Round the Coronados Race
Septemer 22, 2001
Confessions from the skipper
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Since it was my first time at helm without assistance, I thought I'd make sure everyone knew we weren't pussyfooting around - so even prior to the start we went up and hit the committee boat. Sure, the crew told me I probably shouldn't have done that, but what the hell. |
From there, we performed an excellent game of confusing our competition, (and ourselves), by first missing our start - only to discover that it wasn't really our start anyway, but the class before ours. Nevertheless, this gave us an opportunity to practice starting no less than three times. For our first starting sequence, we went ahead of class 3 boats, (we were in
class 2), then thinking that we had simply crossed too soon, we went around the committee boat again to try and catch those boats, and finally we went back again to start a third time when we realized that we were completely in the wrong fleet of boats.
Anyway, after seeing how talented I can be when steering the boat, Steve finally lined us up for our classes real start and made sure we crossed the line behind most of the fleet with about 30 seconds in the bank - just to make sure I wouldn't hit anybody else. Although I think we would have been OK anyway, since they all seemed to be avoiding us anyway
after we did the committee boat thing.
From there, we actually sailed pretty well initially - believe it or not I think for a while we may have actually been leading the fleet by heading off into some good clear air. However, believing this to be simply too good to be true, I decided to see if we could pick up some kelp - just to keep things fair. Sure enough, (although we can't confirm the kelp), we soon began steadily losing boatspeed and position. But just to be sure we kept things challenging, after turning down somewhat we went ahead and blew out our blue .50 spinnaker, (literally shredded it at the top). No problem right? We'll just
raise our Gay Pride kite and let the fleet really know where we really stand?
Ummm, except for a slight problem. We decided that the gaping 2-foot hole in the middle of our .75 rainbow kite was just a little bit too much of a handicap - even for us. So down it comes and Steve and Mike start the taping process. From there, with no spinnaker, we steadily dropped back into the DFL zone, and start breaking out our lunches Although we finally repaired the .75 spinnaker and were able to Round the Coronados with it, we were pretty much out of the running at this point. However, as we came around North Coronado Island and started heading back it did make navigation easier, since all we had to do was follow the large fleet of sailing vessels in front of us. Anyway, Darryl took the helm and we successively started picking off several of the boats ahead. Well that's no good, right? Right! Let's go find some more kelp to keep things on a consistent basis.
Sure enough, we sit back and watch boatspeed steadily decline and we begin getting repassed by some of those boats we'd just sailed by. Although we tried a few times with both the kelp stick and also the weighted lines, we weren't really able to clear much, (although when finally at the dock we did have a nice harvest that we brought back with us).
Well, the good news was I think we all had a good day and with the outstanding breeze, (10-15 knots all day) we ended back at the docks at a decent hour.
- Peter
Full race results at http://www.phrfsandiego.org/CorISLANDrace.html.
