Team Seacats

I had a last minute business trip to attend to and a couple other things to sort out. I’m sailing with Tad from Velocity Sailing this weekend in the Bare What You Dare regatta on Lake Keowee, SC on the F18 and should have a post or two here. As far as the boat work goes, we should be back up to full bore next week. We’re slated to go to the paint booth weekend after next to spray the bottoms and after that it’s all downhill.

Sorry for the late post – I drove the 8.5 hours back from Pensacola last night and got in a little before 1am.

There’s certainly some starting practice drills in our future. On the second day of the Performance Mid-Winter Championship hosted by Key Sailing in Pensacola Beach, FL, we needed to defend our one point lead in order to remain in first place. On Saturday we had great boat speed and were able to come back from several slow starts to high finish positions. We lined up for the first start of the first race on Sunday and immediately were in trouble. The wind shifted nearly 20 degrees and fortunately the race committee abandoned the sequence and put up the AP (postpone) flag. For the second start attempt, I put us too close to the line in an undefendable position and Mark Murray pushed us up and over the line before the start gun. We had to stop the boat, let the boats pass us, and return to dip the line. It’s hard to stay positive when something like that happens but we seemed to have a lot of “come-back juju” on Saturday so we tried to keep a positive outlook and kept pushing. We ran on the right side of the course toward the middle and tacked on several large shifts and before we knew it, we were in 3rd at the first A mark with McDonald in first just ahead. We barely edged out the 2nd place boat by the time we got to A and McDonald maintained his lead for the run back downwind. We were getting better height back up to Amark and John tacked to cover. The shift continued and he found himself on the wrong side of a direction change. We passed him by the next A mark rounding and held the lead for the finish. Unfortuantely, for the next several races, we had bad starts again and our “come back juju” was starting to run out as the wind continued to become spottier and shiftier. John beat us in the next two races both times with Tom Paoli between us leaving us now in second behind John seperated by two points going into the 9th and last race. We had to beat John and put two boats between us in order to tie our score with him. I believe we would have won the tie breaker because we had more first place finishes. David called the start this time and for the first time all day, we started near the front of the pack and in clean air. However, we found ourselves on the wrong side of several shifts and struggling to maintain contact with McDonald who was sailing a brilliant race. John beat us squarely again and deservedly took the regatta. 2nd place is still a stellar result and David and I are very pleased to have performed so well. I’ve got some photos from the racing on Sunday and will post them tonight.

We’re in first place by only 1 point at the moment. John McDonald trails us with 9 points and third place has 13 points. They’ve been very consistent where we have tended to have highs and lows. Tommorow, they intend to run three races (starting at 10am) and we need try to stay with McDonald to get ahead and cover. The sea breeze kicked in today at 12:30 – we’ll need to keep a close eye on the forecast tomorrow because we have a better idea now about what happens when the wind reverses here. I hope we can hang on as this is a fairly prestigious event.

David Mosley and I are sailing this weekend in the Performance Catamaran Mid-Winter event. Because the F18 fleet evaporated when the previous week’s Alter Cup boat changed from the new Nacra F18 to the Nacra 20, we decided to charter one of the Alter Cup boats used in the previous week. Racing started this morning with 12 Nacra 20s and 3 Nacra F17s in a moderate 10knot northerly breeze that eventually died as the sea breeze started to circulate (the sea breeze is a southerly breeze and they cancelled each other out). We got caught at the start line unprepared for the wind shadow provided by the large trawler in use for the committee boat. We came back from last to a 4th place finish as the wind died, then started to build from the south. The race committee moved the course for the new breeze and started a race. We saw that the line was a little slanted leaving the ‘pin end’ favored and went for a pin end start on starboard. We shot up the course and tacked to port in a very fresh 12knot breeze. We crossed underneath one Nacra 20 while the rest of the fleet was climbing up to us. We rounded A mark, David set the kite, and we shot down the course with David manhandling the kite from the trapeze. We managed to cross the boat in front of us on starboard and never looked back. The next race went the same except that we reached A mark behind two Nacra 20s. We were again able to maintain excellent speed downhill and pass both of them to take our 2nd bullet. For the next start, it was obvious that a few boats were hoping to put us back and we did suffer a little by not defending a good start position. But, again, we fought back hard and after two laps we finished in 2nd. The last race got terribly fluky as the sea breeze died. I had lost my wrist watch GPS somewhere when the pins broke out of it (I found both pins and they are not bent). That left us without a starting watch and I had to guess at the countdown. I had hoped to put us near the committee boat so we might have a chance to overhear a countdown….but that didn’t work and John McDonald skillfully slammed the door on us at the committee boat leaving us stuck again in that giant wind shadow. The wind continued to die and we were the last boat to A mark by almost 5 minutes. We took a flyer and the gamble paid off as we had pressure while most did not. We had caught the back of the fleet by the time we got back down the the c-mark gate. Going back uphill, the wind proved to be very shifty and we set the spinnaker at least twice but we managed to out-luck several boats and climb up to a 6th place finish. We’ve got to head back to the regatta site for dinner…but we did see enough of the results to see that we are in first place! We’re going to be pretty nervous setting out tomorrow and I think we’ll have to really reconsider our light air strategy as we’ll be racing sometime when the sea breeze switches on.

I’ve been operating this week as the U.S. SAILING Multihull Vice-Chair and will be taking over as Chair next year filling some pretty big shoes! This year’s event was spectacular – the racers were supplied with 10 new Nacra 20 catamarans and experienced many different weather conditions. I was able to acquire a series of movies from Patrick Pettengill and have linked to them here. I’ll have some more to link here soon.  More information about the event can be found at the U.S. SAILING site HERE.