8/11/05 - 10:48pm - The redress hearing was heard and the race is still tossed out.  A lot of people are not happy but we're over it.  While it would be spectacular to have that 5th place finish back...it's not coming.  Now, onto the racing.

rhythm  The first race was lightish winds and we managed to have a high teens placing.  It was difficult racing and we didn't do terribly well off the start.  It was a pretty uneventful race. 

We had a pretty bad finish in the 2nd race today because I choose to lower the sail before the start because the top batten was loose. As soon as the sail hit the trampoline, the horn went off! We tanked a 34th place finish because we were terribly late to the line.

So we got mad - real mad. We've not been high performers in 12 knots of breeze before and while we're still not sure what we have done differently we had two top 6 finishes in the last two races.  We started each race by going left starting about 3/4 the way toward the pin end of the line...getting clear air. David worked the main sheet and chastised me anytime I started pinching. We weren't pointing as well as the other boats around us but it wasn't hurting us because we had great speed. We banged the corner and headed for A. When we got there, we had a few boats on our hip and two boats tacked in front clear - Jacques and Greg and Nigel and Alex! We tacked onto port about 4 boat lengths away from A mark. Two boats tucked in under us at a - they may have not had overlap at the two boat length circle but I wasn't concerned. We reached the short distance to the offset mark and David made the most beautiful spinnaker set you've ever seen. We had 30 yards on the other boats by the time they were moving with only Jacques and Shafer ahead. We held this around the course and finished third - elated and hooping it up over the finish line!

The next race went similarly. The start was congested and a lot of collisions took place. Mike Krantz and David Lennard had a boat drive over their stern pushing them ahead on our right without steerage when about 4 boats drove under us within 8 inches of each other with every one screaming "up up up!". We couldn't hedge David and Mike because they had a boat impaled over their rear beam and we had another boat ride a bow over a wave and land on top of our rudder arm. We heard the sound of gel coat scraping away and "thump thump thump" as the bumper boat command took over. A quick inspection of the rudder reveled nothing but a new white stripe and David wisely advised me to forget it - 22 seconds to go! We ran down the line accelerating away from this fray. We started with a Tiger on our windward hip and clean air. We footed slightly and outran our windward Tiger to get clear. Nigel and Alex had gotten a terrific start and were barely within shouting distance ahead. We tacked for A mark and cleared all the starboard tackers behind. We round A in fourth and held that position, slightly distancing the boats behind us for the next two laps. While approaching the last A-mark rounding, we watched as Alex and Nigel caught the anchor rode on the A mark and stopped. Trying to focus on boat speed we both agreed to disregard it and stay focused. David then let me call the layline to A and I left us tacking pretty tight to the mark. We pinched up when we got there to leave some extra room for the anchor line. Turns out that we didn't leave ~quite~ enough room as we snagged the mark too! It was anchored FIRMLY and David and I both lost our balance on the trapeze nearly capsizing the boat. David ran and raised the board quickly clearing us within seconds. As we were speeding up and heading for the offset with two boats fairly close behind, a third (who's heading for A) says "Wanna see turns!". We jibed at the offset and realized we have room to do our turn. We hammered the quickest damn 360 degree penalty turn you've ever seen but the two boats behind us JUST barely got around us before we got moving again. We held our position downwind. We could have gone more into attack mode by David going on the Trapeze wire but I was more concerned about driving deep and getting to the finish line safely - 6th place not being too bad for us Carolina boys.

We're not sure where we are in the standings and while the 3rd and 6th place finishes today were excellent, the 30 something we got earlier will pretty much offset these successes.  We feel good, however, that we've been able to demonstrate some ability to stay near the front on a couple of repeat occasions.

8/10/05 - 11:41pm - I'm not going to go into a whole lot of detail because I'm putting together much of this from reports from various unconfirmed sources.  However, we have filed to reopen the hearing for race 6 being tossed.  Twenty one teams (yes, that's  almost 2/3 of the fleet) have signed the redress form to speak that they disagree that race 6 should be thrown out.  The initial hearing is scheduled for 8:30am tomorrow morning but I suspect that this is going to drag out for quite a while - days or even months.  Basically, (and this is my interpretation from what the judges explained to us this evening), the race was thrown out because the 7 competitors that filed for redressed provided evidence that there was less than 5 knots of wind at the start of the race.  Mind you, none of us have wind instruments besides tell tales and direction indicators on our boats.  Naturally we disagree and feel that the hearing was unfair because it was closed and no other testimony, outside of the 7 teams that filed for redress, was heard.  I don't know exactly what happened inside that room because we were not allowed access but you bet we'll be there in the morning!

