The 5 circles arching across the top of the face change from blue to red as the minutes of the starting sequence ticks down to the final horn. With this bad boy on your wrist how could you not be in clear air, at maximum speed, with a nice buffer defended to port?

Ok, so it costs about as much as our boat, but still. It even says “racing” right on it. Racing. They even printed it in red.

In case you feel the need for other features beyond those two:

It’s available in Titanium to keep weight down. (See the “how much does your paint weigh?” posting for some context on this issue)

It’s a self winding watch so as long as you are moving you are keeping it charged. For the LONG coma-like hangover after an afternoon-evening-night in the Rum Sponsor’s tent at a regatta, it’s got a 44 hour reserve power – so when you finally arise from the dead, scrape the fuzz off your teeth and prepare to head out for day two of racing you won’t be able to blame your watch for making you late.

Lastly, it looks fantastic and will provide one more (perhaps the only) reason for your fellow one-design racers to pull your ass out of the drink if you forgot to latch your lazarrettes and are watching your J24 win the race to the bottom.

The Omega Seamaster Racing Chronometer. Please buy me one.

Fortunately, due to the dual constraints of one-design rules and budget limitations, I’ve gotten better about ignoring most of the “stuff” that I come across.

But this latest piece of cool gear is a must have.

Set aside whatever opinions you have about Team Alignhi, the America’s Cup in general, and the spate of protests and lawsuits arising out of this year’s event. Check out the beautiful piece of equipment that came out of the Team Alignhi partnership with Wenger, maker of the orignal Swiss Army Knife.

It doesn’t seem to be available at any retail outlets locally yet, but can be ordered via the Alignhi Knife Website online. The site also features an animation of the various tools and a video of the TV spot for the product.

I’ll be ordering mine ASAP. I’m certain it’ll make our boat better, faster, cooler than before. Maybe with a Swiss and Italian accent, as well.

That wraps up our season of Tuesday night racing for the year. I feel like we improved a great deal this year, more than our standings in the rankings reflect. The balance of “is it the sailors or the boat” continued to shift as our tactics and handling skills improved over the season.

I’ll write up a detailed schedule of the boat optimization plans we have for the off season, but in short we’re going to fill the various thru-hulls and defunct electronics that we’ve been uselessly dragging through the water this season, and sand and re-coat the bottom.

We’ll probably have the boat out of the lake for a month or two, then put it back in for some wintertime camping and cruising adventures. A weekend circumnavigation of Vashon Island is already in the works for Columbus Day…

Photo courtesy of Sean Trew at Pacific Fog Photography

Photo courtesy of Sean Trew at Pacific Fog Photography

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…

Unless the mast has been knocked down by the enormous motor-boat tsunami over Seafair weekend, we should be in good shape.

Check back for the Race Report on Wedneday.

8-10 knot winds and only 20% chance of precip? Glorious conditions…

It’s summer. There have been some crappy windless nights, that I’ve crewed. Also (reportedly) a few windy nights while I was busy at work on on vacation…

Currently it’s Whidbey Island Race Week so both the Leschi Series and Duck Dodge are on hiatus.

Back to the action next week, I promise.

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.