Missing on the water was the Tuna 525 Full Moon, reportedly due to illness which has sidelined pretty much everybody in the greater Seattle
Race 5 in the 2013 Goosebumps gets a course creativity award for setting a north-south start/finish line off Westlake Ave with good n’ steady 5-8kn blowing from the NW. The RC set a two lap course around cove and freeway marks. You could say the boat end of the line was HEAVILY favored.
Race 5 in the 2013 Goosebumps gets a course creativity award for setting a north-south start/finish line off Westlake Ave with good n’ steady 5-8kn blowing from the NW. The RC set a two lap course around cove and freeway marks. You could say the boat end of the line was HEAVILY favored.
In the 2nd start fleet we got trapped at 1:30 being taken away from the line by a Tbird below us and blocked out of a tack to port away by a black dinghy above us, stalling our planned gybe to the line by a good 20 seconds. By the time the Tbird hitched for the line we were both a good 20-30 seconds late, however we missed the midline pile-up and found a clear lane at the committee boat with the kite up and drawing good. If you didn’t absolutely nail the start like Zephyr did, being late actually gave the open space to sail out to the front of the fleet.
Reaching the cove mark proved a very tricky rounding necessitating a gybe to port with 1st start leaders (finishing their first lap) reaching the mark hot on startboard at the same time. Like the traffic at the start, the cove turned into an SR520 stop-n’-go without the luxury of ABS. Fending off Ignitor, Friday, and the Newport 33 Free spirit who had us completely boxed in, we watched ourselves get spat out the back while many of the 2nd start participants found their way up and over the top of us.
Much of the fleet remained on port tack looking for the lift off the shoreline of floating homes while we hitched out to starboard for what looked like better breeze and certainly cleaner air in the middle of the lake. The tactic paid off pretty well and we clawed back a number of positions. We rounded freeway on the heels of Free Spirit and immediately put the kite up.
By the cove mark we had worked over Free Spirit and were closing in on the Columbia 26, The Lab (who was having a tremendous race too…) – The Lab took the rounding a bit wide and without the nightmare traffic previously encountered we snuck in and over to weather and began the beat to freeway. Winds started going light and Free Spirit began water-lining us to death…
The tight reach to the finish was rather uneventful, save for the kayaker paddling directly in the pathway of many finishing boats. We held off True Blue and Friday, but couldn’t reel Free Spirit back in with her waterline proving a bit too much for us off the wind. Based on the preliminary results I’m guessing we placed somewhere between 11th and 13th place, despite the results having us in 15th. There are some strange results entries that have The Lab sitting in 7th place despite the fact they finished a few boats behind us, and 3 boats engaged in some form of camoflauge magically got between us and Free Spirit… I don’t think that happened, my crew and I were there…
Cake or Death’s crew on the fine sunny Sunday was Nicole on the pointy end, Fisch and BK pulling strings, Caleb in doubt and easin her out, and Kyle yelling starboard more times than reasonably necessary.
