Congrats to Ed Cesare for mopping up the Class 40s. An interesting and challenging race for Dragon, finishing a full 4.5 hours after Ed. The Good: 1) The keel repairs performed exactly as they should. Rock solid... (although maybe I should avoid the word rock) 2) We got a lot of practice in. Multiple sail changes, lots of tacking a gybing. 3) I found and made a few tweaks to the boat set up during the racing, all part of the continuous improvement program 4) the last run from south of Block Island into Newport was epic. As we started it, we saw 3 or 4 boats about 6 miles down the track, heading towards Newport under kites. We just launched it under our big A2 and the storm jib, keeping boat speeds in the mid to high teens. We ended up catching and passing 6 boats, ultimately getting past Icarus in front of Castle Hill. (of course none of those boats should have been in front of us, but more on that later) 5) The finish was a pisser. We ended up pulling off a perfect douse / gybe under the kite in about 16 knots of wind right under Clingstone in the east passage, staying in front of Icarus. We then could fetch the harbor, but the finish line was actually pretty deep inside the harbor, in front of the host Ida Lewis Yacht Club. The conservative move would have been to douse the kite and go in under the storm jib but Icarus was immediately behind us and would have passed us. We kept the kite up, came screaming into the harbor, crossed the line and then had to douse and dump every scrap of sail in about 50 meters before we were to plow into some very expensive hardware floating in the mooring field. In general, it was a pretty good race and better than the results indicated. The boat performed well, and the practice was great. But the rough bits were pretty rough.... The Bad and the Ugly A) Losing the solent cost us, both in terms of the time it took to get it down and the bare headed rounding of the NB buoy mark at a crawl but then even more in terms of not having that sail for the 37 beat up from Buzzards Bay to Montauk. B) We had a bit of a sloppy and slow set of the kite for the first run from Newport to Buzzards Bay, mostly the result of having the solent issues. C) Our first rounding of Buzzards was wide, slow and embarrassing D) Then... the topper. Most of these races use government bouys as marks for the fleet to turn around. This race had those, but also had one mark that was virtual, with just a latitude and longitude coordinate to turn around. It was actually used twice during the race. Idiot that I am, i put in the wrong coordinates. Instead of a latitude of 41.06.00 I used 41.00.06 which is six miles to the south of the actual mark of the course. In total, it meant an extra 17 miles of sailing which was about 2.5 hours of time. We liked the race so much we decided to increase its length by 10%.... A little bit of a debacle, but well worth doing. I liked our speed when we were running, and liked the boat handling. After going to an excellent party at the host club last night, a night cap at Willies and a good nights sleep at the Shipyard, I delivered the boat back to Stonington today. She is tied up at the New England Sailing and Science Center, the first time she has been back in home waters in almost two years of adventures.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 21:58:58 +0000
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