The third race of the 2014 Goosebumps series featured sunny skies, a sailable 5-7kn of nor-westerly, and half cooked changes to the NOR that included provisions for a 2nd start without any description of a flag sequence that otherwise accompanies the signals provided to 1st start. C'est la vie!
At check-in time we read a course of Aurora-AGC, 2-laps which made good sense to us given the wind was very west/northwest, but after the 1st starters got underway it became obvious that the course board simply hadn’t been completed when we long eyed it. We nailed a pin end port tack start in clear air but stayed high still thinking that the first mark wasAurora till J24 Fat Chance set us straight. The extra distance sailing away from freeway negated much of the advantage from our excellent start.
From freeway we were 3 tacks to the aurora mark and boats staying up closer to Gasworks were able to avoid much of the nasty header influencing boats who tacked immediately at freeway, so it was nice of Tuna 525 Full Moon to lead us up as they had snuck to weather and pinned us out of an earlier tack. The aurora mark was set near the Westlake shore in a painful westerly header which complicated and congested the rounding for boats not paying enough forward attention. On Cake or Death we squeezed by and managed another fine spinnaker set.
Much of the spinnaker traffic was moving off the Westlake shore per conventional wisdom so we took a bit of a risk and stayed higher, protecting what was at least clear air in a notoriously fluky and softer lane on the lake – there were more than a few big boats who cast big shadows that we were chasing down, despite some dramatic fumbling that was quite a show. Through some wild shifts and boat to boat battles for air we ended up sandwiched between Ranger 26 Rascal and Hunter 31 Friday fetching the AGC mark in a softening breeze. With Friday pinned to weather and Rascal too low on the buoy we were able to take point off their transom and sneak into clear air on the 2nd fetch to freeway, leaving Friday in the dust.
While putting our pedal down and VMG’ing our way to the Freeway mark hot on Rascal’s tail, right behind us the Ranger 22 Anakena was on absolute rails and closing quick. At Freeway Rascal tacked while we hardened up for a repeat of the next triple tack beat to Aurora. Anakena stayed even higher than us, trading high-fives with gasworks observers and crossing ahead near the SPD lake union fuzz docks. While we let Anakena get by, we also managed to catch up with Rascal and big sister ship SJ28 Zephyr. Rascal tacked too early for the mark and was rolled over by both Zephyr and our boat which set them low. Rather than gybe around and re-run their approach to the mark the Rascal crew simply bore off and set for the run.
Although we had another quick and pretty spinnaker set we were blocked out to the west by Rascal and a Ranger 23 who seemed to come out of nowhere. The position of the AGC mark and the clear air beneath us allowed for two swift gybes to clear out a lane. Unfortunately all the fumbling about with the other two boats put Anakena out of reach for good, able to sail completely unobstructed by traffic. We did, however, manage to put Rascal and the R23 behind us with our excellent gybes and keen sail trim. In honor of our favorite Persian gangster Milad, we executed a textbook Mexican take-down and reached our way to what we hope is a top half 2nd start finish.
Results are out and they’re confusing...We’d appear to be in 27th place (It should be 26 as Blue Lullaby did not finish between us and Anakena) scoring all 53 boats together. If we extract the 1st start boats, our placement is probably somewhere around 8-11 out of 35 boats. I will say this, however, we’re pretty satisfied with whatever the results of the day are – There was a lot of back-and-forth battling with natural competition and we definitely brought a good fight. Crewing for the mighty Cake or Death was Becker and Nicole on the pointy end, Caleb manning the pit, Christine on dogwatch, Brian and Fisch practicing overrides, and Kyle giving trim instructions by stringing random nouns, verbs, and adjectives together without thinking them through.
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