Wednesday, July 13, 2011

July 13 - Day 5 Racing at Europeans

Today was another long day with 3 races. We were once again the first team(s) off the ramp and out to the race course. We tuned up with the Russians in 6-8 knots and then headed down to the Race Committee. We were still really early, so we went back upwind for a bit to try and find some trends in the wind shifts (no trends, really random!) than back down. We were third start so settled down to wait our turn and watched the multiple and strange clouds move around the sky. At one point there was a solid line of black clouds down the course that were billowing more black stuff out the bottom; which was fun to watch and try and predict what it would do to the wind.

They got off the Men's Silver fleet okay, but the Gold fleet had a general recall and then a huge left shift came down and they had to re-set the line, and then another general, and then more shifting wind.... you get the idea. They ended up having to re-set the entire course and move the Race Committee so we didn't get our first race of the day started until after 1 pm. The general trend today was we didn't have great starts and the wind shifts were super random and the pressure was up and down. We struggled to put it all together. As we crossed the finish line on the second race, the Jury boat called us over and asked us where our life jackets were. We pulled them out from under the spinnaker bag and they instructed us to put them on. We did so, and then they came back and told us they were protesting us in that race for not wearing them. This was ridiculous, as the rules state you are only required to wear them when the RC is flying flag "Y" which they were not.

During the start sequence another boat failed to keep clear of us and we had to avoid them; so we hailed protest. The thing about starting is it's easier the better you are - because no one wants to start near the World Champions, so they always have lots of room. Or the really good teams look for weaker teams (us) to start beside. Not that I'm complaining, but at this particular instant we were just fed up with working really hard on our starts and constantly getting messed up by other boats not respecting the rules; and perhaps a tad grumpy about being yelled at by the Jury.  Our start ended up being okay, but not great. Again we struggled to figure out the shifty/puffy conditions and were a tad distracted by all the protesting. So all in all not a great day, although we didn't make any huge mistakes and had some solid mark roundings and reach legs.

Once off the water we filed our protest and prepared to sit around and wait for the hearings. Both protests ended up going really well. We won the protest about the start incident and we had the other protest dismissed due to ambiguity in the wording of the sailing instructions. Now to re-focus on tomorrow. Since we had three races today we have only one race scheduled for tomorrow. The forecast is for very light conditions so hopefully we don't wait around too long and we get in a solid race!

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