Well Circe survived her first race of the 2014 season. It was a very fluky and pretty weird night.
Trevor introduced Mike to the crew and decided to join us as the light weather looked no fun for an RS400. As Mike has no sailing and no racing experience we gave him observer status for this first race to get a better sense of how things worked before throwing him in the deep end. So the crew consisted of Kathleen and Nansi on foredeck, Susan on the main, Trevor and Pam on the jib, and yours truly in his usual motivational role. Ryan got caught in the traffic nightmare that the QEW/Gardner has become this summer and could not make it.
But it was a bit of a weird race for Mike's first. Graham set up a buoys to starboard triangular course with a buck from the city to the eastern gap in a very light south east wind only to have the wind shift to the east during the starting sequence of the first fleet so that you couldn't even run the line of starboard tack let alone cross it. So it was a port tack start close to the committee boat. Very interesting and very weird. But Circe's start was near brilliant (the Skipper says modestly) tight to the committee boat moving well with only Alpha Omega ahead of us (Eric's start was brilliant). Division 1 and 2 starts are combined this year.
So we crossed the starting line first in our division well ahead of Blue Streak, Abracadabra, and Veloce and stayed ahead the first weather leg in shifty lights winds. But the two faster boats, Blue Streak and Abracadabra, got by us on the light broad reach to the leeward mark but Veloce was half a leg behind. But we were still close enough to the blue and yellow boats to have them comfortably on corrected time. Then it all went to rat shit.
The entire fleet fell into a hole half way down the third leg and the boats behind came up on their own little wind. So, we got to watch helplessly as Veloce steadily closed the gap and sailed over top of us in her own 2 knot beam reach breeze so that when the breeze did come up for us it swung close hauled and we were in Veloce's dirt all the way to the mark and dropped back further and then had to sail beyond the clump of smaller boats jamming the mark to ensure clear air up the next leg to the gap which was now just a fetch. Now Veloce was half a leg ahead.
We flew the light weight genoa which worked well for most of the race, but there were periods when the wind inexplicably piped up to 12 knots causing concern about it's safety. But it seems to have survived.
So in the end, Veloce amazingly won the race, and Blue Streak beat us by only 13 seconds on corrected time, and Abra withdrew due to what may have been a halyard jamb during a sail change. But Skipper Ron apparently wasn't too badly behaved, and everyone had a good evening and Mike says he'll come back for more.
The season has started.
Skipper Ron