2007 Grand Prix

So the Seattle Yacht Club puts on a three day event in the beginning of Nov called Grand Prix. It is an invitational regatta and you must qualify during the season to attend. We managed to pull a third place finish at Race Week, so we were going to grand prix. It is usually very cold, and it usually blows fairly hard at least one day. That was the case again this year. This would mark the first time that I drove at Grand Prix, but not my first rodeo. The previous boat that I sailed on, Isabeau, managed to win our class three years running, not too shabby. Anyway, we had a tough fleet as always, and had to sail against the fastest boats in our rating band.

Friday usually has one medium distance race to get the blood pumping for the weekend, we saw light winds for this race and had a so so start. It was fun to see the broad spectrum of boats that were in our fleet, a moore 24, a pocket rocket 22, an Olsen 25, a Ranger 26, Santa Cruz 27, and some others. Here is a shot taken right after our start Friday.....

The bad news, was that the wind had other plans and died right before we got to the finish, very frusterating to get so close and watch as the others come from behind, nothing new to us......

So Saturday saw some heavy air, and we were ready, sailing with five, with the help of our buddy Rich. We managed to have two over early starts, putting us in bad position of each upwind leg. The wind built as the day went on and we manged to end up at the weather mark with the big boat fleet bearing down on us. We were on the lay line doing fine, when we were tacked on by a larger boat (I think it was Veloce, but they did apoligize....) so we went into pinch mode, more and more big boats surrounded us, until it was obvious that were were not going to make the mark. At this point in time I tried to tack onto port, but had no room to duck or cross anyone, so we flopped back onto stbd, just to realize that Shoot the Moon, a peterson 40, was also in pinch mode coming up right behind us. I tried to yell, but they had stalled and lost helm, so I sat in horror as I watched a wave lift their bow up, and dropp it right onto our port transom. The impact drove our boat forward rapidly, and I bore off as quickly as I could to clear the scene. They didn't even realize they hit us and kept on racing. By the time shell shock was over, we were way too far to hail them to protest, and I pointed our horse to the stable with a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomache.

We evaluated the damage when we arrived back at the dock, and it was a pretty large impact, about the size of a grapfruit, complete with their red paint. I felt horrible, as it wasn't even my boat! We sat around and watched the rest of the days racing while eating burgers and shakes from the local diner. Once Shoot the Moon arrived back at the dock, Vic and I went to go have a conversation with the owner to sort this all out. They were totally cool about the whole thing and offered to pay for the damage. Winter project is all I could think...... Needless to say, even dispite missing a couple races, we were coming back for more on Sunday since the forecast was for more wind!

Sunday saw a great northerly and a long kite run down past Elliot bay. We had a long slug back upwind and manged to even learn that the lee side of the Ferries have a HUGE wind shadow, that is a funny story....once we climbed out of the water, the wind returned and off we went again, looking around to see if anyone had saw that....we found out later that some people did and had a good laugh. We pulled off a second place finish (missed first by three seconds after racing for 3 hours!!!) and felt like we had redeemed ourselves. I arrived home and was met at the door by my wife, holding a pregnacy test.....we were going to have another little one!! ! That was enough excitment for me for one weekend, and a great ending to a great season for Shenanigans. We finished middle of the pack, but it felt to me like we had won!

2007 Saragota Sprint (aka Baby Island)

So Baby Island is a race in August that WINSA puts on that is a nice relaxing pace compared to Race Week a month earlier. The big thing this year for us was the engineering genious that Joey displayed when adding our new SailComp to the boat. Not to be out done by fancy brackets, or recommended mounting ideas in the manual, Joey pulled one right out of the 3M play book.....scotch tape. I have never met anyone who has scotch tape on a boat, in fact, I couldn't produce you a roll of scotch tape from my desk as I type. Not this guy, he pulls out a full roll, and in under one minute, had the sailcomp mounted in a very seaworthy manner right next to our chartplotter. Classic.......







As you can see, we have our game faces on, and a good thing too, since the well known racing yacht, "Yeah Dogg" made an apperance to go head to head with Shenanigans. I know what you are probably thinking, "Is that Chad in the back of that boat?" The answer is yes! Either he was too drunk to realize he was holding onto the tiller and not the spinnaker pole, or he is doing a great job acting like a winner yacht racing skipper.


Yeah Dogg managed to pull out front and hang onto a nice lead in the 15 knots southerly that had develped after a light air start. It took us half way uphill to catch up to these guys. This is the moment we climbed above them and passed them after an hour tacking dual.




Chad and the gang ended up correcting out over us, and claimed a first place trophy, good for him! Very cool to see Chadly driving a boat.

2007 Whidbey Island Race Week

Race week is always an amazing event, and this year was no different. It was our first year with Shenanigans, but marked my 13th year at race week, the previous two I drove my hotfoot 20, so I was getting more comfortable at the helm at this venue. We had a pretty tough fleet and we found ourselves as scratch boat, so if anyone was in front of us, they were beating us.

We sailed with the usual suspects, Vic, Joey, K-Dawg, Rich, and I even brought my younger sister, squirt, along on Friday (I think she learned some new words). We got off to a rocky start on monday, which included a minor collision at the leeward mark the first day, but didn't phase us. We came back swinging and managed to pull off some pretty decent finishes, including a first!

Our biggest problem was keeping up with an extremely well sailed Hotfoot 27, Egress. These guys were fast and could sail well. They hardly every made mistakes and it was fun to sail against them, as it makes you better. The one I didn't see coming was the threat the Olsen 25s put on us. Nate with Three Ring Circus led the charge and managed to string together a consistant regatta and come out ahead after a tough race on Friday beating us by two points by a great finish on Friday.

The weather was great, consistantly blowing 8-10 from the west with blue skies. The only day we had with light air was Thursday. The typical up the right side down the left proved to be the way to go as usual, although we did take some risks trying out some other routes when we were down and managed to sneak back a few places when no one was watching us.

The boat sailed well and we managed to hold our own going downhill, something I was worried about. We were able to burn down and sail as low as the mastheads, but had to periodically heat it up to gain some boat speed back. All in all, I was very pleased with how the boat performed and how we sailed her.

The real funny story came on Friday, we were in second place by two points to Three Ring, and Friday was forecasted to be light. We watched as the RC attempted to start races in a dying southerly, and bobbed around for a while. After the three blasts came, I started to cheer and get very excited about finishing second in race week, something that almost certainly tempted fate. Turns out the RC was just cancelling the races in progress, and saw a westerly filling in Penn Cove, so off we went to restart in a filling westerly. Well, needless to say I was nervous, as I had to fight off the Olsen to claim my second place trophy! As luck would have it, we were putting together great starts all week, top notch, but on Friday, I managed to let the hotfoot get underneath me and they took us to the moon at the start. The gun went off, the knotmeter was reading 0.0 and we were head to wind, I was bummed! We watched the other boats take off and I knew that we had a long battle ahead of us. The worst thing was, that the RC decided to dust off the gybe mark and placed it in front of Coupville, so it was really two reaching legs, leaving us no room to pass other boats. We manged to come back slightly, but not well enough. We placed 6th, and Nate placed 1st, betting us out of second place by three points. Kudos to those guys for sailing a great regatta.

Here is a great shot of how our starts were going all week, with the exception of Friday.

This year was a blast and we are so excited we did so well!