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2006 Sunset – Race #8 |
June 7th - Crew tonight was Dick, Art, Demitri, Frank, Jim and Reggie. After last week's persistent shift to the south we wanted to keep our eyes open for such a possibility tonight. It seems to us like 10 years ago the boat that went furthest south on Wednesday night usually won. That has seldom been true in recent years but we wanted to be on the lookout. After checking out the pre-race winds we decided to start at the pin end. There were a few boats to our right but no one between us and pin. We got a clean start.
We basically went up the middle of the course. After the start we stayed on starboard until we got a slight header and tacked to port. We then sailed on port to the starboard-tack layline for E Mark, with PH-C going around the same mark ahead of us. There had been heavier winds earlier in the week so we were keeping our eyes open for kelp.
We were the first boat in our class to get to E Mark and probably had a 2-3 minute lead over the next boat, which we think was Avet but there were other boats quite close to her. As we got ready to round the windward mark, it seemed like our lucky night. That was soon to change. As we came into the windward mark our jib-trimmer started calling off the distance to the mark. There was apparently some confusion at that point because the spinnaker started going up early. Since we hadn't rounded the mark yet our spinnaker was in danger of touching the mark. To compensate, our helmsman stayed high while rounding. Unfortunately, that was to prove fatal - as we only learned later. Anyway, we rounded the mark, got our chute set and then gybed over onto port since it pointed closer to the breakwater.
At that point we realized something was very wrong. With the wind strength that we had we should have been going ~6 knots. Instead we were going ~3 knots. We had serious problems with kelp twice last year so over the winter we had a kelp window installed. We went below and checked the window and sure enough we had kelp. We dragged out our kelp-clearing line (whose design was borrowed from the Martin 242 class) and flossed. After five attempts to remove the kelp by flossing (each of which did pull off some of the kelp) we decided flossing wasn't radical enough and that we better drop the spinnaker and back down. We got the chute down on deck, went head-to-wind and backed down - a huge piece of kelp came off (as big a piece as some of us have ever seen). We then turned back downwind and checked the window. EGAD - there was still more! We went head-to-wind and backed down a second time but nothing came off. We then went head-to-wind and backed down a third time and a piece of kelp bigger than the first piece came off! Our track for that time looks quite strange! A check through the window revealed the keel to be clear of kelp so we put the spinnaker back up and got back in the race. When the crew had a chance to talk about the whole incident later we realized that the kelp had been right at the windward mark. If we had done a normal rounding we would have completely missed it (going to leeward of it). However, because we had to round wide to keep our spinnaker clear of E Mark we had run right over the kelp.
Most of the boats in our class were far ahead of us so there wasn't much traffic. After we got rid of the kelp we caught a few waves and saw speeds as high as 6.9 knots with sustained speeds of 5.8+ knots. That was a far cry from the ~3 knots we were going when we had the kelp caught on the keel. We sailed on in to the finish line without any significant worries about other boats in our class, all of whom we assumed were well ahead of us. It turned out there were several boats behind us so we were 8th, and not 12th, and corrected out to be ~5-1/4 minutes behind the 1st-place boat (Avet). We later estimated that we lost 4-1/2 to 5 minutes due to the kelp so we probably would have been 2nd if not for the kelp.