April 16 – 17, 2019
Not much has been happening over here in Genoa regarding the wind and racing unfortunately.
On Tuesday, since the 49ers had an early start time the previous day, it was our turn to start earlier. We were scheduled to have a 11am start, however we went down to the boat park and got postponed onshore until 2pm waiting for wind. Our D flag eventually went up and the FX fleet went out hoping to get some racing in.
The race committee started our race in a 3-4 knot dying breeze. We got off the line right in the middle in an okay position, but noticed that the very little breeze we had was shifting hard left. We tacked and crossed all the boats that started at the committee boat, however everyone that started closer to the pin did the same. As we got farther up the beat, we noticed that it wasn’t going to shift back right anytime soon, so we decided to ride the header back to the left side of the course earlier in what we thought was the best breeze to do that. Unfortunately, there were a lot more boats left of us than we thought and we rounded the mark at best around 20th.
The wind has now dropped to about 1-3 knots and for a second we thought the race was going to be abandoned, but about half way down the downwind leg, we realize that the race committee was desperate to get any racing in, so they were going to keep us racing. We caught a few boats on the downwind beat by gybing early to the gates and rounded the right gate looking downwind. We had a much better last upwind beat trying to stay in as much pressure as we could to keep the boat moving as fast as we could make it go. We happen to pass quite a few boats on the last upwind beat rounding the windward mark in 11th. On the last downwind leg, we passed one more boat on the gybe and finished the race happily in 10th. The winners of that specific race was scored OCS (over the line at the start) and therefore we finished 9th.
Despite not being more on the left side on the first beat after the start, we persevered through the whole race and never gave up. This paid off as we passed 10 boats over the course of our very very slow and light wind race.
On Wednesday not a lot happened as were had a later start and eventually were postponed onshore again because of lack of breeze. We sat around the boat park for awhile patiently waiting for any breeze to come in, but we were not lucky and racing was called off.
Right now we only have a total of 3 races and we need 4 races in order to split into gold and silver fleets. Hopefully there will be some more breeze later in the week!
Anna & Paris
Henken | Tobias Sailing 