First Summer Series Race

My sailing goals for this year include:

• Participate in more weekend races
• Do at least one overnight sail (yes, sailing through the night, taking watch, etc)
• Bareboat charter for a week's vacation, possibly in the San Juan Islands

To meet the first goal, I joined a bunch of crew lists and sent out email to some skippers who listed themselves as racing in the bay in a competitive way but for fun. I've already been talking to some of them and am scheduled to crew in some races.

My first weekend race of this season was the Sequoia YC's Summer Series #1. I crewed for Skipper Stan on the Smokin' J, the J29 I enjoyed so much last year. We were very short-handed with Stan (our skipper), Alex E (who I crewed with a few times last year), my buddy Norbert (who I brought along at the last minute when someone cancelled), and myself. The race was from marker 3 out to marker B (by the main span of the San Mateo bridge) and back to marker 3.

It was a gorgeous, warm, sunny day with very light NW winds (probably about 6-8 knots at best). We had a flood tide almost the whole time, but we were moving along pretty well on the way up to the mark (5-6 knots most of the time). We moved much slower on the downwind leg—about 3 knots on average.

Since Norbert and I just finished our spinnaker handling class, we were anxious to get out there and do some spinnaker work on a bigger boat than the Merits we'd trained on and in a real racing situation. To be honest, we weren't that good. I was doing foredeck and was really slow in raising the chute. I was also slow on gybes but did ok and got faster as I got more practice. Stan actually showed me a different way to do an end-to-end gybe than the way I'd learned it, so in my defense, this was my first time.

When all the number crunching was finished back at the YC, we ended up coming in 4th out of 5 boats in the spinnaker class. The only boat that didn't beat us was Black Sheep, which Ron was single-handing and didn't use his spinnaker. So I guess we didn't do very well at all.

As always, though, a good time was had by all!