Weatherman Ron Bianchi predicted very light winds, with some wind holes in the middle of the lake. Most of the wind would be land effect shore breezes. There was a 30% chance there would be thunderstorms coming in from Lake Michigan on Saturday at noon. He was spot on!
White sail fully crewed 1 with 9 boats in our class.
We had competed against many of them in previous LO300s.
Almost 100 boats at the start; what a sight!
We crossed the start line at around 8:30pm, about 30 seconds late (not bad!).
Wind at between 6 and 10 knots from the W, swinging SW.
No waves, we hovered between 5 and 6+ knots of boat speed.
French Vanilla has a theoretical max hull speed of 6.9 knots.
About half way to the Burlington mark, Harvey and Dave went below to sleep. Denis on the helm and me trimming we kept our boat speed up to about half the speed of the wind as the wind was diminishing and swinging to the SW (right on the nose). It was a challenge to keep boat speed up beating towards the first mark. Whenever someone would cross our path, we would tack to follow and give chase. This would keep us concentrating on boat speed AND not falling asleep. We outpointed and/or passed everyone we followed.
Winds were less than 5 knots going to the Burlington mark. If we went on a port tack, we could only do 2-3 knots of speed, but our VMG was close to ZERO. On a starboard tack, would do slightly faster, and our VMG was in the mid twos, so we decided to stay on this tack, and miss the mark by about 5 miles to the west, hoping for a windshift, land effect, or more wind.
We tacked to the 1st mark about 5 miles off shore, and 5 miles west of the mark (7 miles from it). The wind was between 2 and 3 knots, but we kept our boat speed up heading to the mark on one tack. We could not see any boats that had rounded the mark, so we thought we were way behind.
About 3 miles NW of the mark, we lost the wind for about 5 minutes. All of the sudden, our sails filled, and we started moving, even though our wind instrument showed ZERO. I guess wind was at water level; you can see when this happened by the strait line to the mark on our track. We barrelled along on a beam reach to the mark at 5 knots. It was then we saw the fleet: probably 40 boats in a huge wind hole west of the mark.
We were bringing the wind to them!
Later we found out that most of them had been there for several hours!
We rounded the Burlington mark at 5:25am.
After getting the boat sailing on a close reach towards Niagara, Denis and I went below to snooze. At 10:50am Harvey started the motor (in neutal) to charge the batteries. At 11am, the motor stopped, and Harvey was calling GET UP AND GET OUT HERE NOW. The squawl had hit with 30 knots of winds from behind, and pushed our boat speed to 8.5 knots. Dave had let the main out to blanket the jib, and Denis and I scrambled to furl it in. It furled so tight, that we did not have enough line on the furler to get it all in, leaving about 18" of sail. It was a wild ride, surfing downwind at 9 knots, the four of us under the bimini to keep somewhat dry. When the wind calmed down to 15 knots, we put a reef in the main, and road it out until 11:30am, when another squawl hit it, about the same as first one. After being knocked out of the LO300 last year with a broken boom, a 33 knot squawl was nothing. We were prepared for it, and knew exactly how to react.
Many boats were bare poled around us, serveral withdrew.
Approaching the Niagara mark with 15 knot winds gusting to 25 knots, we sailed on a close reach with the reefed main and headsail. We purposely went way past the mark before tacking. We watch 2 or 3 boats tack too early and miss the mark by a longshot. We remembered from the LO300 two years ago that the Niagara River current makes it difficult to pass the mark closely.
We rounded the Niagara mark at 1:20pm.
Pointed the boat to the finish, had the wind dead downwind, with lumpy seas over the port quarter. Even though would could do over 7 knots of speed, it was a VERY uncomfortable with the waves coming from a different direction. So we headed up to a reach towards Toronto: much better point of sail, but slightly slower. Wished we had done this sooner. After a couple of miles, the wind shifted from the SE to NE, allowing us to tack and point directly at PCYC on a starboard broad reach with the waves come off our front quarter. NICE POINT OF SAIL.
After a while, the wind was dying, so we poled out the collapsing geneoa to leeward, and it brought our speed back up to 6 knots. We were quite comfortable, until we saw a Hunter 326 with a higher PHRF coming up to pass us. We took the pole down and trimmed in to bring our speed in the mid 7s, leaving the competitor behind (THANKS BTW). This Hunter 326 was in white sail 2 and finished 24th overall!
We passed the PCYC mark, and hardened up to close hauled to the finish line.
But alas, we couldn't make the finish line, and had to tack twice to get accross the line.
We finished at 06:33pm: a little over 22 hours on the water.
We had heard on the radio that two other boats in our class finished about 45 mintues before us, so we were confident that we had finished 3rd. We were elated!
When the results were posted with corrected times, we placed 2nd of 9 boats in our class, 31st of 97 boats overall. This is against a lot of well known bigger boats!
http://www.yachtscoring.com/event_results_detail.cfm?Race_Number=1&eID=435
Trip Odometer: 101.93 nm
Moving Average: 4.3 knots
Moving Time: 22:05:03
Google Earth track: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12535935/Still%20Time/20110604.kmz
No comments:
Post a Comment