World Cup Series Genoa: Day 1

Today kicked off racing at the Hempel World Cup Series in Genoa, Italy.  We had two tricky races in light winds and finished the races with a 16, 14, putting us in 35th place overall.

We sailed in split fleets today for the qualifying series. Each fleet had 25 boats in it.  We have one more day tomorrow scheduled for qualifying races where we need to move up to the top 25 overall to make the gold fleet.  The good news is that the points are super close and we are only 10 points out of 15th place.  So every point counts tomorrow.

We arrived into Genoa around noon yesterday.  We knew we were coming in late and that was going to test us today, but we were surprised with how decently well we felt going into racing today.  Once we arrived, we headed straight for the boat park and got our boat put together and registered for the event.  A huge thank you to the boys 49er Squad for putting our mast up and wings on for us before we arrived!!!!

Then we headed off to find our apartment.  We decided we would walk and try to save money on the taxi fare.  The route said it was about a mile walk, but what we didn’t know was that it was a mile walk, mostly uphill and sometimes up some stairs.  However, after about 20 minutes, we made it and got to our accommodation.  The grocery store is about a block away so that makes cooking every day super easy.  Last night, we shopped, cooked, then hit the hay to get ready for today.

Today’s racing was delayed a little, as the morning wind died and the sea breeze built.  We eventually headed out, but the launching situation is a little slow as we can only launch around 4-5 boats at a time, so it took a while to get in the water.  Then we sailed half way before getting picked up on a tow.  We got out to the race course just as they were putting up the warning flag, but then the postponement flag went up again, so we wanted to do our pre-race routine. So we trimmed in and sailed upwind a little bit.  We didn’t realized it at the time, but the horns on the committee boat were not very loud and we missed them pulling down the postponement flag and starting the sequence.  Unfortunately, by the time we got back down to the start line, we were about 1-1:30 late for the start so we had to play catch up.  And we did.  We didn’t catch any boats on the first upwind leg, but closed the distance to everybody so could make some moves from there.  We ended up passing 7 boats on the course and then two more because they were scored OCS, giving us a 16th in the race.

The second race started very well.  We rolled the boat below us but didn’t shift back in to point mode soon enough and ended up fighting for a tight lane.  It wasn’t too bad as we tacked out and only had to sail behind two boats.  We had a great lane out to the right side, but that’s when things started to go a little pear shaped for us.  The boats on our hip started to fall down a little into us and the boats on the right started to tack and looked pretty good.  So we tacked to leeward of the right pack and lead them up to the top left.  But then a small pressure line came in from the right, but didn’t want to make its way down to us, so we started to loose some of the boats more right of us and also those who hipped up farther right than us. We decided that we had to do the same and we hipped out, but we had lost a few too many and rounded probably around 20th at the top mark.  We were able to pick up boats on each leg of the race and ended up finishing 14th.

Overall the results are pretty disappointing for the day, particularly the first race as that is a silly mistake that should never happen.  But we were happy with our speed and our calls for most of the day so that was a win.  We are looking forward to tomorrow with more light winds foretasted.  You can check the results here.

Thank you for your continued support.

Anna and Paris