Race Zero Commentary

Well, what to say?  All the weather forecasts I had checked out turned out to be wrong.  Or, to put it another way, they were right but about 2 hours out in predicting when the increase in wind velocity and change in direction would happen.

About 7 boats turned out.  The ones I recognized were Trading Places, Windsong, Gleam, Tidelines (I think) and…..well, that was it.  But I think there actually were a couple more.  No Excuses, I think.  Who did I miss?

One reason I didn’t get a good read is that I and my crew were busy rigging my new J70 for its first trip out onto the Peconic Bays.  We barely made it to the start line with about 2 minutes to the gun.  Just enough time to get to the West end of the line and turn to sail straight back down the line towards the Eastern mark as the seconds counted down.  With so few boats, the line was plenty long and hardly anybody seemed to be over early at the gun….

After that it was a slog with patchy, light winds and enough outbound current at G3 to make it very frustrating making westward headway.  Trading Places seemed to do best by staying closer to the New Suffolk beach, while those of us who went across the current and crossed near the mark had a very bad time of it.  On my boat we struggled through and  g r a d u a l l y  pulled away.  Looking back, we realized that the following boats struggled as much or more and, in fact, started to drop out.

A brief battle ensued between us on the J70 and Trading Places before we threw in the towel.  It had been a long, hot day and we’d run out of cold beer.

Last evening I got an e-mail that said “Trading Places: 4.58.47”.  More power to Tom and his crew.  As he told me in a later email, “The wind finally kicked in about 10-15 minutes after you turned back”.

Oh well.  At least we tried to get a first semi-official race in!

 Til next Sunday,

Peter