Based on a decent forecast, eight people and five boats came out to race today: Seth, Katie, and Thomas Van Huss sail their O’Day 222, Fred Falchock on his Hunter, Tim Vacula sailing with Jennifer Medgul on his S2, Jimmy Harrell sailing his “new” Catalina 22, and Jay Harrell sailing his Beneteau 210.
We held our skippers meeting at noon and decided to run the great triangle course, starting and finishing at the club. This is a three mile long course, and the start/finish line in the club cove can be rather difficult in a SW wind like today. But the advantage is that we don’t have to deal with settings and retrieving buoys. It’s about as simple, low pressure and ad hoc as you can get.
We managed to start right on time at 1pm. As expected the wind was variable and the weather was pretty warm. Everyone managed to get across the start line in a timely fashion, but then the wind more or less completely died for about ten minutes. When the wind came back, it stayed filled in for the rest of the day but it had a lot of ups and downs and shifts. We ran two races – the first took about an hour and the second took about 40 minutes. Finishes were close in both races, with multiple lead changes around the course.
Order of finishes:
race 1: Jay, Tim, Jimmy, Seth, and Fred
race 2: Tim, Jay, Fred, Jimmy, and Seth.
Last week I gave you a single-boat replay, but this week we had RaceQs on four boats, so you can watch the whole race play out among the fleet. Jay’s boat is called “Electra” and Jimmy’s boat is called “Unknown”. Fred didn’t have a recorder on his boat today.
The replay allows you to control the point of view and view various data about each boat at each point in the race. Play around with it – it’s kinda fun!