June 27th, 2019
It was another amazing day of sailing in Kiel today. All night the wind blew and was forecast to hold through most of the day for today’s 3 races. We sailed well, but had a couple of mistakes that cost us a couple of points. We ended the day with a score line of 9,9, UFD, but the UFD was a 2ndon the water…grrr.
The sun wasn’t shining when we launched today, but the temperatures weren’t too cold. We were sailing on a farther course today and it still had an off shore breeze, but also had a nice wave state with it too. The course was quite tricky to figure out, and depended a lot on playing the numbers and responding quite quickly to them.
The first race of the day, Paris got us off the line winning the pin end. We were sailing in a 15 degree knock, so we thought that the German boat that was on our hip would tack fairly soon so we could all get on the lifted tack, but they didn’t and we sailed for probably 1:30-2 mins on the knock before we tacked. We were looking quite good on the fleet but we knew at some point the wind would come back to the right, and half way up the beat it did leaving us sitting not as comfortably as we wanted. Anna was a bit behind on the shifts, not recognizing that we needed to tack almost immediately on the shifts and we ended up rounding the top mark in 12thplace. We didn’t gain downwind, but managed to get our second upwind a little better and gained three boats, although it didn’t feel like we did. The last downwind, we raced hard to try and catch people, but didn’t manage to gain any extra finishing in 9thin the first race of the day.
Race 2 started great again and this time we were able to tack and get on the lifted tack early. We sail on port for a while in the lift, and then as the knock came, we didn’t take it immediately because we wanted to let the rest of the fleet get it first and get bow down into us. Then as the fleet got the knock, we started to get lifted again, and so we were debating if we tack off a 15 lift or if we keep sailing. And having watched the tracker again, we’re not totally sure that tacking would have been the correct call, even though it showed us in first place at that time. The angle back up the course would have been so bad. As it turned out, we waited a little longer then tacked. We ended up 6that the top mark, being passed by the boats inside of us upwind. Downwind we passed a boat to round in 5th. On the second beat, we rounded the leeward mark and were heading right. We wanted to head out to the left but debated when we should have tacked…meaning, do we tack and sail through the kites, or do we wait. In hindsight, we should have just sailed straight and waited for clearer breeze all around and for the numbers to settle and get in phase. We did, however, end up tacking and moved us closer to the left, but probably not far enough to get the benefits we were hoping for. We lost a few boats on that beat and held our own on the downwind to finish again in 9th.
Heading into the last race of the day, we were fired up about how good we had been sailing, but how our little mistakes were costing us points! Let us just say a big thank you to Paul Brotherton for holding our cooler today! He was awesome at getting us water and food between races despite having two other teams out there!! Thanks Paul! Going into the last race, we were a little tight on time so we grabbed a FitAid, downed it and headed to the startline! And it worked…well sort of. Again, Paris nailed the start and we set off holding a tight lane. We were just about able to tack when we wanted to, with the SWE 999 team tacking right when we wanted too so we had to take the second best option, a little farther past them. But it wasn’t a bad lane at all, and we battled with SWE and CRO 112 for the top three leading into the top mark. We rounded 3rd. SWE gybed early and went to the course right downwind. We stayed straight and called the lay-line correctly and CRO slightly over stood and we were able to pass them into second. We held that position to the finish and were pretty pumped on our sail in to the beach about how we finally were able to put a race together, only to get home and find out we were UFD’d (meaning we were disqualified for starting early). We tried to get the score re-instated but didn’t win the case. We had to count our 16th from yesterday instead of a second today.
We are sitting 20thoverall going into gold fleet racing. The forecast for tomorrow will be light winds, quite a change from the last two days of racing. We are looking forward to keeping the learning curve up, trying to cut down on the little mistakes, and climb up the leader board these next two days.
We would like to thank Driscoll Boat works for their event sponsorship for us for this event! We greatly appreciate their support to get us here racing and learning!
You can follow the races and check out the results here.
Thank you all for your continued support!
Paris and Anna
Henken | Tobias Sailing 