February 13th, 2020
Gold Fleet racing today was tight and the scores are super close. It was a tricky day on the water with one basic story to the day…go left. The more you got left up the first beat, the better you tended to be at the top mark. We had an okay day finishing with a 7,14,15 and sitting 10th overall, but only 4 points out of 6th.
The day started with what looked like a decent breeze forecast that was expected to get lighter before it built again in the afternoon. We started the day with a good wind around 9-10kts. In the first race we had a pretty good start, but didn’t go quite hard enough left at the top of the course. We rounded the top mark in the low teens, and held about the same downwind. On the second upwind, we executed our plan to go left and managed to pass a lot of boats up the beat to round in 7th and hold that position to the finish.
On the second race, we didn’t have the best start and we were forced to tack away. We tried to make it back to the left, but couldn’t quite get all the way there so rounded the top mark around 21st. On the downwind leg, we passed a few boats and caught up to the middle of the fleet. On the second beat, we held our own sailing a bit more on the right hand side of the course, but mostly alone and rounded around 14th at the top which we held to the bottom mark.
The final race of the day, again we had a similar game plan, but this time to shift up the line a little more as we felt like we were getting little righties occasionally. We had a great start and held out towards the left. We positioned ourselves to leeward and ahead of the boats coming from the hard left corner in the lighter breeze thinking that it would be a good position to be in heading up the course. Unfortunately, it didn’t actually help that much and we rounded the top mark around 15th. We held that position around the course for the rest of the race.
We weren’t extremely happy with our scores at first, but once we got in and chatted about how we actually sailed and put the scores in prospective to everyone else, we were a little happier with them.
We have two more days left of racing and 4 races scheduled for tomorrow. Tomorrow’s forecast looks to be on the lighter side, so we will see what the day has in store! We are very much looking forward to getting back on the water again and doing more racing!
For the overall results, you can check them out here. They didn’t do live coverage of our racing today, but I can imagine that we will have some coverage tomorrow. Click here for live coverage details.
Anna & Paris
Henken | Tobias Sailing 