June 30th, 2019
Yesterday was the last scheduled race of fleet racing. We were scheduled for three races, with the first race starting at 10:30am. The forecast for the day was for the wind to lighten up as the day warmed up, and that it did.
We hit the water just before 10 and sailed out to the race course. We did our pre-race homework and figured out which side of the course we wanted to head to. Pre-race we had decided we wanted to head to the left side. We had a pretty good start and headed out to the left. Half way up the beat we decided that we needed to change our plan and shifted our game to head out to the right-hand side. We were a little late, but we needed to do it to save some points. We got back in the race at the top mark and were around 16that the top mark. We had a decent downwind, but maintained about the same position. We rounded to the downwind right mark, but rounded with a lot of boats. We rounded ahead but on the outside of a few boats, and we were held out to the left side of the course. It wasn’t our plan, but we couldn’t get ourselves out of that position so we sailed hard on that side of the course. We didn’t loose any, but we didn’t gain any boats either. One the downwind, we again, held about the same and crossed the line in 16thplace.
From there, we attempted one more race, but the race was postponed with a minute left to go to the start. And then we were sent in. We were postponed on shore for a very long time, when by 5:30pm, they finally decided to cancel racing for the day. For us, this meant that our regatta was done.
We obviously are disappointed in our overall score (21st), but have a lot of great take aways from the regatta. We definitely don’t like to say shoulda-woulda-coulda, but when we do make massive mistakes in races (ie: a capsize or an ocs), we try to take back the points we lost to see where it would have put us, and at this regatta, we would have entered the medal race in 9thplace. Again, we know its not totally realistic to look at it that way, but it shows us that we are right there, and we just have to keep training to eliminate our mistakes that are holding us back in the results.
We packed the boat up and came home to an amazing dinner made by our rommies, Ida and Marie from Denmark who were headed into today’s medal race!!!
Today, we cheered on our roomies (who came away with 4th), and got some future training and racing planning done, and figured out how to get all of our new awesome Magic Marine Gear home! (which we successfully conquered!)
Up next, we head home for 5 days and then it’s back to training into San Fran for much of July!
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 check out the final results here.
Thank you all for your continued support.
Paris and Anna
Henken | Tobias Sailing 