Summer Race #5

Wednesday 8/17/2011

Light Westerly breeze. Course for A&B was H to F and back, twice around. C sailed to F to 24 and back to H. Current was ebbing hard.

The wind was pretty light this evening. Not much was forecast, but we had a decent west breeze to start. The current was ebbing through the race course. It was a big factor.

We started up by the boat end of the line. It was favored and we wanted to tack onto port right after the start. There seemed to be an incident further down the line, but no one protested. I heard some yelling and saw some course changes, but I do not know if a foul occurred. What I do know from the radio call is that a boat hit the starting mark. They were unsure what they had to do. Here are the rules.

31 TOUCHING A MARK
While racing, a boat shall not touch a starting mark before starting, a mark that begins, bounds or ends the leg of the course on which she is sailing, or a finishing mark after finishing.

44 PENALTIES AT THE TIME OF AN INCIDENT
44.1 Taking a Penalty
A boat may take a Two-Turns Penalty when she may have broken a rule of Part 2 while racing or a One-Turn Penalty when she may have broken rule 31. Sailing instructions may specify the use of the Scoring Penalty or some other penalty.

So when you hit a mark, you break rule 31. Rule 31 requires a one-turn penalty. You do not have to go back and round the mark. That happens when you are over early.

Upwind was interesting since you had to take a long port tack to get up the river against the current. The boats that did best seemed to go onto port, but then head west on starboard a bit before going back onto port. We took port for a little too long, but shorter than many other boats. One boat who went left early came back in pretty decent position.

Rounding F, we were just ahead of a boat. We did not allow them to pass to windward and they made no attempt to separate to leeward, so they just followed us to 24. We sailed high of 24 until it was time to round. We made a nice early turn 10 boat lengths to windward of the mark. The other boat continued on and made a big looping turn. The current was raging and they were swept pretty for south before heading up to make the finish.  Here is a drawing of the way I saw it.  Keep in ming the current was running right to left and the wind was from the top of the drawing.  In sequence 7, the yellow boat is heading for H.  Hopefully, you can see from the drawing that the blue boat got swept off to the left and lost quite a few boat-lengths on the rounding.

Since our course was shorter than the others, we finished before the A & B fleets. The wind was dying as A & B boats rounded H, but there was no signal to shorten course. It is interesting that no one hailed to shorten course. In Spring Race #5 this year, I wrote about how two boats prodded the RM to shorten course. Now the RM was in the same situation and no one hailed and the RM did not shorten. It goes to show that the concerns of the RM are different that those of the competitors. Similar to Spring Race #5, a handful of boats were scored as not finishing.

We sailed around for a while in the dying breeze before heading in for pizza night. We saw a NE breeze and then a decent southerly before heading in for pizza night.

On the way in, we debated whether you can have your masthead light on with the steaming light when motoring at night. The answer is you can. I used this helpful link to get the answer. At night, you always need your running lights. You should only display the steaming light when underway and the masthead should be on at anchor or you can use it while steaming.

Please feel free to donate to this week's Leukemia Cup through my Beavis themed donation page.  All donations are appreciated and you can write nasty comments on the donation page.  My wife already has.