June 28th, 2019
So today started a little crazy, not just for us, but for most of the teams. The boys were scheduled to start at 11 today and we were to start at 1. Around 11am, the boys went into a 4 hour postponement, and I think a lot of us got a little relaxed and weren’t convinced we would go before them. But as it was, the wind filled in probably a little earlier than the RC had thought and so they sent us out before the boys. So we made a mad dash to the sailing center and managed to get there in time while getting dressed in the car, rigging up in record time, and made it on the water just fine on time.
To say the least it was a good warm up; it got the blood flowing. But we got out to the course and had plenty of time to sail around and figure out what we wanted to do. By the time the course was set and the wind mostly settled, we had a game plan that we wanted to have a clear lane quickly on port, even if that meant starting on port. We had a great plan and executed it for the most part quite well, but about 10 seconds after the start, us and a few of the boats around us hit a massive momentary lull and we all crashed to windward and slid into each other lanes. Unfortunately, this meant that we needed to find a new lane, but in reality, at the gun, all the lanes on the race course were taken because of the wind angle to the course. So, we found ourselves at the back of the pack at the top mark. We sailed quite a good downwind leg, gybing quite early to take advantage of a small puff and to position ourselves well coming into the bottom mark. We rounded the opposite mark than most of the fleet and made about an 8 boat gain, that we weren’t able to hold for the rest of the race. Unfortunately again, there weren’t a lot of passing lanes so we were on damage control and trying to pick off what we could.
Race two started much better. We could start on starboard this time with most of the fleet. We had a good start in the middle of the line, but slowly lost our lane 1-2 minutes after the gun. We were able to tack out and cross the boats we needed to and settle into our lane up the course. Because we couldn’t do exactly what we had wanted (go more left), we had to accept that we were not going to be winning the race at that time, but worked on trying to get to the top 10 at the top. We got there and held onto that position just about for the rest of the race.
We finished the day with a 16, 11. Not the score line we were hoping for, but we made the best of it by learning from our mistakes and situations.
Tomorrow we have three races scheduled for a 10:30 start. Its going to be an early one, so we hope that the wind is there to play early tomorrow!
We would like to thank Driscoll Boat works for their event sponsorship! 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 