I've almost recovered from Nationals, made it to the two great CityFront races yesterday despite incredible childcare logistics. We had a great time, here is my report.
First race: Had a great start, held Elaine off at the windward mark to start at the pin at full speed only 5 seconds late, but everybody else was further down the line and the pin was heavily favored. We played the shifts well until close to the mark and made it to Blackhaller alongside Inshallah and just ahead of Tackful. Shirley went right, Cathy went left and promptly covered us. It looked like a long boring reach to Harding so I exchanged pleasantries with Cathy while racking my brain for possible passing strategies. Finally a big cruising boat showed up on collision course on starboard, we both sidled over to the left to stay on the windward side and then I decided to duck down and get some distance, hoping Tackful would be distracted and not follow us. To my amazement it actually worked, we worked our way to leeward and then saw a tide line ahead that Tackful and Poniente (?) crossed first into the nascent ebb. We stayed on the flood side of the line for a few more boatlengths and got through their windshadow, made it to Harding with a few boatlengths to spare.
Now we get a long boring reach to Ft. Mason, right? Well, not quite, folks on Tackful were racking their brains too and crept up on us. I threw a moderate luff at them to keep them on their toes and rattle them, they went to leeward and started passing us there until we figured out that poling to leeward was really faster and copied them. With Carlos on the inside we were pretty safe at the mark, especially since the right thing to do was obviously to stay on stbd and head for current relief/building ebb near the shore. And it's a short way from Ft. Mason to GGYC, so we were able to sit on them pretty effectively and got what I think is our first gun of the season.
Manoevering between races was almost as challenging as racing since some Ayedeens (skiffs) were racing all around us, with tons of crash boats, photo boats and helicopters covering the action (way more support/press than the skiffs themselves). But finally the RC fired off a bunch of guns and we came back to discover the Olson 30's had disappeared and we were next up, with some strange flags announcing the course. Cathy graciously told us it was course 22, the confusion was that the RC only had one flag 2 so they put in the AP instead of the second one. That and losing my VHF some time at the end of Nationals made us a bit less informed than usual. But we managed to start OK, this time headed right after the traffic cleared, with most of the fleet to our right and Tackful way inside. At first we seemed to be doing great, then it got shifty and we always seemed to be on the wrong side of them, so Inshallah crossed us on the way to Blackhaller. But then they overstood the mark in the ebb, and we rounded first.
Next up was an inflatable "NorthWest of Hyde Street Pier", the new mark that Pat got added to the inventory last year. Of course there were inflatable marks all over the place being rounded at high speed by skiffs and photo boats, but we managed to follow the Olson 25s (hi guys, nice regatta two weeks ago, eh?) who were apparently using the same course, and also followed their strategy of heading outside at the top of the run to get good air, then inside to escape the ebb after leaving the start/finish line to stbd. Elaine tried going inside early and ran out of wind, everybody else stayed outside and we made some ground downwind. The greatest excitement was avoiding an outbound ferry who seemed to want to play chicken with us on the way to the mark, we jybed early and made it plain where we were going, they then changed course to stbd to track us and we had to go high of the mark to keep separation. Probably just wanted to let people take photos of us or those darn ayedeens, we waved merrily while cursing their bloody wake, then jybed back to get to the mark. At least they didn't give us five horns.
Now we had a long beat back up to Blackhaller, an Olson 30 (must have decided to have just one long race instead of the scheduled two) worked their way through our weather and we followed, they were far enough to wx that there wasnt' much wind shadow. A one-tack beat on the ebb, except that our tack was a bit too late, we ended up overstanding the mark a fair bit, so Inshallah got a lot closer at the top mark. But the run was basically a shorter repeat of the first one (without the ferry), this time we went to Ft. Mason again, went right into the ebb and kept a loose cover on Inshallah to get our second gun of the season. Whoopee! And many thanks to the new main and ancient jib (the same one I loaned Pariah so they could beat us handily at Nationals), our boatspeed was pretty good in the moderate to stiff breeze. I know Tackful got third in that race, not sure about the others as we had to split and go find my kids, we had a nice ride back home (though nothing like the one after Admiral's Cup), despite my misgivings the wind held all the way to the club.
So this brings me to the musings part - here we have 11 boats signed up for YRA, 19 locals did Nationals so we know we have a lot of potential racers, and yet only 3 came last week to the South Bay, and 6 to CityFront yesterday. I know Bill Murphy was planning to race yesterday but changed plans after he broke his tiller 20 seconds before the first race last week (that was the blue boat that Chris mentioned in his heartrending report of the dismasting). As ODCA chair he really want us to get more boats to qualify, so he ended up crewing on Cloud 9 (?) so they could race, after Usquebaugh was mathematically eliminated from qualifying (which one does by sailing, or at least starting, 50% of the races, for the newbies). And Tchoupi is out of commission for the rest of the season. But where was everybody else, why are so few of us coming out to play in the regular races?
I almost wonder if we should sign up for the "Party Circuit" next year and only do special events like Pumpkin and Fall One-design beyond that, but that is really only three weekends (Vallejo, Encinal Opener and Summer Sailstice), and the Encinal Opener comes close to Nationals and hasn't been very popular anyway, despite the great party Saturday night. So I am a bit flummoxed, musings from others either on our listserve or in person at the party Saturday night at THE SEASON CLOSER, SEPTEMBER 8-9 or THE NEXT SCOMBRIDAE SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 23. I hope a lot of us can make those two events, after that it's only Great Pumpkin at the end of October before we're into Xmas parties and winter light. Perhaps Pat Broderick or Craig McDow could tell us more about the season closer hosted by Corinthian YC, and of course our fearless leader will be prepping you for Scombridae Sunday.
Fair sailing to all of you,
Jan Grygier
Carlos
hydrophilos at earthlink.net
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