April 3, 2019
Today was the first day of Gold Fleet racing and the conditions were great, but very tricky. We had three races. The first race we were scored OCS, then finished the day with a 3,7 to move us to 9th overall.
We had a later start again today as the boys fleet sailed the “morning shift.” We headed out in a slightly building breeze, but the sea state was already there with an underlying swell and chop on top. There were low clouds with breaks that provided some conditions that kept us on our toes.
The first race, we had a pretty good start, obviously because we were over lol, but that aside, we didn’t have that much of an advantage off the line. We had a tight lane that we held for a while then were able to break free and put the bow down and go fast. We tacked when we wanted to and about 30 seconds after the tack, we thought we were going to make a cross on a boat, but missed it by a couple of feet and had to spin a circle for breaking a rule. We spun our circle, but unfortunately it was early enough in the race that a lot of boats passed us and we struggled to come back through the fleet that race.
The second race was much better. We again had a great start and sailed in a lane off the line. This time we made the tack that we wanted to and crossed the boats that we needed to no problem. We rounded the top mark in third and held that whole race.
The final race was the trickiest of the day. We didn’t have the best of starts, and had to tack out almost immediately. We found a couple of tight lanes early on that lead us to be able to get out into a wider lane and sail the shifts that we wanted to. We climbed back to round the top mark in 6th. We held that on the down wind leg. On the second upwind leg, we tacked early out of the mark and headed to the left side of the course which ended up being a little more favorable. We made up some distance on the other boats that rounded in front of us and rounded the top mark in 4th. On the downwind leg, we got caught a little high on starboard and the two boats behind us were able to surf into a lower lane which lead to them rolling us after the gybe. We lost those two boats and right at the finish we lost one more to finish in 7th.
Overall, we are pretty happy with the day. We are having fun and still learning a lot every race! Tomorrow the conditions are looking a little different, so will be fun to race in something different.
Thank you for your continued support of our campaign.
Anna and Paris
Henken | Tobias Sailing 