Wednesday evening race #11

North Westerly winds at 10-18 knots. Race course was 3 7 (6 legs)

Mid race brain trust failure…!!

A mediocre start – managed to get fairly close to the line but with no speed. You can see ( and hear) my fustration…see the video below:

As we have seen a few times now, breezy and from the North West, the left has a tendency to pay off. Well guess what, we banged left and continued to protect the left (Tactics learned from John Vanzee) which meant getting to the windward mark in first by about 10 boat lengths. See video below:

Sailed well downwind with breeze, bye the lee or dead down meant quite a few gybes (well executed as usual). Smooth rounding and still a 15-20 boat lead. Instead of waiting for Ricochet to tack left then covering we decided to tack left first (big mistake). By playing the middle our comp made gains on us! As usually happens the mistakes kept compounding on each other – towards the port layline I failed to communicate a possible fake tack, which lost us more ground followed by the fact that we did NOT tack in front of Ricochet at the Starboard layline, which allowed them to get in front of us. See video:

Note: There was NO foul by Ricochet “The rule says that the tacking boat regains rights as soon as they are on a close hauled course (regardless of where the sails are trimmed). After posting to Sailing Anarchy and getting my ass reamed for being such an idiot for thinking there was a foul, the concensus was “no foul”. In reality no one on our boat was observing or communicating about the layline (which by now we had over stood). As soon as we saw Ricochet initiating a tack we should have slam tacked and we would have sailed to the mark in front of them!

By this time Hallel was close and pinned us out to the right side of the course. Another big mistake at the leeward mark when I called for the jib up and pole down much too early, causing us to lose our overlap. We really should make those “WTF Trevor” cards for someone to hold up!

Made gains on the last downwind leg but were not far enough in front of Hallel to correct so locked in our 3rd place after a very possible 1st – many learning opportunities on this race, especially on our close boat to boat combat.

Great race, with great wind which everyone enjoyed (despite our problems). Once again the boat handling gets better and better!