Re: [Cal_Boats] Racing is the easy part . . .(Mike)

Mike - Yeah we were watching you guys too and lusting over those sails ;-). We have a 2 year old main but our genny is who knows how old and is getting a pretty good belly on it. Thanks for your sympathy but as they say, a bad day out on the water is better than a good day at work so I don't want anyone to think I'm complaining, just voicing the efforts it takes to get the job done LOL. We were short handed with only 4 on board which didn't help. The guy from Vermont had not sailed in 2 years + and had only been on this boat a few times. The other guy is a small boat sailor and had not flown spinnaker much at all and never on a boat this size. My wife had to do the trimming and on a 1,000sf chute all she could do was ease and had to call for grinds. My wife was doing foredeck which she is well trained well for but had not done it on this boat nor had done it in 3 years or so as she is usually barking orders from the pit. The spinnaker bag did not have strings sewn inside of it to tie the clews to and so they tied them together but loose inside the bag and as I understand it, they got twisted inside the bag and when we did the set we got the hourglass. I have some blame in that as well as I was watching everyone trying to set their chutes on a beam reach and wiping out so I was not willing to fly the chute right away but once we rounded that middle mark and went further downwind I gave the go ahead but we had lost a lot of time by the time we got everything set up. We still had a great time though. Where did you guys finish? Did they get your rating right? We are 123 and they had us at 128 and the boat Relentless who should've been 114 was rated at 128 too. WTF is up with those guys? We did the race 2 years ago and they did the same thing with our rating. We sent them an email to correct it and they never did. Oh well . . . We hope to do the Solomons and Gov Cup races so hopefully we'll see you out there again. Paul West Adventure Kwest '80 Cal 39 In a message dated 6/3/2011 7:13:24 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, mk… [at] yahoo.com writes: Paul, Sorry to hear of your misfortunes getting to the race. I was crewing aboard a j29 "Gabrielle" and we were right in front of you for a good portion of the race around Bloody Point and up the Eastern Bay. I remember looking back and thinking how much more comfort you all must have been racing in. Everything looked smooth and graceful (except maybe the set) from our distance. If anyone had only known what you went through getting there! Mike Sails Call 1988 28-2 From: "pw… [at] aol.com" <pw… [at] aol.com> To: Ca… [at] yahoogroups.com Sent: Thu, June 2, 2011 11:33:08 PM Subject: [Cal_Boats] Racing is the easy part . . . This past weekend we did the Annapolis to Miles River Race on the Chesapeake which is a 20.9 mile race down the Chesapeake Bay, up the Eastern Bay and back down the Miles River. With sunny skies, puffy white clouds, temps in the mid 70's and winds 10-18 out of the south it couldn't have been more perfect. Getting to the race ?? Well, that's another story. I had been working on getting the boat ready for 10 to 12 hours a day most of that week with re-gel coating the companionway cover, varnishing handrails etc etc. The Thursday before the 6hr delivery on Friday I got all of 2 hours of sleep. The Friday we were to leave we had set 7pm as a goal, hoping to get out earlier. Well, my wife made a pit stop at home before coming to the boat and left the truck running and accidentally had locked the doors when getting out but left the door open. Well, my almost 3 yr old shut the door for her and locked the keys in the truck with it running. Fortunately, he was not in it and did so from outside. Well this set in motion a series of delays and we didn't get out of the slip until 11pm. In my fog, I was thinking that the red can 1/4 mile away was a lit mark and I headed for it. It was not a lit mark and what I was headed for was the red sector of Hambrooks Bar light house! 10 min out of the marina we ran aground hard LOL. Not a good way to start a trip. Thank goodness for the Chesapeake mud. We got off in a couple of minutes and I gave up the wheel to take a nap. We headed for Knapps Narrows which is basically a canal cut thru the Tilghman Island peninsula and is a short cut to Annapolis. We figured we'd tie up there for a couple of hours and get some shut eye and head out at the break of day. Well, 2 hours later we were up and headed out and ugh!! Aground again! Well maybe the channel shifted more to the right . . . ugh! Aground again! Screw it, we're going around I said and we went back under the drawbridge and around Tilghman Island. On the way my wife did a route to the start line and determined we were going to be an hour late for the start! I could'nt believe that was right so we kept on motoring, discussing what we thought we might do instead of race. When we got around the point, the eta changed and told us we'd be there 15 min before our start! Our spirits lifted considerably seeing as how one of our crew members was a guy who used to sail with us before moving to Vermont. He had driven down just for this race. We did get to the check in boat 12 min before our start and went directly to the starting line and had a pretty good start. We were a little early and leeward to a lot of boats but were right on the line when the gun went off. 14 boats in our PHRF B class was the largest class and we all finished within 20 min of each other. We didn't do well as we had an hour glass spinnaker set that took forever to get back down and re-set. How did you do Charlie? They had our ratings all screwed up so the results I saw are bogus. I looked for you a couple of times but we didn't hang at the Yacht Club as we had to go get my son in Easton and bring him back to the boat for the trip home. Paul West Adventure Kwest '80 Cal 39