Team Seacats

Today was just a nice day of sailing.  The wind was up at times to maybe 20 but most of the day was just a great day of sailing.  I messed us up at the start with the spinnaker up and sailing over shallow water with the boards up and the rudders kicked up, I started to loose the helm and the boat rounded up when I called for the spinnaker to be released.  We survived the initial gust, but the second got us and, out of concern for the mast, I was hesitant to release the mainsheet with the spinnaker still up (although it was flogging).  Frank’s intuition was probably correct, he wanted to oversheet the spinnaker, which probably would have balanced the helm more and potentially saved us.  We flipped in about a foot of water.  Once we righted the boat, we set out to try and catch the fleet.  We started to really gain ground on Mike and Dave on the F18 and Team Accelerated Chaos.  We made a navigational error half way back that really cost us some time and we lost contact with the fleet from there.  We finished in 5th place overall.

Some photos courtesy of Mike Hill …