J24 Blog

Filed by: Brian

In case you all haven’t had your eyes glued to the CYC results page for the Tuesday night racing series, here’s a brief recap: We WON!

Of couse, by “won” I mean “didn’t come in dead last”. That’s right, gentlemen, we came in ahead of another boat in last night’s race. Finally.

Read the dramatic blow by blow after the click… 

We raced as a crew of 3 with Chris working Trimmer and Pit, Peter as Driver, and Brian working Mast and Bow. The wind conditions were very light which made our short-handed crew a benefit to us as it kept our total crew weight down.

The first racing start was delayed by 40 minutes or so while the committee boat waited for the wind conditions to improve and settle on a predominant direction before they set the course. We used this time to train Chris to be a genoa and spinnaker trimmer. We also made several test passes by the pin end of the line concentrating on counting down the time it took us to approach the pin and practicing getting far enough past it before tacking upwind.

Turns out the committee boat doesn’t give any warning horns that they are about to start the first race after a 40+ minute delay, so we got the clock started late. We got back down to the line and into our planned position a little later (about 1 boat length behind the line) than we wanted to. However, we were able to get into a nice fat lane between the 2nd and 3rd starboard tacking boats. We crossed the start line ahead of about 3/4 of the fleet. The race was on.

It was set for an S, A, Z, A, C, F course which means all the way to the far upwind mark (A), back toward the start line to round the Z mark, up around A again, then all the way downwind to the far downwind mark( C), then upwind to the finish. We thought it would be a very long race with such a long course in light winds. It was a north-easterly breeze with the A mark set just south of Bill Gates house in Medina.

We kept decent boat speed compared to other boats on the first half of the upwind leg, and made 2 or 3 really smart tacking decisions based on headers and lifts, but also based on our right of way power. We sailed in clear lanes and with predictable crossing situations all the way to the last 3rd of the upwind leg.

The wind really started to get light at this point.

We got out to the starboard layline with about 10 boat lengths to the mark. Other port tack boats were still coming in closer to the mark, but the wind was really dying so it was getting to be a big drifting trafffic jam at the mark. We struggled, along with other boats around us, to keep high enough of a line to maintain room to round. Since everyone was almost stopped at this point, slower boatspeed had shifted us down to lower pointing ability. The effective layline for us and the boats around us was an additional 2-3 lengths farther to starboard now. We made our tacks in clear lanes. And made it cleanly to the mark. We were still ahead of at 10 or more boats at this point in the race.

We got the spinnaker up and flying fairly quickly. We followed other boats out on a wide starboard reach back toward the Seattle side of the lake in search of more wind. After a while the boats on the other tack seemed to be going faster. Our spinnaker slowly alternated between being almost full hanging limp as the light winds dissappeared.

The committee boat signalled a mid-race change in course. They shortened the finish line for the J24′s to what was originally the Z mark and left a skiff to record finishes. The main CB motored south toward the I-90 to set a line for the Snipes/Thistles next race.

We ghosted slowly toward the new finish line with all crew weight to leeward to keep our pathetic spinnaker and main as full as possible. The water was so still you could see the mirror reflection of the other boats around us in the water. It was painfully slow sailing, and would have been a good time to break out beers and take it easy, however… We were still just ahead of one other boat: One of our bottom end of the fleet nemesis – California Girl.

We stayed laser focused trimming and keeping movement to a minimum and slowly ghosted toward the line. After what felt like 30 minutes, we had finally covered the distance between the rounding and the new finish line. A total straighline distance of maybe 100 yards.

The committee skiff driver who had pulled the mark on us before finsishing the prior week (were we really THAT far behind?) gave us a smile and congrats and the committee volunteer blew the whistle and recorded our finish.

We had won. We had finished before another boat.