This year’s race featured 42 boats registering but I believe
only 38 started in picturesque Fidalgo Bay in Anacortes Washington. A
quick bit of background, this race starts in Anacortes on Friday night at 19:30
hours for all Double Handed entries, followed 10 minutes later by the crew
boats @ 19:40. This year’s race had an equal amount of entries in both
crewed and double handed divisions. Anacortes Yacht Club put on a hot
meal and weather briefing @ 17:00 and present awards to last year’s winners as
well giving out any last minute changes to the sailing instructions. The
club also provides each both with a SPOT tracking device’s allowing family,
friends and racers to see where everyone is live on the course……….this can be
both good and bad as I will explain later! Oh and did I mention that this
is a 100 mile race.
Point Roberts Yacht Club had three boats entered in the race
this year, Cinco de Mayo and Vampire in the fast Double Handed division, while
Plus Ten was in the slower Double Handed Division, so this meant we all started
together.
On Cinco de Mayo we had an excellent start, getting off the
line quickly and at the favored end and found ourselves out in front of the
fleet, a spot they would not relinquish till the lights went out and they were
more than halfway up Lummi Island. Sailing at night can be challenging as
its difficult to see pressure on the water and which way you should go to not
run out of wind, a common problem at this time of the year in the gulf
islands. We managed to find puffs and only came to a dead stop once, just
east of Alden Bank and proceeded to float back at 1 knot for an hour. The
good news was that only one boat was ahead of us at this point so we felt we
had done pretty well so far, it was about 00:30 Saturday morning now.
We managed to round the first mark – the Point Roberts Bell
Buoy around 05:30 am Saturday morning and hoisted the kite and started to make
our way to East point. We made decent ground getting across the straits
in about 2.5 hours and were 15 miles ahead of our closest competitor in our
division……….but we missed the tail end of the ebb and the flood was fully
developed and without more wind we were stuck. It took us till noon to
make a mile and get around the corner and our lead had been cut down to 3-4
miles.
The rest of the trip to Hein Bank was similar to the past 4
hours, light to no wind and time waiting to past tide gates. Meanwhile
the boys in the back of the pack were enjoying a nice breeze in the Georgia
Straits and were making up miles on us fast.
We drifted past Turn Point and were headed up Haro Strait –
at a whopping 0.5 of a knot ( yes we were just drifting ). It was
actually about 19:00 on Saturday night and we had gone 3 miles in 5 hours when
we started to think about quitting. The realization that all our hard work
the night before had gone to waste was starting to where on us. So we
decided to have a hot meal, turn on some music and give it another couple of
hours. While we were waiting another big freighter came by and I thought
to myself ( we are allowed to run our engine to get ourselves out of the way of
commercial traffic as long as it doesn’t better our position ) lets motor into
Roche and relax and just wait for the breeze and motor back out to our previous
spotJ but alas, we waited.
At 21:00 a light breeze developed as the sun set so we were
off to Hein Bank again. We made it there around 00:30 Sunday morning but
we were not alone anymore. We rounded and started our way home. The
problem was that there was a big ebb @ 3.5 knots that was going to start in an
hour thus, getting around into Rosario strait was going to be impossible till
09:00 am and by then all of the boats behind will be with us and being at the
top end of the rating band in our class, that meant we had less than 8 miles to
put over 1.5 hours on our competitors. But winning wasn’t our objective
anymore, finishing was!
The forcast for the entire weekend was spot on. Today
the Westerly was going to start to develop around 10:00 am and right on time it
did. Obviously being in front of the boats and heading East meant that
the boats behind would get that new breeze first but at least we could see the
light at the end of the journey now, the finish line was just over there!
We set the kite one last time ( I think it went up 12 times
in total ) and had our best run of the trip, hitting 7 knots of boat speed in
the water in about 11 knots of breeze.
We finished @ 12:04:17 Sunday afternoon. We were the 3rd
boat to finish the race and first to finish in our division, that’s the
positive. The bad news for us was that the other 10 boats were about to
finish starting just 3 minutes later.
Congrats to Velli and Andy on Plus Ten, they finished 6th
overall and 4th in their division. Cinco de Mayo with myself
and Ivan, were 10th overall and 4th in her division.
Vampire, with Don Mille and Mark Hansen, finished 7th overall and 1st
in her division!!!
Only 14 boats finished the race out of the 38 that
started. This is a race of skill and perseverance. At times you
want to jump off the boat and just swim ashore, while other times you are
having the time of your life.
As I mentioned the Anacortes Yacht Club give each boat Race
Trackers. While racing family and friends can follow your every move, my
wife and kids kept calling and texting me saying look out, so and so is about
to pass you. Now back at home you can review the tracks you and your
competitors took in live time. So check out the link below and click on a
boat or multiple boats and watch the routes they all took.
That’s it for now, see you all on the water.
No comments:
Post a Comment