Team Seacats

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.