ACE Lake Ontario 300 Day 1

Woke up at around 8am, and went for a shower, followed by the complementary Sperry Breakfast.

Kris arrived shortly after and put on the bow sticker:

Always a tradition to take a shot of this!

Michael, Ashley, and Christine arrived a little after to load and pack the boat:

Getting ready to depart

We shoved off:

There is a tradition at PCYC for the LO300: they have a piper pipe the boats out of the harbour:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSi07SP9FoY

Gets me every time!

Going out of the harbour, we noticed that the mast instrument displays were not working.
I scrambled below to discover that two of the four wires at the junction box had broken from their terminals.  Must have happened during the ACE Tsunami.  The 22 gauge copper wire was brittle, so they broke off in the jolt of the splash.  Did a quick cut/strip/terminate and all was well with the mast displays.

It was amazing seeing almost 80 boats out on the water for the start of the race!

Complete with two Open 60s from Quebec:

Kris at the helm

Our start was the last one at around noon.  We did a starboard tack pin end start:

Christine celebrating as we crossed the line with the gun!

Winds were light, maybe 5 knots and it was an upwind start with the light #1 genoa.
After a while the winds started to pickup and it was weight on the rail:

A Lancaster bomber from Hamilton flew by

That boat in the foreground was not in the race, out for a pleasure sail on port tack; we had to YELL or he would have hit us!

We were the smallest boat in our start and were the last to round the mark and pop the chute.

8.68 knots boat speed

The wind angles were perfect for ACE, 110-120 degrees apparent with 16-18 knots of wind.

My non sailing friends think that 9 knots is slow (they are used to planing powerboats).

Check out these videos of us flying down the lake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U03UiXPiGN4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atlxQTgjWig

AMAZING and in complete control.

Out top boat speed on this spinnaker run was 12.7 knots!

We split up into shifts of three:

Michael (driver)
Bart (bow and whatever else)
Christine (trim)

Kris (driver)
Jenny (trim/runners/spin flyer)
Ashley (trim/bow)