MUMM36 Susan Hood Trophy Race

Mark, Peter, and I met and the club and drove to National where we met Kris, Mike, Michael, Carson, and Jenny getting the boat ready.  Leon was meeting us at Port Credit.

We hoisted Kris up the mast to install our new "wireless" VHF antenna.

Peter got busy wiring the VHF in the cabin, I installed jacklines for clipping off, and everyone else got the boat packed with gear.

We motored over to PCYC.

We are in IRC 1 division with 6 other boats.

We had eight people on the boat:

• Me
• Kris
• Mike
• Micheal
• Jenny
• Peter
• Mark
• Leon

Weatherman Ron Bianchi predicted light winds with little to no shore breezes on the south shore.

At the start, the water was flat with a NW wind about 6 knots.  We kept near all boats in our start all the way to the Burlington mark sailing on a very close reach.

Friday night sunset

We purposely stayed north of the rhumb line to catch some shore breezes, plus the wind was forecast to swing to the N meaning we could possibly fly a spinnaker to the mark, which we did. We passed the Burlington mark at 12:33am gybing under spinnaker around it.

After the Burlington mark, the north wind of about 3-4 knots put us on a broad reach towards Niagara.  On the new boat, the polars showed that this point of sail with that little wind was the slowest for the MUMM 36; and it showed!  We stayed with the fleet for several hours, but the waves started to build, and we found it very difficult to keep the spinnaker drawing and ANY boat speed, so we reached up at little to keep the boat moving.  Plus we didn't want to go into shore like the weatherman Ron had said.

In the middle of the lake in the dark, winds started dropping.  We had gotten away the overall north wind and any south shore breezes and into a wind transition zone.  Winds were variable, and shifting over 90 degrees all over the place.  I took the helm for while, and it seemed like we were going in circles!  For over an hour we had ZERO boat speed!  Meanwhile we watched half of the fleet a mile or two to the south of us zooming by with wind and boat speed!

Uggghhhh

In hoisting a spinnaker on the foredeck, I lost my hat overboard, and we couldn't get it.  This meant I was baking in the sun for rest the of the day!

Winds picked up slightly to 5 knots as we hobbled to Niagara, and we started gaining on the fleet.  At the Niagara mark, we counted 60 boats ahead of us!  The point of sail to the finish was a close reach, so we couldn't fly a spinnaker in the light winds.  We found that we could sail at the speed of the wind with everyone on the low side, include several down below near the keel on the low side.

At the helm on a tight reach at a blazing 2.5 knots of boat speed in 2.5 knots of wind!

It was this leg that we caught a lot of the compressed fleet; we alternated between genoa and spinnaker as the winds shifted slightly.  In the end we found the genoa worked the best.



Near the finish

At the finish we counted 45 boats behind us.



Boats at the finish line after we were done

We were very proud of how we sailed the new boat in these conditions.

We finish 2nd in our division, but last (9th) in corrected time in the IRC fleet of 15 boats (5 had abandoned the race).

http://www.yachtscoring.com/event_results_detail.cfm?Race_Number=1&eID=966

Our fatal mistake we going into the middle of the lake between Burlington and Niagara.

Wish we could have seen the GPS tracks of the other boats, but there isn't mandatory tracking for the Susan Hood.

In delivering the boat back to National, winds had picked up to 15 knots from the NE;

WHERE WAS THAT DURING THE RACE?

Oh well, that is sailboat racing for you!

Trip Odometer: 84.6 miles
Moving Average: 3.5
Moving Time: 24:26:00

Google Earth Track: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12535935/Still%20Time/2014/20140531.kmz