Cheeseburger Regatta - August 25, 2007

The biggest fun race of the year was last Saturday. It was all Merit 25s, so there were no handicaps. There was a boat lottery, and we were assigned to boats with crews arranged by Mike at Spinnaker. My skipper on M2 was Kerry, who I'd raced with a couple of weeks ago. Also on our boat were my friend Sandi, Norbert (a BCC classmate), and Heli (who none of us knew but she'd just finished BKS).

As soon as we raised the sails, Heli informed us that she'd torn a huge hole in her pants and that we'd be getting to know her really well really fast! Sandi had some duct tape and took Heli down below to "patch her up". You can see the result of Sandi's handywork in this picture.

We got out to the starting line before anyone else and started timing drills... tacking back and forth to see how long it takes to tack and get back to the starting line. That way, we were able to time our start and pass the line right on time... which we did... exactly on time. We quickly took the lead and were so far ahead of all the other boats at one point that we couldn't imagine we'd take anything less than first place. Keep reading...

The course was to round marker 2 at the end of the channel, round marker 11 right in front of the main span of the San Mateo Bridge, round marker 2 again, and be the first boat back to the marina. After we rounded marker 2, still in the lead, we headed toward the main span of the bridge and noticed that M4 was heading almost directly east. We couldn't understand what they were doing, but we had plenty of wind, an ebb tide, and were speeding toward the bridge, so we didn't really care.

All went well as we kept heading up toward the eastern span of the bridge to take advantage of the ebb. We notice a boat much further west than us, heading for the western span of the bridge and thought it was M4 taking a different course. (We didn't find out until the race was over that that was M1, and M4 was way behind us.)

We were pretty confident that we could maintain the lead... until... we got close to the bridge and tacked about 110 degrees to head directly for the mid-span and hit a dead spot. We had NO wind at all! We were seriously dead in the water and couldn't move for what seemed like an eternity but was probably a minute or two. We turned in different directions, trying to catch any little breeze, but nada. Finally, we drifted out of the dead spot and caught a little wind and started to move.

Meanwhile, the boat we thought was M4 had rounded the marker and was heading back to 2. We rounded the marker next and headed down, setting up wing-and-wing sails, just as the boat in front of us had done. We watched them the whole way back to see what they were doing, and then followed suit, if they seemed to be moving faster. There was very little wind at all... maybe 4-6 knots, so we were trying to capture any small advantage we could.

When we got close to marker 2, we noticed the boat in the lead was fiddling with their spinnaker pole and trying to shift their jib to the port side to prepare for a beam reach down the channel. They lost a little time while they were fiddling... time we gained on them as our sail change was flawless. Thank you, Kerry!

We chased that first boat all the way down the channel and gained on them every step of the way. We crossed the finish line second by only about 4 boat lengths. Pretty good, since they'd timed us out at marker 11, and we were 3 minutes behind them at that point. If the race had been another half mile long, we might have won!

It was a really good race, though, and we all had a blast! At the BBQ afterwards, our crew and a few others decided to charter a "big boat" together on Labor Day and have a nice leisurely sail together.

Stay tuned for more postings soon.........