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.

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.

Race 1: The wind was big before the start and maybe because of this we tore the spinnaker during pre-start warm up. Chris took the lead and set about with the rest of the crew repairing a 2 foot tear on the starboard edge of the chute. About this time the warning horn went off, unbeknownst to us. So happily we sailed towards the start with repaired spinnaker stowed, and lo and behold the race had started. Amazingly we were able to start with good speed and not far back. GOOD: boat speed! In side by side sailing with many boats throughout the night, including luminaries such as Mouse Trap, we were able to keep pace. Perhaps the rig was better tuned for the conditions this time. The pointing was not quite as good in some cases, but this may have been due to variable wind conditions, and certainly due somewhat to driver error (that’s me). But we made up for our improved boats speed with other issues. For instance, we kept missing laylines (throughout the night) and having to do tacks and turns to make up for it, so… BAD: Judging the laylines, or laying the mark. I believe these are two separate issues, which I’ll detail below in our “Areas that need attention” section. Honestly most of the race is a blur, except for one point that needs special attention. UGLY: during the second beat, the race committee removed the windward mark, before we rounded it! We’ve been blackballed. More on this later.

Race 2: Excellent start, almost. First off, we failed to get the course. Secondly we missed the warning signal. We finally punched the clock at 1 minute, and were able to realize that it was one minute to go. This turned out to be ok as we had been loitering around the pin end of the line. GOOD: We came in on port, into the teeth of the fleet, and we tacked over just as the horn sounded. UGLY: And we ran into (actually slid sideways into) the pin! Ouch! Then we did our penalty turn and tacked over to cross the line, realized we weren’t going to lay the line, and had to dip the line again! This time we went off on port. Amazingly we started better than many boats! This was tantalizingly close to a perfect start. Next week! Race 2 was notable for the race committee having set an offset mark that required a reach before the run. All was going OK, even though once again we missed the layline at the windward mark, and due to another boat being close enough that I couldn’t pull the trigger on a tack and duck, we ended up doing a turn at the mark. We actually caught up to the end of the fleet on the run and meet up with our old friends Djinn and California girl. We thought the next leg was to the finish so we sailed towards the line, as we neared the line we realized the rest of the fleet was on the second beat. By this time we were in a different wind system and they were gone. But we were not done. BIZARRE: The wind shifted over 90 degrees to the right and everyone hoisted spinnakers (on the “beat”). We happened to be on a beam reach all the way to the mark and were closing fast. But then the wind died. Anyway, we did finish that race (last), but not according to the posted results. I’m not sure why we didn’t get the credit. Blackballed!

Areas that need attention:

Pre-start routine: We need to sail past the committee boat on starboard to let them know we are racing. Then maybe they wont pull the course out from under us. And we need to write down the course. There are many other elements of the pre-start that we need to incorporate into our routine, but there should no be no excuse for omitting these two.

Laylines: There are two issues. The first is the obvious judging of the laylines. This is difficult when at a great distance due to wind shifts, and of course, the great distance. We should stay away from laylines until we are close enough to judge them correctly, and so that we don’t get knocked of the line by a wind shift. The second issue is leeway. When we tack close to marks we need to nail the tacks so that the sails fill and we go forward instead of sideways. We also can’t pinch. This is why we bumped into the pin on our almost perfect start (but bad tack). This leads into:

Pinching: This is bad on me. I would venture that we don’t pinch much normally when sailing upwind. It is when we are trying to make a mark, or we are in denial that our true course is so low (relative to where we want to go). A perfect example is when we were going to cross a starboard tacker near the layline but then lost momentum and had to crash tack. I now believe we couldn’t cross because I was pinching in an effort to get above starboard tacker I believe that if I had sailed a proper course we would have crossed no problem (but close). This is my big point of focus in the races to come.

Tacking: The jib is not coming over fast enough. This is often due to the ropes getting hung on someone or tangled in other ropes. It is also due to the timing between the helm and the trimmer. Both of these should improve with time on the water.

Rope management: This is a major hangup (no pun intended). And I’m confident it will also improve with time on the water. I also think a new spinnaker pole (without bridles) is warranted. But…

Gear: We might need to think about a new spinnaker.