Well, what a few days these have been. And who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. The format is excellent with practice practice practice and then some racing. The good news yesterday was that we were in second place after sailing four 6 leg brutal races. The bad news is that there were 3 boats tied for first 😳
But we are all getting better in our roles. Joe is driving better all the time and seems really well ANCHORED in his new role as driver. Rory has the square topped main down to a science. Kent and I are ably handling foredeck (Pete, we need FU shirts) so all good. Chad, our onboard coach from North U got promoted to handling my foredeck duties as I tried to shift aft. Rory was game to give his job up but I was hoping to bump Joe off the helm but it turns out he is a bigger wheel hog than Donald.
Today was a bit of a disaster but we survived. Plan was four 4 races. But we managed to hook the pin boat’s anchor and lived there for the next hour while they started our fleet then the J24s then the J22s. 3 knots of current and a torpedo keel is a bad combo for easy extraction. Eventually we launched a knife and sank an anchor and 150ft of line but we did spend an hour thinking deep thoughts on how to extract ourselves and missed our race. Ruh roh! The RC was less than impressed but they eventually saw the humour in the situation 😃
The second race we never got our act together and came last by 20ft while the final race saw us with a third. The 4th race was blown off because the wind backed 80 degrees and there was more shipping traffic so they called it quits. We won the race back to the dock. So some tough sleddin’ today 😎
Biggest take away from all this is how fast we are getting it together and how tight the fleet is. I didn’t really expect this but the 7 boats often finish within a minute of one another even though we sometimes split gybes and fly down opposite sides of Charleston Harbour.
Tomorrow may be blown off due to incoming weather which won’t help us but so far we have had a hell of a great time and Joe has learned a ton of new tricks and the rest of us too.
Photo is us heading out of the marina happy as clams, not a clue of the day head!
Day one of North U’s OD program behind us and we are still alive. The Flying Tiger boats are fun and fast… not as fast as TL but still good. The challenge of the day was crew placement… in our upside down universe we had Joe driving and Sean and Kent doing foredeck and jib with Rory in the middle on main. Chad, our coach, just shook his head in disbelief.
Lots of starts, gybes, hoists and douses and a couple of practice races too.
Race Week starts tomorrow so hopefully today we get better at what we are supposed to be doing but with breeze and up to 3 knots of current it is going to be interesting.
All for now, Sean
