C22 Whitby Tornado Warnings

Weather was nasty all day with dark clouds, major rain, and tons of wind.

By 4pm the sky had cleared and it was sunny.

Consulted with a bunch of sailors in the clubhouse and took a look at the weather radar, and there was a band of thunderclouds in Oakville coming our way from the south west arriving around 8pm.

The race was on.  The race committee was going to start right at 6:30pm and run a short course so we could get off the water before it hit.

Melissa, John, Chris, and Rita and I had a drink and some pizza on big Still Time and discussed our participation.  On the way in John and Chris had their radio programs interrupted with tornado warnings.

Time on the email was 5:31pm

We could see thunder clouds on land much north and west of us, but the wind was from the SW.

Melissa had a bad feeling about going out and decided not to come out.
I fully support her decision, as I know she was spooked last time we got caught in a thunderstorm coming in after a race last year.


We left the dock close to 6pm.



Time on the email is 5:56pm

Winds were forecast for 9-12 knots from the south west, but it had been blowing hard all day from the south, so there were LOTS of waves out there.  We went out with a full racing main and #1 as we needed the power to plough through the waves.  Going out to the start we could do a little over 4 knots just off of close hauled.   It was Chris' turn on the tiller.

At the start, wind started gusting to 20 knots: we had a great start on starboard just windward of the red shark Mickey.  She was 5 ft below us

You can see above we passed the committee boat and road the line to mark 9, and hardened up at the gun.   In the waves we were getting closer and closer the Shark below us.  We decided to pinch into the wind to get away from them.  However, a puff caused us to do a 270 (crash tack).  Andrew from Mickey says our motor sticking out the back missed his transom by inches!

Wind were a constant 20+ knots, we had too much sail up.  We dropped the traveler, ragged the main to keep the boat on its feet.  Looking a the GPS track, we were 400ft from Mark 4 our competitors were rounding the windward mark when the wind completely died.  It dropped down to 3or4 knots, but was swirling around.  We could not set a sail with the waves.  We managed to claw are way to Mark 4: we could touch it, but the waves pushed us back:



Click for larger

GPS track reported that it took 21 minutes to cover those last 400 ft to get around that mark!

The wind filled in from the NE (a shift of over 90 degrees!)  The wind was coming off the land and was VERY warm!

We all commented that with the wind shifting all over the place, all four legs were sometimes upwind!  It was nice to finish on a beam with boat speed over 6 knots!

We didn't get wet, but we experience gusting winds and wind shifts.

We finished last a full 20 minutes behind the leading Shark Cheeky Monkey

Trip Odometer: 8.52 miles
Moving Average: 4.2 knots
Moving Time: 02:02:00
Stopped Time: 00:20:37

Google Earth Track: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12535935/Still%20Time/2015/20150610.kmz