Regatta Pro Midwinters - Saturday 10 January 2009

Saturday morning - woken up by Pumpkin's meow festival. Time to get ready, load up the racing sails and grab a nice sit-down breakfast and coffee at Martha's, down the street. I then stop by the supermarket to get food and drinks for the day. My way of selecting beer, as a non beer drinker and in the absence of any kind of instruction, has a lot to do with packaging...if I like the image or the color of the pack, I might just buy it. I then drive to the 24th and Mission BART stop, arrive 10 minutes early, park and wait for Nathan who I was supposed to pick up. I waited. And waited. And waited. I waited until I decided to check my email and realized that Nathan was waiting for me at the 16th and Mission BART station. 
All this nice perfectly-timed morning out the window! :)

Anyway, we get to the boat with a 5 minute delay, not too bad. Adrian and Rom are there. We have a 4-person crew, two less experienced and two experienced. So today will be a training day 'in vivo'. Note that this is the end of last year's season, eg a counter for last year's ranking and Elise wasn't very active in the one design event last year.

We put the boat in the water, set up the engine and go, dressing up Elise on the way to the west side of the Berkeley circle. Forecast was downgraded to 5-10 knots. The wind picks up slightly though and we hoist the sails and decide to go upwind to try a nice spinnaker run down back to the starting area. The upwind part and the setting up of the spinnaker we did. No problem. The running back to the starting area we also did. The wind played a nasty trick on us though. It dropped in velocity! Getting to the start area 5 minutes after everyone else wasn't a perfect start. We decided to follow the course, staying out of the way of everyone but only go once around to catch up with the other boats and do the second race. Wind was very moderate, we had the genoa up. Maneuvres went fine, with a bit of coaching and it was a lot of fun. Some lunch, some drinks and we are getting ready for the second race.

And then, something terrible happened.

The wind died.

We became all panic-stricken as we realized that we would have to make the beer bottle last for much longer than originally planned. A challenge for most. We were all fighting the ebb and slowly making our way to the Golden Gate bridge, bobbling around like sad ducks definitely not in a row. After a while, the committee boat leaves the starting area with a 'follow me' flag. We looked at each other. With the genoa up, we were managing to remain at the same location. Going somewhere was out of reach at that time. Fortunately, a J24 brought out their engine. Or unfortunately perhaps, they soon became the locomotive of an Express 27 train, launched after the speedy committee boat. 

The wind picked up again and we dissolved the snail train. The committee boat was racing around the entire area, picking up marks, dropping them, picking them up again, moving them around. After a pretty long time, over 2 hours, the wind was finally up, moderately but from the NW, so likely to remain stable. 

With 20 minutes to go before the last warning was supposed to go off as per the sailing instructions, we started our second race - first for us. We did things slowly as we wanted everyone to really get a chance to practice their position (Rom on the foredeck, Adrian doing pit work and trim 2, Nathan doing trim and tactics and me at the helm) and I was thrilled to get some practice in conditions that I am not usually great at: light winds. Enough to sail well though. I need to get more practice upwind to balance out all the downwind driving that I did during the Pac Cup. I want to be a good upwind driver! West side of the course seemed favored by wind and current (up to a certain point) -

Lessons learned - 

• As soon as we are certain that we will be able to make the mark, foredeck can set the pole and get ready for a hoist.
  
• Foredeck person needs to jump the spinnaker. Priority job at that time is to get the spinnaker all the way up. Then it is OK to take care of the genoa (take down) and the spinnaker bag (bring back to cockpit for later re-packing)

In general, whenever you have to make snap decisions:

• what is the most urgent for safety/good standing of the boat (eg a half hoisted sail cannot really be trimmed and controlled but it could be a liability as it will catch wind)
  
• what is the most urgent to make the boat go fast (putting the big sail up will definitely do more for boat speed than taking down the smaller one)
  

Obviously, if wine is involved, priorities might be modified. Everything else is clean up work :)