Thursday, June 11, 2009 SYSCO Summer Series, Race 2

No crew showed up. I did the race single handed. Winds were light to moderate, ranging from 4 to 8 knots. The course was C - 2 - 14 - C. I started on starboard tack. I had a late start, about 1 minute. I tacked at the coffer dam at the east end of Tomahawk Island. Just before the next tack the wind headed me when I was on port tack. Looking at the plot of the race, the heading did not help with speed. Once I tacked, I actually went faster. Note to self: tack sooner near the Washington shore. Starboard tack was short. I tacked when I had the concrete wall abeam. Then another short starboard tack to round the mark. I set the main to starboard and engaged the autohelm. I set the pole to port and went wing on wing ab out a mile. Then I dropped my pole. The wind was back winding the head sail occasionally and would come abeam occasionally. So I sailed a broad reach for about a half mile. I then jibbed toward the center of the river. I joined up with Dew Drop Inn who had remained wing on wing and heading straight for 14. I rounded 14 and took a starboard tack to the finish.

Two unusual sightings this race:

A peregrine falcon circled about 60 feet above my mast 2/3 thirds down the down wind leg of the race. She/He was a beautiful bird.

When going by the committee boat (CB), I followed a 20 footer being helmed by a woman, who kept looking back at me with an apprehensive look. I kept clear of her. I was back about 6 feet from her stern. We were going less than a knot COG. She passed the committee boat and I was trying to get my course when everyone on the CB yelled at me to stop. The 20 foot sail boat had not cleared the CB and the current had washed her up on the bow of the CB. When they yelled I put Aventura hard astern, which kicked my stern to port and pointed me out and away from all the carnage. I took a short loop around to get the last letter of the course as I was distracted by all the commotion. When I joined the line again, I was about 5 boat lengths away from the CB. I noticed the sail boat was just clearing the stern of the CB. A gentleman had jumped aboard and taken the rudder off the stern, which made the boat swing on the line that had been attached to the CB.

Another item of interest for me was that I had a GPS chart plotter aboard, finally. I have an ASUS EEEPC 1000HD. I reloaded the Linux distribution from the XANDROS to the Debian EEEPC 5.0.1. Bill said he is using SeaClear software successfully, so I down loaded it and loaded it to the netbook and my desktop. I had to install wine, version 1.0.1-1 on the netbook. I also downloaded all the NOAA charts, but I really worked on chart # 18531 Columbia River Vancouver to Bonneville. I used gimp, version 2.6.6 on my desktop which is loaded with the Fedora 9 Linux Distribution. I also loaded SeaClear on that, too and my wine version on the desktop is 1.1.14. I chopped up the chart into 3 pieces. I then chopped the top part in two. I used the MapCal executable to calibrate and convert the chart to the SeaClear's WCI format. I then transfered the chart to my netbook. The one trick I had to do to my wine installation is to link dos devices. In the ~/.wine/dosdevices directory link com1 to /dev/ttyUSB0 and com2 to /dev/ttyUSB1.

My GPS device is a Lowrance IFinder. I set the com port to 9600 baud and format to NEMA. I have a data cable that has a 12 volt power plug and a D9 serial terminal. I have a serial to USB converter. I also used a USB extension so I could put the netbook in a safe place. The IFinder is mounted just inside the cabin on the starboard hand gripe panel.

Everything worked just fine. I started recording my track just after I got my main up or about 6:00. I had 10% battery life in the netbook when I turned it off at about 9. Normally the system has a five hour battery life, but this GPS charting must be taxing. Since this was the first time ever for a track, I took the defaults and just turned it on. The points are too sparse. So this morning, I reread the manual and discovered the place to change the settings. Now I should have a better plot next week.