Over early

During the season I have been reading books about racing tips, and we could sure need some. They have all talked about aggressive starts and that if you don’t go over the line early then you aren’t pushing enough. For the past few races we have been trying to aggressively position ourselves in the race. Last night we succeeded. Since we were short handed – Yolande, Morgan, Joe and myself - we were not able to put anyone on the bow to count down the distance to the start line so we had to play a bit of a guessing game. We had been timing runs from different positions to the start and noticed that the rest of the boats were preparing for a long starboard tack run to the start line. Cunningly, or so we thought, we decided to circle near the committee boat, sail along the line on a beam reach and push up into the wind with about 15 seconds to go as the other boats approached. It worked perfectly except we should have waited to push up at 10 seconds.  The horn sounded twice, the second horn to say there was a false start, then over the radio we heard “sail 495”.

Now we had to get back behind the line and start again, we loosened the sails to slow down and had to wait for the other boats to pass before we could turn. Once we heard the radio call “Clear” we started over. The course was a simple three times around a windward leeward course.  We started near Battery Wharf and headed over to green Buoy #13 and back. Spinnaker deployment was excellent and it was clear we were even catching boats. We estimated that we lost 3 minutes with the false start so it will be interesting to see how the results come in. 

On our last lap we noticed that the fireboat was out by #13 with her water jets turned on. Luckily for us, they were turned off as we rounded the mark. We think that a captain of one of the ferry’s was retiring and that this is a traditional celebration that accompanies retirement.

This weekend off to Australia, Japan and Korea. However, Morgan is being trained in docking and he and Joe will be the core of the team for the next two weeks. If you see them take Prairie Gold out, don’t call the police, they have my permission.