J24 Blog

In the final evening of the Interim Series, we narrowed our last place position in the standings to only trailing by 4 points.

Our normal trimmer, Bill, was out on vacation, but Nate was back from a week away for work commitments. So that moved me back from foredeck to trimmer for the night, Nate into his place on foredeck, Chris as mast man, and Luke came out for the second time racing with us and took the pit position.

Peter and I arrived early to do some dockside repairs to the spinnaker (yes… sadly, the NEW ONE…) that occured during racing last week. We’ve upgraded ourselves from black sail repair tape on a green spinnaker that we used last year, to white on white this year. We’re so uptown now.

Light winds alternated with big glassy patches on the lake as we drifted out from the marina at 5:20 or so. Enough breeze filled in to allow some practice tacks and a spinnaker raise and douse. Everything was ready. Then we waited. And waited. 6:05 came and went. The committee skiff seemed to be trolling the lake using marks for bait.

Finally the course was set and the first race got off.

We intended to line up for our standard “opposite side from the clump” starting tactic. We didn’t get far enough away from the crowd in time and ended up getting rolled by a couple of boats and eating dirty air for what seemed like an hour. We bailed out and cut across the back of the fleet on port.

No fiascos ensued through the rest of the first race. We ended up early on the layline on the upwind beat, and seemed to make the wrong choice about which way to split around the restricted start line on the way downwind. However, we managed to catch up to the other boats trailing in at the end, and finished DFL, but only by about 20 seconds after the boat in front of us.

For those of you playing along at home: Please note the shift in units of measure from 20 boatlengths behind to 20 seconds behind. Yes, you read that right.

Click to hear the triumphant second race

In the second race we got a good start. We sailed the middle of the course and made some good choices about keeping lanes and making decisions early. The wind was getting lighter and lighter throughout the race. Coming downwind everyone nearly came to a standstill for a point in the race. Luckily we had set ourselves up to be able to sail a pretty wide reach with the spinnaker and were able to keep it filled and keep the boat moving.

All the boats who reached the leeward turn were stalled out and drifting within 2 boat lengths of the mark. We saw a new breeze filling in behind us and worked out our game plan. We knew we’d have speed coming into the mark and have to deal with the other stalled boats that were were still slowly ghosting around the mark.

We reached out to the layline, jibed, raised the jib, dropped the pole, and doused the spinnaker, without fiascos. A few boats were drifting wide of the mark, and only just starting to rebuild speed with the new breeze, but were getting shadowed by the other J24s and a bunch of Thistles coming around the buoy. We made the decision to go inside (see last week’s right of way / rule 18 discussion) since it was clear that these boats wouldn’t have the momentum to head up and shut the door.

We cruised through without incident and headed back upwind. We held the ground we had gained by passing boats at the rounding and held a decent line to the upwind mark. The committee shortened the course to end between the upwind mark and a skiff.

For the second week in a row we found ourselves sailing the right side of the course on starboard to the finish line while the rest of the nearby boats reached out left. We cruised in ever lightening winds through the finish line ahead of 4 other boats still slowly coming into the line from port.

A tie for our best finish ever, and finally a complete race (actually two) with no fiascos.

Update – Peter pointed out to me that we finished ahead of 5 other boats, not just 4, making this our best finish ever.