Team Seacats

stumbled across this on this morning and while I was trying to figure out where I could keep it to reference it later, I decided to just post it here. I don’t have any idea who Dave Berry is but #3 seemed to be a particularly insightful piece of wisdom!

Pearls of Wisdom
“Fourteen Things That It Took Me Over
50 Years To Learn” by Dave Barry

1. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

2. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be “meetings.”

3. There is a very fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness.”

4. People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

5. You should not confuse your career with your life.

6. Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance.

7. Never lick a steak knife.

8. The most destructive force in the universe is gossip.

9. You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time.

10. You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.

11. There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age eleven.

12. The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above-average drivers.

13. A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person. (This is very important. Pay attention. It never fails.)

14. Your friends love you anyway.

The fat lady has sung and the 2007 Performance Nationals are officially over. Final results and exhaustive numerical particulars will be posted here.

The top five finishers are:

Alex Shafer and Nigel Pitt
Wick Smith and Jake Kohl
Kirk Newkirk and Glenn Homes
Mark Smith and Bert Rice, Jr.
Trey Brown and Chuck Harnden

The Carolinas and FL representing solid, I must say. Fourth place was to go to Brian Lambert but his team withdrew from the event. Congratulations to everyone that showed up for this great week of sailing. I’m going to play in the Gulf for a bit, look for some cool shells, etc., until it gets too terribly cold and then I’m going to post some supersize shout outs and a list of people I love and exactly why they’re so great. Will you be on my list? What I meantersay is that, even though the competition’s over, I hope you’ll come back to read that.

Also, I’m sure that Jake will do an event wrap up from a racer’s perspective as soon as the boat is broken down, the awards are given out, we get settled in back home tomorrow, etc. It is his birthday, after all, so he may kick back with a little rum drink (or four) this evening.

There’s always something interesting happening on the Team Seacats web site. We’re not only active during big races. Jake has other projects, including construction of a one meter RC sailboat and wild sailing related videos he somehow finds online. Hell, he’s even posted photos of a crazy looking caterpillar (Saddleback?) that stung the hee haw out of him while he was mowing grass around a tree. It was waaaay too cute to kill, but not cute enough to let him use the birch tree that I planted as his grocery store, either. He will be re-located to another area soon!

Until later, Take it Easy, as the Eagles would say. (That’s it, girl. Take a theme and then drive it into the ground.)

The call was made to abandon the water until further notice. There won’t be any starts later than 2pm (when there’s actually supposed to be wind) and Fairlie should be making a decision by shortly after 1pm as to whether or not their going to get one in today. Basically, everyone is on standby and hanging out at Kirk’s place, Key Sailing. Their going to grab some lunch upstairs at Surf Burger and hopefully keep me posted as to what’s up.

Everyone was front and center for the 10am start this morning but they’re still tooling around in very light air around what will hopefully become course-worthy in due time. Not a peep over the radio to indicate progress towards being able to set marks as of 11:30am, Pensacola time.

The breeze patterns on the Santa Rosa Sound are incredible…all stripe-y and big holes everywhere. The sun has gone away and if it doesn’t come back to warm up the land on this side then the wind may stay really light; generally considered an advantage to lake sailors who often run races in extremely light air. Bad news for the big boys as well as those with less experience in fluke-y faint breezes. There’s also the chance of showers later on this afternoon.

If they don’t wait for the sea breeze that’s fighting to fill in later on this afternoon, then it will be an extremely challenging race. I think it’s fascinating that tactical decisions in catamaran regattas are so crucial despite the conditions. It’s just that, in heavy air, you pay for miscalculations much more quickly…say, with colossal pitchpoles from a heavy puff as opposed to the feeling of sailing forty days and forty nights to get through a hole as payment for a wrong call or when someone simply shuts off the fan. I don’t really know which is more annoying, and they can both cost you valuable time. At least in the latter, there’s only lots of time for regret, but no carnage.

I still don’t see that any marks have been plopped. So unless they’re moving the course further East then I believe they’re still waiting for a steady breeze at all points on the course.

Holy crapola. For reasons unknown, Nigel/Alex and Wick/Jake are getting a choo-choo tow back toward Key Sailing/home base. Now that I keep looking, though, the rest of the chase boats are bringing everyone else back as well. Whether Fairlie has decided to call off racing for the day or simply postponing for the alleged West shift pick-up between 1 and 2pm is unknown. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear.

They prolly just found out it was Jake’s birthday and planned an early lunch at Hooters, ’cause really…who doesn’t like boobies?

