Hi Everyone! It was a cold, dark and rainy night...lighter wind, rolling waves and dark skies. Even with all that, we had, what I would consider, a very successful race! Dark Island finished first in the section! We're the only ones in our section! HA! Then the race committee grouped us with another section, and we ended up towards the middle. But that's ok... we (and the race committee) need to figure out where we fit in and who we should be racing against. Either way, we had a good start, we played with a couple different sails, which was good practice, but probably ended up slowing us down a little, and we took a more conservative approach to the whole race - which will probably change as we get more comfortable... pretty soon we'll be screaming at everyone to get out of our way!
Check out Maskwa behind us in this picture. No, not the boat you can see behind us with the red sail numbers, but the small light at the top of the mast on the boat behind the boat you CAN see in the picture... that's how overcast it was Wednesday...
We had a bit of a challenge on Monday evening. I got a call from the harbor at about 5, saying that our head sail was "up". Well, it is always up, no? At any rate, I zipped downtown to find that the clew had ridden up the sail and a pocket opened, causing a half-hour glass aloft. The wind was howling so I didn't think I could handle it alone. In fact, the motion on the headstay was so violent, I thought the whole rig would come down. Matt met me at the harbor, and we began to try to sort things out. We finally found a way to unwind the sail, and Dennis, from Planxty came by with his son, and they leant a hand - none of us really knowing what to do with a fouled roller furller. Tom arrived from Elgin and after about 2 hours we all had it secured. Nothing looks torn or broken, so we will re-furl properly on Wednesday, and probably just go out for a sail, rather than race.
ReplyDeleteThanks to Matt for his help with that. Thanks to all of you who helped on Race Committee on Sunday.
Judi