8/10/05 - 6:45pm - The protest was apparently upheld and the race was thrown out.  Obviously, we are substantially disappointed...we worked hard to earn that 5th place.

8/10/05 - 6:19pm - The Race Committee only got in one race today due to lightish winds.  We waited for several hours, had lunch, and finally got the signal to go at about 1pm.  The first attempt at a start had the majority of the fleet over the line early which resulted in a general recall (again - I think it's the 6th recall this week).  David and I had a pretty good start lined up but I felt pretty good about having another whack at it.  The next start with a minute to go, I ran the boat up a little to high trying to slow down our approach to the line and ended up pinned in irons.  I was panicked but David pointed out that nobody was gunning for us and that we would  be OK...then he followed up with..."we're over the line!".  The race committee had the "I" flag flying which meant that if you were over early, you could no longer just duck the line and restart.  You would have to round one end of the line and restart resulting in keeping people from being quite so aggressive on the line.  We backed the boat up and footed off for speed at the gun in almost a text book maneuver and had a terrific start!  With a light 5 knots, we raced upwind chasing the lead 8 or 10 boats.  We picked up a couple of spots before rounding A mark and set our spinnakers.  We passed two more boats on the downwind leg and rounded C mark in 5th place.  I saw David look away from the spinnaker looking behind us and chastised him for looking away.  He remarked that it's a beautiful sight and I looked back at 33 boats a fair distance behind us with a broad array of colored spinnakers set chasing us to C mark - it was a beautiful thing (and not just the fact that they were behind us)! 

The next upwind leg was pretty uneventful and as we approached A mark, we realized that the race committee was finishing us there.  We crossed in 5th place and were elated!  We're primarily lake sailors and we sail very very often in light and shifty wind - we know how to handle it.  All the boats in front of us were highly skilled sailors who have a lot of experience sailing in light and shifty winds on lakes. 

Now, the evil part....there's a protest hearing taking place now where several of the top teams are trying to have this race thrown out because of not enough wind.  Obviously, I would beg to differ but I'll profess to being a bit nervous about it.  I've been assured that there's not much for them to qualify this file for redress but none the less, I think it's a little weak on the sportsmanship side.  They've been behind locked doors for over an hour and as time goes by, I'm getting more nervous.  We worked hard for that 5th today in a race that was fair....everyone had the same opportunities.

8/9/05 - 10:45pm we had a somewhat disappointing day today in that we did not get good starts but we still hung on for moderate finishes.  Again, we had two extremes when a squall line came through just before the start of the first race.  We started racing with the wind howling 18 to 20 knots.  I put us too close to the start line early and we were left with no room to accelerate before the gun and several boats rolled on top of us.  We were trapped there for what felt like an eternity!  The swells were really beginning to roll in with an occasional set that was approaching 3 to 4'.  We ended up going way out left and tacking back for the mark.  We got the mark just ahead of our group of boats coming from the left while a train of starboard boats were heading to the mark (we did not have right of way over the starboard boats).  With the wind and the waves so heavy we felt it was better to slow down the boat to pick a hole that was approaching in the starboard train.  About that time, a monster wave washed over the boat sweeping David and I off our feet.  I did an "Amazing Flying Bambini" impression as I sailed off the back of the boat clear into the air while still hooked into my trapeze line.  With boats zipping all around us to try and avoid us in our sudden deceleration, I came swinging back to the boat and was able to plant both feet squarely on the rear beam.  I clamored over the rudder cross bar while David was resorting out the boat.  We tacked and rounded A mark glad to still be right side up!

