Lightship I 2007

(Nathan writing)

Today (Mar 24) was the crewed Lightship I event, with a simple course: St. Francis on the cityfront to the Lightship and back, for a handicap total of 25 miles. The actual lightship is long since retired, but at the same location (approach to San Francisco/Golden Gate entrance channel) is now a large buoy.

Conditions are usually typical of gate-crashers: heavy upwind out to the light bucket and a heavy downwind back. The scenery is great (Golden Gate, Pt. Bonita, and the shorelines north or south of the channel depending on which way you play the currents.

Attending were, from bow to stern, Heather, Arthur, Roger, and Nathan. Nat is still out on sick leave, which isn't particularly fair because she still managed to put in a lot of effort prepping the boat for the weekend.

This was a big event for Elise: her first offshore trip in years, and a first in racing for several of her crew. Because of much more stringent safety requirements for offshore racing (versus round-the-buoys in the bay), many pieces of equipment had to be procured and/or installed. It was a busy couple of weeks preparing, including installing permanent deck fittings for jacklines (used to "tie" crew down to avoid falling overboard while still allowing them mobility) to assembling a large bundle of signaling devices (parachute flares, smoke generators, etc.).

The workload was sufficient to keep us busy up through just before start time (we didn't even have time to change into sailing gear and took turns going below after the start).

This year, the breeze was up and down, basically #3 weather upwind and nice kite conditions downwind. There were extended periods when a #1 would have been preferred, but on a shakedown cruise and training day we didn't want to get caught out with too much sail area for the conditions. Our four-man crew was another factor in this decision (5 would be desirable in heavy air for weight/performance reasons).

We took the race easy, to check Elise's reactions to wind and wave loading and to give the crew a chance to understand how she would react both to performance tweaks and mistakes.

Elise was very forgiving, and quite eager at times when the wind rose.

The first portion of the upwind (from the cityfront to the Golden Gate Bridge) was reasonably heavy air, with all hands on the rail and deliberate effort to depower the rig- backstay, outhaul, etc. We knew that the wind was going to be going right, but guessed wrong about how soon and lost distance when the answer turned out to be "immediately" rather than "when we pass the gate". Still, speed was competitive and Elise calmed down when appropriately trimmed.

Past the gate but before Bonita, a few crosses left and right netted or lost distance inconsistently versus the other 27's. Shortly after Bonita, the wind dropped, and didn't recover until we were near the lightship. Staying out of the way of some commercial traffic inbound for Oakland was a minor inconvenience that kept us a bit to the south. A good spinnaker set at the mark got us going well, but the wind was light and we took a deep course south rather than taking a couple of gybes to work north. Still, we managed a couple of solid gybes for practice.

Arriving back at the main channel near Seal Rocks and Mile Rock, we worked back north through and into favorable current. One extended gybe (problems getting the pole back on the mast on the new side) led to a temporary wrap around the forestay which we resolved by flying the kite without a pole for a while. We just twinged it down, drove+trimmed the wrap out, and then reset the pole on the new gybe (starboard tack heading at the South Tower) at our leisure.

After passing under the bridge (pointed at the St. Francis, the finish line and our home port) a very welcome increase in wind came in and gave us a quick 13.8 knot over ground run (in favorable current, but our knotmeter is on the "fixit" list so we don't know our through-water speed). We had one or two "ease the sheet NOW" moments, but handled everything properly and got in a nice fast run across the finish line and correct spinnaker drop afterwards.