That was a day to rattle the nerves. Early on, the wind was extremely shifty and full of holes. It seemed as though everyone struggled to figure out what was going on. We struggled hard to hang on to a 4th place finish in the first race. We were perhaps a little late figuring it all out as it took us until the end of the 2nd race to realize that the middle of the course was death – you had to pick a corner and be very dedicated to it on each upwind and downwind leg. We suffered with a 12th and knew that, although some other teams were having deep’ish finishes, we couldn’t afford to do that again. While waiting for the next sequence to begin, Wick and I had a very detailed post-mortum examination on that race laying out each execution error and tactical error we made. Based on that, we established a game plan for the next race, Race 11 and decided to try and win the pin and hammer the left corner until we ran out of water to the shoreline. We got a great leap, tacked, and crossed the fleet and got to A mark first. The air was building and we were really starting to see some very sudden puffs coming down the course. I believe Alex and Nigel slipped around us on that downwind leg and we split going back deep to the left side. It held again and we rounded close behind Nigel and Alex and had stretched a good bit on the fleet. We finished comfortably in 2nd.

For the next race, the RC put up a course “5″ which is a short 1.5 lap course with an upwind finish (these are now burned into my memory). This was probably the last race for the day as we could see some pretty substantial weather just offshore of our location. With the short race, Wick and I both knew that the start was going to be crucial and with one minute to go, a hard left shift left us sweating it out to make the pin end of the line but we eeked by and Wick footed us off as I cranked on the mainsheet for all I was worth. It was risky to take the pin and depend on boat speed to get us clear to tack free across the fleet on port especially given that the left shift meant we had even less water to work with before we ran into shore. We were quickly running out of water again and were nervously close to being able to cross the pack leaders when Wick called for the tack. As I usually do, I slid in on my butt to my knees and as the boat healed over and I power slid across the trampoline grabbing my trap line. This time I pushed out hanging onto the trap handle before every hooking in and hooked in once I was out – this had to be a rocket tack…and it was. To my amazement, we cleanly crossed the entire fleet once again and rocketed to A. It looked as if Nigel and Alex were forced to tack early and they got caught in the middle of the course with a little less pressure but they were in 2nd lower than us but slightly ahead on that tack. Wick and I had incredible speed and were actually able to extend our lead as we rolled over Nigel and Alex (that one is going into my most memorable moments!) and Wick let out a good long distance belly laugh to taunt Nigel (we are all very good friends and it’s not typical for us to pass them in such a manner)….this may have been a mistake.

We had a good lead on everyone as we rounded A and started to setup for the one spinnaker run. The wind was really up at this point and we made a conservative turn downwind and I hoisted the kite and we took off like a cheetah on crack cocaine. Nigel and Alex were still in it and after C mark rounding, we felt obligated to cover out to the right. We held out as long as we felt comfortable, saw that we were on layline (though expecting some very shifty stuff) and tacked. We felt that we were too far away to directly cover them at the time. As we sailed out to the left and tacked back to the finish line, I could see that N&A had plenty of speed and we seemed to be getting lighter. Suddenly, Wick and I were in a vacuum and we were tea-bagged into the water as our 18knot wind completely evaporated! I clawed back on board the boat and desperately started shifting gears for the lighter air to power up the boat. We were still single trapped while Nigel and Alex had spray flying from their leeward hull and pointed to the finish line. OOOOoooohhh the agony! We finally got back into some double trapped breeze and were trying to will “speed” as much as humanly possible. About 6 feet shy of the finish line, we had to take their sterns and wick jammed the boat up hoping our forward momentum would get us there quicker. It almost worked but we lost first place to them by 3 feet. Well done Nigel and Alex!

We had a good day today and were again successful at doing a little disaster recovery. A change in the scoring may move the 3rd place team of Kirk Newkirk and Glen Holmes a few points closer to us. We go into the last day with a 7 or 8 point lead over 3rd. Kirk is not only a local here but is a catamaran dealer on this gorgeous body of water and owns Key Sailing. We need to be really attune to determining the wind patterns early and before it becomes a problem. The scores need to be in our head and calculated as we go so we understand what has to be done to hold 2nd place. Kirk and Glen are not slouches and I’m nervous!

PS, when we hit the beach, The Chuck asked me what we did in that fourth race to get such a jump…I was confused as I thought we did three races. I asked Wick for confirmation and we he chuckled “yeah we did four”, I said, “Look, it’s my job to know how many laps we’ve done and are supposed to do and I’m not screwing that up again. It doesn’t matter how many races we’ve done!”.