The Race went on with many playing it conservatively.  We wanted to heat the boat up downwind but constantly ran into other boats that were playing it safe running nearly dead downwind.  Spinnaker runs on these boats in heavy wind and waves is a very sensitive thing and while we may technically have rights to make these boats change their angle to get out of our way, it could lead to calamity as it could cause them to capsize on top of us.  Had we not gotten so far behind early, we probably would not have to deal with these boats but we played it safe and didn't push the issue and finished in 17th as the wind was dying.

The RC managed to fire off another race in the lightish breeze.  David and I were mostly single trapezed through this race but again had a terrible start because we got to the line too late and were stuck behind a bunch of boats.  Starting strategies are very different for light, medium, and heavy air and while we feel very confident in our medium air starting ability, our light and heavy needs some review.  At any rate, we had a decent race until we snagged the offset mark meaning we had to do a 360 degree turn to exonerate ourselves.  We did this quickly with the spinnaker up the whole time but it cost us heavily.   We eventually finished in 24th place.  The folks at www.adventureonline.tv put an onboard camera on our boat for race 5 today - check out the footage at www.f18naonline.com (choose Race 5 onboard footage).

We stopped for lunch at about noon and the RC called us back out to the course for a 1:30 start.  We all launched and got to the starting area as the sequence was beginning.  With about 2 minutes to go, the RC cancelled the sequence and sent us back to shore as some additional major storms were headed our way.  We got back to the beach safely in time to put our boats away and racing was eventually cancelled for the rest of the day.  As far as standings go, we remain in 18th place with potential to move up if we can get our starts sorted out.

8/8/05 - 10:45pm we got a sneak peak at the results and we're currently sitting in 18th place!  Considering that we tanked the first race with a 34th place finish we're doing O.K.  After 4 races we get to drop our worst finish from our total so if we can be consistent tomorrow with our 15th and 13th place finish later today we'll move up a bit!  We're happy.

8/8/05 - 6:13pm; Today saw conditions from 5 to 10 to a nuclear squal (30knots?).  Team Seacats had a great day. There were several general recalls due to a huge pack of boats being across the line early.  We got some pretty solid starts but suffered badly in the first race bringing up the rear in something like 34th spot.  David and I agreed that he would setup the boat for the next race and after some pretty tightly coordinated effort on our part, we wiggled into a great starting position with speed at the gun right on the line and 20' away from the committee boat.  David's changes to the jib helped us point considerably better and we found ourselves winning the first crossing with the entire fleet in 1st place.  By the time we got to A-mark, we had slid back to 4th because of some slow tacks due to the mainsheet cleat angle too high (uncleatable  from the trapeze).  We continued to slide a little bit through the rest of the race and we believe we finished somewhere around 12th.  On the last lap, we noticed that the sky was getting pretty black as the wind continued to build.  After crossing the finish line and heading back for the beach (we didn't wait too long to see if we were to go to shore) a huge squall unleashed on us with some pretty incredible winds.  We tried to furl the jib (but strangely, these things never work properly when you need them the most) and it ended up in a nasty knot but was better than nothing.  We drove safely into the beach before it got REALLY nasty.  Our sails were flogging relentlessly as we tried to keep the boat right side up on the beach and we ended up stuffing the mainsail under the trampoline while we fooled with the jib (as it was really taking a beating).  The squall finally passed and we pulled the mainsail out into the surf to roll it and try to wash off most of the sand.  We were fortunate to not break anything!  Others were less fortunate and several boats capsized violently and a lot of bruising took place and a lot of sail battens were broken.

After the mayhem settled down again, the R/C decided to get us out there again for another go.  After two more general recalls they finally got a race started.  We had a decent start and were grooving with full speed when the mainsheet slipped out of David's hands (we had just made an adjustment to the cleat angle of the mainsheet) which tea-bagged us.  The boats on our windward hip quickly rolled us and we were forced to tack for clear air.  We lost a bit going out to the right but started grappling back both upwind and downwind to finish somewhere around 15th place.  There were several OCS.

We should have some photos up later tonight.

8/08/05 - 10:54am - David and I have a camera on the boat today so be sure to check www.f18naonline.com tonight.  It's not one of the wireless camera but is a digital camera - they'll edit the footage tonight!  Stay tuned!

8/08/05 - Uploaded some photos in the photo gallery of boat setup.  Will get some of the beach this morning.