Sailing Blog
St. Thomas Rolex – Day 2 »
March 26, 2011
When I poked my head out of the hatch on the 55ft cruising boat I am staying on in St Thomas Yacht Club harbor, Im not sure if I was expecting something different, but it is almost like the weather conditions are on cruise control. When we go to bed, it is blowing 15-18 from the ENE, and when we wake up, it is the same. For day 2 of the Rolex Regatta, we knew we had our work cut out for us as the first race of the day was a traditional W/L course, but the second race of the day was going to be a full Caribbean tour with sailing all the way into St. John, than circling back to St. Thomas.
In the first race, the other Melges 32 on the course Jurakan, got off the line cleanly and did a better job of getting a further into the islands to get the most of what appeared to be a land-effect shift. After 60 minutes of racing with less than 2 boat lengths between us the entire time, we took a hard fought 2nd place which was tough to swallow. The heat is also proving to be a tough opponent as there were plenty of spent, exhausted bodies on our boat. The good news was we only had 1 more race for the day, the bad news was it was going to be a 18 mile journey that would be painful if we didnt get a clean start and establish good position early.
Fortunately, we learned our lesson from the first race and got left of the other 32 off the starting line, and could only sail our race to protect against the Melges 24s in our fleet. Once off the starting line we headed around the mark off of Dog Rocks, tight reached over to St. John Island with a nice lead on the fleet and did our best to keep the boat moving as fast as possible knowing every second would count on corrected time. After a 2 mile upwind beat along the gorgeous shoreline of St. John, we left a windward mark to Starboard, reached back to Dog Rocks, set our spinnaker and ripped to the bottom of the course for a downwind finish.
We beat the other 32 by a nice margin, but it was anyone’s guess as to how we would do the other 24s, and all we could do was have a couple of rums at the yacht club and wait. Once the scores were posted, the 24 team on Budget Marine snuck in again for another race win, and we would have to settle for a 2nd only 25 seconds out of first. While this was again a tough result, we still managed to increase our overall lead from Day 1 which set a good tone for the afternoon.
1 marathon race is scheduled tomorrow, and as long as we don’t finish worse than second, we should be able to get a our crazy, Grizzly Bear owner Mark Plaxton a nice Rolex watch for his efforts. Stay tuned. Full results here.
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