right after the start and we did ours too. Larry did turns for not giving us room to maneuver (he just came right up and hit us, even though we had no where to go).

After a fair amount of thought and discussion, we're not sure we should have done turns as we think we could have kept clear if T.C. had not been barging. Oh well, it turned out it didn't matter.

C.B. (Infinity) started mid-line (and a bit late) so he wasn't involved in the starting melee. We were lucky to get through our turns quickly and get after C.B. On the second leg, we were able to fetch the next mark without a tack, but C.B. got a bad shift or bad air and had to tack to make the mark. He lost a couple places in that situation and we successfully held T.C. off for the rest of the race into the finish line.

One item of note is that we did not run aground in Queenstown! I'm pretty sure that in some 20 years of doing this race that this quite possibly is the first time I can say that.

--Tim

Division: ALBERG 30 (5 boats) (top)

Pos	Sail	Boat	Skipper	Rating	Finish Order	Finish Time	Penalty	Pts
1	244	LIN GIN	Tim Williams		1	12:39:45.0		1.0
2	247	ARGO	T C Williams		2	12:41:45.0		2.0
3	501	SOLSTICE	Larry Morris		3	12:44:10.0		3.0
4	57	INFINITY	Charles Currier		4	12:46:02.0		4.0
5	197	LAUGHING GULL	Jonathan Adams		5	12:48:30.0		5.0

Notes

Start Date/Time = Saturday, September 22, 2007 10:10:10.0, Length (nm) = 13.60