Thursday, June 21, 2007

A few words...

In terms of results, we prefer Monday's to our last two days. However, the difference between 1st and mid-fleet in this class is about one mistake. It's not too hard to make a few of them around the race course and many of these races are being lost rather than won.

In the round the island race, we got caught in two huge traffic jams at the first two marks. Hard to say if we could have avoided them and done any better. The small boats started first, and with the foul current slowing everyone down, it was the first two marks that involved the most compression between all the classes. We opted to play the the port layline for clear air on both of these roundings. Our hope was to shoot through to clear air on stbd after rounding, but no holes appeared and we ended up joining the crowd rounding each mark while some of our competitors found better openings and shot ahead. We also gybed out for clear air early on the run down the island and then the wind shifted to the left on the run, basically forcing us to consolidate a loss...

Yesterdays racing was very close. Good starts, but we overstood mark #1 in the fog and spent the rest of the race catching up. Our ability to pass boats that race was really a credit to our crew work which was exceptional while others had some real trouble rounding marks. In Race #2, we were on the outside of a shift that put us in third, and then ducked one boat that ended up on the stbd layline. Bummer....we then overstood by 5-7 boat lengths allowing another to squeeze in at the mark. Although separated by only a boat length or two, it was back and forth from there with very little change for the rest of the race.

We'll try to do better today.....boatspeed is fine to very good relative to others. Gibb's doing a great job driving. No reason to think that things can't return to consistent top 4 finishes. That's our goal....

No comments:

Post a Comment