SYSCO Summer Thursday Series Race 6

July 8, 2021

This evening was a beautiful light wind racing night.  The course was "T", Start-1(Buoy 2)-3-Finish.  Crew was back to Jon and Jill.  But before the race this evening, we tried to thread the new spinnaker line.  Jon and I hoisted Jill to the top of the mast.  I even drew her a diagram on how to thread the line through the spinnaker block at the bow end of the mast head and down through the hole in the mast.  It would have worked if the hole was larger or the line splice was smaller in diameter.  But Jill tried valiantly to get the line into the hole after threading the chain through it.   However the evening was not lost.  I had repaired our hull cleaner and cleaned the hull, which needed it.

As I stated earlier, the wind was lighter this evening than in the past races.  The starting line was wide and watching the boats sailing, I notice that port tack sailing was more down stream than starboard tack.  So for a change we decided to start at the committee boat end.  La Dolce Vita (LDV) had the same idea.  But the wind had another idea.  It died just before the start at the committee boat.  Both LDV and us were left to scamper up to the start.  The track below shows the mess we were in before and during the start.  We started three minutes after the leaders just behind LDV.  We sailed into the channel on port tack.  I tacked before LDV.  We stayed on starboard tack until we could make the mark, then tacked to port. We tacked to starboard but not before the other three boats were lined up rounding the mark.  We rounded the mark fourth, but we cut it close.  Jon and Jill set the pole with alacrity.  We caught up to the pack.  We managed to stay on the upwind side of everyone. 

By staying on the upwind side of the pack, we managed to be in clear air.  We gained and passed them.  Then they caught up to us.  We passed them again.  The track below shows the down wind leg as starting out slowly, red to yellow to light green.  There are places where it gets lighter and then darker, until near the end of the run.  I noticed that we were getting much more beam reach wind than following.  I adjusted the main and picked up speed, which made the wind even more of a beam reach.  We dosed the whisker pole and did not lose our lead in front of the pack, still being mostly to windward of them.  We set the head sail.  The track goes dark green.  We rounded the mark 3 to 4 boat lengths in front of the pack with Blewstreak behind us.  

We finished in first place.



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