Sailing Blog
Mixed Bag on Day 1 of Melges 32 Worlds »
September 22, 2010
Day 1 of the Melges 32 Worlds ended up like the practice race finished, with huge San Francisco breeze and great racing conditions. With the fan turned on and fully pumping many teams would find themselves in collisions, wipeouts and carnage type situations, and many contenders would end the day with high scores, and a few darkhorses have found themselves leading the regatta.
With a solid 18-25 kts of breeze, Race 1 would go to the Kiwi team led by tactician and good friend Andrew Wills. The Kiwis have been getting better with each event and they clearly have found good wheels in the breeze. The most impressive performance in race 1 however was from the Full Throttle team who found themselves OCS and battled back all the way to 3rd place by the end. They pegged the right side of the course hard each time up wind, made massive gains and sailed cleanly downwind to sneak into the front of the group. On the Samba, we were shot out the back on the start and had to bail out, hanging in there for a 9th place.
In the 2nd race, we had a great spot in the front of the group at the top mark, pulled off a nice gybe set, only to find ourselves getting to the wrong side of a shift in a slightly dying breeze. The boats who did a bear away set made big gains downwind and we lost at least 7 to 8 boats. There were plenty of collisions, but there were also some injuries as the team on Arethusa found out when one of their team member’s ankles got wrapped in a spinnaker retrieval line from a nearby boat attempting to take down their spinnaker. Having someones ankle wrapped in a take down line as the other boat is pulling like mad and the boats are separating at a high rate of speed…not a good scenario.
Up to this point, we had found ourselves sailing ok, not great, but we did not have any “majors” up to this point and we were feeling good about having a solid race to finish of the day. One lesson to learn is when you let your guard down on SF Bay, you often get punished. When the gun went, B-Lin and Q nailed the pin, port tack the fleet and rounded 1-2 at the top mark. We muddled around in 10th as we went for our first hoist and as we pulled off a nice gybe set, we unexpectedly got rounded up and were on our side. With a quick look back, we discovered the bow sprit of Warpath was speared through our leeward stanchion and making it impossible to keep the boat going. Once we seperated, we lost a few boats and continued on to the bottom mark.
The final set of the day, we called for another gybe set and as we got ready to bear away to go around the offset, the breeze caught the head of the spinnaker a few seconds early, pulled it our of the hatch and our kite was hoisted sideways. At the same time, we got caught in the quarter wake from the boat in front of us, lost steerage and wiped out with a total yard sale at the top mark. Not a good look with plenty of helicopters and photo boats snapping pictures. We finally managed to get the kite back into the boat, re-set and hung on to beat 4-5 boats…needless to say a tough end to a very average day.
Breeze if is forecast to be a bit lighter tomorrow and with our throwout already used up, we will have no more room for error as we battle the next 3 days. Check Melges32.com for full results.
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