Crewed Farallones 2011

Results are up:

http://www.yra.org/OYRA/docs/Results/OYRA_farallones_2011_results.htm

We were 5 out of 5 actual racers.

Nathan's writeup:

Noone racing us owed us less than 40 seconds per mile.  In a declining wind, having them being "scheduled" to finish 1/2 hr or more ahead of us is a hard thing to overcome.

In fact, the scoring for our division is in exact order of handicap...

There were a few boats it would have been nice to do better against even though we weren't being scored against them (Santana 35, Wyliecat 30, etc.).  Maybe we spent some time on the wrong side of the course?

We had some patches of bad boatspeed upwind.  Downwind, we might be able to work on sailing to polars. I don't think our trim was bad for given angles but there might be room for optimizing course.

Tactically, I might have entered the channel more to the north in retrospect.  Going out, I called a tack over onto starboard close to what I expected to be the layline and we subsequently got hit by a significant header on the new tack that didn't let us make it.  Then, it trended back right for the rest of the day.  Bad timing.  Maybe we should have flopped back once the header hit.

I felt pretty good about the initial direction out from Bonita.

Perhaps we should have gone back right once we started to get headed on stbd tack when we were near the upwind layline.  On the other hand, it's hard to second-guess mother nature when she seems to be calling a trend opposite what you expected.  The weather forecast I saw was for pretty steady, typical conditions.  We got caught by surprise on both the temporary shift left and the general wind drop towards the evening (the latter of which wasn't supposed to happen until late night).

In general, the 100+ raters did not do well in this event (exception: PHRO3, the Santana 35).

General difficulty level: For the Farralones race, someone who gets it right 2/3 of the time is doing very well for themselves.

In our division, the corrected finishes were exactly in order of handicap, a pattern which was generally observed in other divisions.  That's not to say that it's not possible to beat the trend or that we couldn't have done better, but if I had to look for tactical improvement this season I'd be looking harder at the Lightship race than the Farallones race.

 

Nat's comments:

On the bright side, we did get to practice a MOB drill in real ocean conditions (our MOB apparatus fell and we had to go and retrive it, it took us only one try) and we improved our knowledge of digesting systems and sun reflections in the absence of sun.