J24 Blog

Emails and phone calls and emails and phone calls and emails and phone calls and who’s in this week? Damn it’s been nothing but vacation schedules and work conflicts and weren’t we supposed to be racing the boat this summer? Ok we’ve got almost all the regulars back and Travis is actually threatening to leave Redmond early enough to get out and race for the first time this summer.

I arrive at the parking lot later than I wanted, hopefully Peter is setting up the boat.

The weekly quick change from work clothes into sailing gear between the doors of my car in the parking lot starts. With all the listserv traffic on the J24 Fleet recently about rebuilding and repairs of the Leschi dock, how has no one mentioned the repaving needed in the parking lot? The gravel under bare feet hurts. It’s totally distracting. It’s certainly going to impact our performance tonight. (note the early scraping around for excuses)

I have a quick conversation with a Thistle sailor in the parking lot who’s hoping the wind doesn’t build to the forecasted 20-ish knots since they are double handing tonight. It’s doesn’t look like it will, should just be a decent gentle breeze, I say, thus guaranteeing we’ll have gale force pressure. I also leave my jacket in the car to lock in the deal with the weather gods for it to be miserable and overpowering.

Peter has put Travis to work scrubbing the boat bottom when I arrive. Nice. I start working on tuning the rig tensions up for the increasing breeze. Chris and Bill show up and we’re ready to push off.

We get in one set and douse and arrive at the line. I’m on bow, Chris as mast, Travis in the pit, Bill on trim, Peter driving.

There’s a new flag flying on the committee boat tonight. Is it the life jackets required? A quick check to the reference card….no. Dark background with 3 vertical yellow bars. It’s not on the card and no-one knows what it’s for. (foreshadowing…)

We get a decent start in the first race, find outselves in our normal crowd of the fleet at the first rounding, and deal pretty well with the heavy pressure on the spinnaker downwind. Where is the downwind mark? It’s an ACAC course so it should be a yellow. Oh, I see two yellows down there. Ummm the other one must be the yellow from the finish line and it just looks farther right? Right? Ok, there are definitely two yellow marks down there… Meanwhile we are blasting downwind at about 6 knots and all the other boats know exactly what is going on and are setting up early for all sorts of nice strategic approaches to the mark(s).

Good news / bad news : we’re close enough to the back that we can see the lead boats approach the downwind mark(s). Turns out that there are indeed two and our fleet has now started using a gate approach for the downwind turn. Boats are pretty evenly splitting at the marks some choosing to round the left and sail back the west side of the lake and some taking the right and the east side.

Ok. There’s usually the stray email or two about someone needing crew on the fleet listserv, and maybe a rallying call for an out of town regatta, but there has been zero chatter about a changeup in the standard course settings that we’ve seen for two years…

We figure it out, sail pretty well (for us) and finish last, but fairly close. Somehow Peter managed to get the boat to do a donut instantly after crossing the finish line to clear other boats. I think the centrifugal force nearly threw off some of our crew. I’m sure it looked super cool from the other boats.

Second and third races go similarly. Without the finish line brodie, fortunately. We managed to come in before Djinn in race two and just (JUST) behind them in race 3.

It was a terrific and fun night of racing. Maybe the few weeks away or the struggle to pull it back together for this week, but it was really energizing. No major mistakes, even with the strong wind conditions.

Looking forward to next week already…