June 26th, 2019
It was an awesome day of sailing…sunny, windy, and mostly flat water! We had a great day despite the last race of the day. We finished with a 6,5, 16 and are sitting 15thafter day one of the qualifying races.
We were scheduled to start at 3pm today, which was a much later start than what we are used to, so the first challenge of the day was staying focused and ready to go. Our launch flag went up shortly after 2pm and we had a quick 10 min sail to our race course to get racing started just about on time.
We were the second fleet racing, with the guys yellow fleet racing before us so we got to see and learn a little of the course by watching them. We did our own homework too and came back to the start line knowing that it was going to be a shifty day of racing!
Race one started and we had a great start. The wind slowy shifted left off the line and we tacked over. In hindsight we should have tacked about 10 seconds sooner than we had, but we made the best of our position and rounded the top mark in about 12th place. Paris made a great call to gybe set and we took off in a huge right puff and were the only ones going that way. When we came back to the bottom we had moved up to about 5thplace. Up the second beat, you couldn’t cover both sides of the course, and you really had to play what you were in and what you saw. We ended up loosing a boat on the second beat and almost catching it at the finish, but ended up with a 6thplace.
The second race started quite well and was a very similar story to the first race except we rounded in the top 5 and stayed there.
The last race was going really well too. We had to do a spin on the startline with about a minute to go, and after it got a little chaotic while we figured out what we were going to do. We were heading to snipe the hole at the pin, but Anna called a bail on that plan and start on port because she thought we would be early. We got the port start but ended up doing some crazy ducks to get out of the line. Once settled we had great speed and sailed the shifts up the beat to round the top mark in 4th. We straight set and caught a nice puff that allowed us to soak down inside the two boats in front of us. We went to match their gybes, but unfortunate, we had a little wobble and capsized loosing us a bunch of places. The mast then got stuck in the sand…thankfully not breaking, but we had to swim the bow around into the wind to help pull it out…which took a loooonnnngggg time! We eventually got it up right and took off on the course again. When you capsize on the first downwind leg, you don’t actually know where you are on the race course, you just assume you are in last because all you can see is the fleet a long way ahead of you, but as it turned out, we ended up beating some boats and finishing in 16thin the race.
Tomorrow, we continue qualifying races with 3 races scheduled. We are in blue fleet with our scheduled start time being at 11am. The forecast is for the day to start with good breeze and it die during the day, but for our racing we should have great conditions again!
You can check the results out here.
Thank you for your continued support!
Paris and Anna
Henken | Tobias Sailing 