Team Seacats

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.