This wonderful weather system is still here! We have lots of wind. It was blowing 12 to 16 knots all day long! we were short handed today, but we had a beautiful spinnaker run out to the start, gybing back and forth, until we wrapped the spinnaker around the forstay in two places. Half an hour later we got the spinnaker down. We repacked the chute, and got ready for the race.
The course for this race was around government marks, but we had to wait until 5 minutes before our start to be sure what our course actually was. It was around three marks and to the finish. It was also a right handed course. Courses are traditionally lefthanded, and the rules are set up for this as the usual circumstance. A righthanded course can be mindblowing, and proved to be for several boats, one in our fleet.
The start was fairly uneventful, with most of the fleet starting on the wrong end at the committee boat. Three started at the pin, the favored end. We were at the committee boat. Oops!
The first leg was dominated by a ratcheting shift. When we realized this, we worked our way to the left of the course to take advantage of the lift we would get. We took our bites on the lifting ratchets, and consolidated on the headers. Approaching the weather mark, the wind shifted 30 degrees back. The one boat, Skybird, still on the right side of the course was now extremely favored and was to the first mark first by about 10 boatlengths. As we watched, Skybird rounded to port. Hey, wrong direction! Protest. We got the protest flag up immediately, and hailed. When Skybird came closer, we told her protest, and that she rounded the wrong way. She obviously didn't believe us, and continued on her way, even though the entire fleet had rounded in the other direction. Sucks for her.
We were second to the mark after consolidating on top of the fleet. We had a slow set because we were shorthanded, but it went up perfectly, and off we went! The leward leg to the southern mile marker was pretty much a parade. We made up on Skybird, and at the last moment, the fleet behind gained three or four boatlengths with a puff that took its time getting to us. The positions were pretty much the same at the leward mark (go figure), and we did a conservative takedown and rounding.
We were back on starboard, heading to the left side of the course. We immediately got a 30 degree lift, and decided that we liked this tack. We did something that we shouldn't have done. We did not take the low risk action of covering our fleet. We had the third place boat come out of the mark with us, low and on our outside hip getting gassed. She should have made two quick tacks and established a windward position, but instead she spent 1.5 miles in our bad air.
As we crossed out of the channel, we were surveying our fleet when we saw this freighter bearing down on them at full speed. Mass confusion reigned. This gave us another nice boost in that race. The freighter was going much faster than she should have been, and appeared out of nowhere. The commercial traffic is warned of races like this, and are expected to travel more slowly through the racing area than usual, but not this guy!
We were still going left, while mist of the fleet was going right. We had just about made it out of an anchored freighter's bad air when the boat on our hip decided to tack and sail the long way through the freighter's bad air. It was a poor decision. Even if she wanted to consolidate with the fleet and get out of our bad air, she should have waited until she could have cleared the freighter. This is what we were planning to do at that moment.
We had been carefully watching our fleet, and they were dropping behind us. We had better air and a better angle. Once we cleared the freighter we saw that the southern side of the severn had even more wind as it came funnelling down the river. We also saw that we were to the left of R"2" which was a passing mark for us. It was to be passed on our right hand side. This meant that the fleet had to come to us. We decided to keep going.
We finally had skybird cross us by about 4 boatlengths, less than one quarter of the distance she had been after the leward mark. She had taken most of the lift, but had gone north of the anchoored freighter, whereas we had gone south.
It was another two boat race between Skybird and Marlin. Skybird had more weight, so she was favored in thehigher wind. When the breeze dropped a little, Marlin was favored. Well, the breeze stayed at the upper range for most of the leg. We watched a beautiful sunset over Annapolis as Skybird opened her lead. For the 20th time I wished that we had three more people on the rail to hold the boat flat. As the sun set, so did the breeze, as is usual. Marlin started making back most of what she lost on the leg, but finished about 10 boatlengths back from Skybird. We watched as Skybird got the gun, but we knew we had won since Skybird went the wrong way around the first mark. We overstood the line a little to come within hailing distance of the committee boat and inform them of our protest.