Spring Sailing

We finished up our spring sailing series with a bit of a whimper, but we did enough to win the series, so I guess I should be happy:)

The highlight though was Round Saltspring Island race, held every May long weekend. 

This years event was especially enticing as we expected to have a fabulous dual with boats like 4 115's, 2 J 35's, 2 Express 37's, 2 J 36's, 2 beneteau 36.7's, along with other similar rated boats.  Well as it turns out they put us in a different division than all of the regular boats we would normally do battle with.  I wasn't happy so went up to the Race Officer and plead my case, and in the end took a 6 second penatly to move up to at least start with the j 35's and C&C 115's.........

Well the race went as expected and was a lovely day.  The highlights were being the 8th boat physically out of Samson Narrows, the half way point of the race and only trailing one of the above mentioned boats.

We knew, based on the weather pattern that the day would be light but it was steady which was nice.  We were on schedule to be done by 9:00pm which is just about when the sun sets and the wind shuts off!  However the Southy Point Parking lot not only put a damper on those plans but it also let about 50 boats sail right up next to us.  The crew worked really hard and we managed to escape with only 3 boats ahead of us in this now 50 boat pack.

We beat down the back side of Saltspring Island enjoying a nice 7-8 knot breeze and some amazing sailors soup ( thanks Lin ) and just as we entered Captains Passage, right at 9:30 with just 3-4 miles to go, the wind shut down:(

We drifted for a bit, then got a puff and up went the kite and we raced to the sisters , still ahead of all of our competitors when the breeze died completely @ 10:00 pm and the lights completely shut off.

Well we tried everything, but nothing was going to work.  To make matters worse we lost track of the others - there were lights everywhere.

Well as it turns out we drift pretty well because as we approached the finish line we tacked over and rolled a boat - RAGS - a C&C 115 that came out of no where to pass in the last mile of the race and us not even know about it.  It was 1:23 AM and we were done......we crossed the line, motored out of the way and packed up the boat and got to the dock.  To our amazement we were first boat out of all those similar to us to be done, regardless of the ratings:):)  We were the 3rd boat to actually finish since the wind shut off @ 10:00.

A huge thank you to my stellar crew, Andy - Ivan - Ian - Lin - Tim.  Never an issue and nothing but positive stuff all race long.

We finished 15th overall out of 120 + boats that started and if we had our proper rating would have been 13th.  And to finish with the woulda coulda's had we finished around 10:30 or so could have been close to top 5!    Oh well, there is always next year.

CdM