Close but No Cigar (by Matt Krogstad)
Dan and I on Tequila Mockingbird had a good race but missed out on it being a great race by only a little bit.
Nailed the start. We were the only boat in the fleet to do timed runs in the ebb with no breeze to time our drift over the line right. We then picked our way on the beach side of the course because there was some local pressure in there and even managed to be the first boat in the event to pop a chute as there was this temporary southerly in there. Made huge gains and caught up to the 2 starts ahead of us by the south tower. There was a nice 8-10 on the other side of the bridge and we motored out the channel tacking on a few shifts. There was one case where on the left side of the channel we found some reverse current and slowed down a lot and dropped 3 knts over ground before we quickly tacked out (starts at ~1:15 in the vid): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F_cWvFgGRw&feature=youtu.be
Then about 2 miles west of Bonita things got LIGHT. Like we were going 0.0 through the water but luckily still had some help from the ebb. This lasted for a very long time and the amount of gas onboard became a topic of conversation. Breeze would vary between 2-6 knots. In these conditions the Moore’s made massive gains. After an hour or maybe 2 of this we got headed significantly and immediately tacked and the breeze filled in to 10-12 finally building to 15-ish. We had been hoping for a righty all day and it showed up. We had been getting wound up on port for a while and I was worried the righty wouldn’t come. It was so glassy it was hard to imagine it ever building. With the Moore 24 “Mas” we were the left most boat beating and then later cracked off a little going straight at the mark. Rest of the fleet were pretty overstood. A wyliecat 30 "Uno" made big gains in the cracked off conditions and caught up to us in the 5-7 miles going into the islands and passed us as we rounded but also managed to take a pic of us outboard sheeted. Going around the island we were quite conservative and stayed in 70 ft of water or so. The Wyliecat and I am sure others cut the corner into ~40 ft depths and made some gains there. At this point we were prob a mile or more ahead of our nearest competition "El Raton". We did not set the chute as we bore off around the backside of the island (again being conservative) but could have on stbd pole. We gybed on the layline to South Tower and the breeze was 13-15 at 90 deg apparent or slightly forward. We were tracking Raton about a mile behind us and they two sailed reached going higher so we covered but could have set our new chicken chute (recut older class chute) and carried it about 5-10 deg below rhumb line. When they set their chute we followed with our chicken chute which was nice to try out for the first time racing. Then the breeze lightened and we peeled to the larger class chute. It did not appear to us that Raton’s higher line had helped them and they fell in behind us which was nice. We were feeling good at this point pumping the main and chute in the waves and having a great time.
As we entered the shipping channel Raton started going very high again. We were in with the 2 Moore’s who ended up taking 1st and 2nd overall going into the channel while Raton went very high. This being our first time entering the channel in these ebb conditions we didn't really have a lot of local knowledge on where to go. We looked at the GPS to look at depths, etc trying to figure out what Raton was doing. It didn't make sense and just seemed like a lot of extra distance since it did not seem they could get into the bays enough to get much relief. Their last attempt at going high didn't work so were unsure of whether this would. We thought about it and attempted to dive deep to get into relief towards Baker beach but a container ship came out and we could not safely make it across so we went back to being on the north side of shipping channel. We passed Point Diablo in 160 ft of water about a mile or so to the south. 1 Moore started creeping up and the other stayed low. We followed the one that stayed low. At this point we were eating 2 knots of adverse current which was concerning but the hope was that it would be short-lived pain for less distance to the finish (wishful thinking). We seemed to be even with Raton up until the final 0.5 mile before bridge and then they started going fast forward big time. They reached the north tower before we reached the South Tower and gybed and went hot reaching across the mouth of the bay in the thick of the ebb all the way into the beach before running down to the finish. We gybed in puffy winds swirling around the South Tower (by this point is way 8:45, dark, and blowing 15 or so). We got a massive twist in the chute during the gybe which took about a minute to clear up. This was less than ideal. We went in for relief towards the beach a bit bummed as it appeared we had lost out on first place in the e27 fleet. We had great breeze in the bay and finished 22 seconds behind El Raton. Got 2nd in div and 6th overall.
Not bad for my first DHF…. Can’t wait for next year!
** One good safety idea we got out of the race happened due to our SPOT tracker failing during the race which caused our spouses to get concerned without any info on what to do. Maybe everyone else does this but going forward we'll leave info for family ashore so they know what to do if they want to track us down including a phone # for the race officer, our sail #, MMSI, and PLB #. Just a though |
