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!
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