Cabo Race Report #1

Hello from Morpheus!! We are underway once again "think" we are in pretty good shape.

Started the race this afternoon off Newport Beach. Nice onshore conditions with about 10-12 knots of wind. I blew the start pretty badly and had to spin around at the last minute to keep from being forced into the committee boat. No problem though as we were off an running just behind the leaders and had great speed!!!

We have a new main for this race and it has about 30 square feet more sail area than the last one. In the light conditions that we are sailing in so far it makes an amazing difference. (Perhaps that's why I screwed up the start. Maybe I forgot to compensate for the extra speed!)

Anyway based on the weather forecast info that we had we chose to basically sail a rhumbline course while favoring the side towards land a bit. We all sailed at about the same speed for the first few hours, but towards evening the wind died for everyone. This was expected as the wind was supposed to shift from NW to ENE. What nobody really knew was which side of the course would get the new wind first. Lucky for us, the new breeze filled in from the shore out. So being on that side of the pack and committing pretty hard to the shore when the wind did die, we made out big time and think that we left those offshore quite a ways behind. Of course, the bad news is that those that were playing the shore harder than us bet big and won big and they have extended on us.

The race will probably have plenty of restarts as the forecast is for light winds and we should expect some interesting times between here and the finish!!

Enjoy watching the race on the race tracking site. Debbie please email to the group.

-Jim

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