Tuesday's race

Tuesdays race was short. A short weather leg , a dead downwind leg, and beat back to the finish line. We like courses with reaches but we race what they give us. We were about 30 seconds late over the line, not our best start. At the weather mark, there was a boat coming in on starboard so about 3 of us had to throw in a couple of tacks until he cleared. Around the mark and some mix-up had two boats about hit each other and I went up to avoid them. My entire crew said I should have ducked them but that isn't what I did. That ended up in an accidental gybe with my nice spruce boom whacking my nice spruce mast pretty hard but no harm done. How am I doing so far? Not that good I guess. We put up our unhanked 150 (started with a 90) and got to chasing the fleet. We had two jibs up at this point but the 90 wasn't doing anything but it wasn't hurting either. We passed everyone except the Tartan-10 that was running a spinnaker. Around the mark a fair amount behind that T-10 we took the 150 down and set about chasing him down. It was a short course or we might have passed him. As it was we crossed the finish line 10 seconds behind him uncorrected. Behind us was another Tarten-10, a Catalina 400, a C&C-41 and the rest of the fleet. Everyone owes us time so another 1st for Papoose. We are sailing with a 150 handicap. The two T-10's got 2nd and 3rd. They have a 126 handicap. It was amazing out pointing the T-10. Everyone with their modern expensive boats hates us with our 55 year old wood antique. Nine races into the series and we have 6 firsts, 2 seconds, and a DNS (out of town). I don't understand why we are doing so well. The T-10 guys are serious racers. Some of these boats owe us more than a minute a mile. This is strange. By the way, on one of the 2nd place finishes, with 10 boats in the race and a 2 hour race, we lost by 47 minutes. Allen