Thursday, August 27, 2009 OCSA Summer Evening Series, Race 6.

I had not registered for the series as I was coming off an operation in early July. But I figured I could go out there and join the fun. The wind was late. It did not arrive until 7:00.

The crew this race was Warren. He crewed on La Dolce Vita last year and this is the first time he sailed this year. He was a little rusty. As evident a little later in the race.

When the wind arrived it came up to 8 knots. We shook out our reef in the main from the last sail and raised it fully. Did not do anything with the cunningham. The wind was light enough for full sail.

The start was confusing due the the delay in starting. We went over the line with a horn, but it turned out to be the one minute warning horn. We turned around and restarted a little late, but still in contention. We had turned around and instead of being on a starboard tack we were on a port tack, but in clear air. We did have to avoid a few starboard tacking boats but they did not impead our progress. We tacked early on the Washington side and continued on starboard tack until the concrete wall was abeam. We tacked over to port and started our climb to the wall. About then Dew Drop Inn was on starboard tack and coming from starboard. I just barely would have cleared his bow. He as a matter of tactic decided to turn to clear me by a boat length and yelled "Protest." I had to do a 360 to clear the protest. Meanwhile Warren had overrun the starboard jib sheet. The sail was tight and gave us no slack to be able to clear the overrun. I turned the boat upstream to get clear space to take time to clear the overrun. I moved the jib car aft to give us some slack but it was still not enough. We could not pull the line out of the overrun either. So I got my rigging knife and cut the sheet at the sail. I had kept the sheet as one length and connected it at the sail with just a loop which I had run the sheets through. It was too tight to untie. So cutting the sheet enabled me to tie two bowlines to fasten the sheets to the sail. I will have to go back and reeve the ends of the sheets and adjust the knots so the sheets are even. They need to be even so when the head sail is rolled up, they both become taught at the same time.

By the time the winch was cleared and sheet retied the sun had set. We were so far out of the running and since we really weren't in the race anyway, we retired to the marina. It was a really good night of sailing even if the sailing part was only 50 minutes.

After the boat was moored, I went below to check the track on my netbook only to discover I had not turned the tracking on. DARN. I also discovered the "C" key was missing. After we put the boat away, I came down to the cabin and turned on the cabin lights to look for the key. I found it and continued looking for the "spring". Finally found the spring, a little white plastic thingy that was almost invisible in the dim cabin lights. I tried to put the key back, but the light was too bad to do that, so I put the pieces in my coin pocket to try it again the next day. (The next day at work I had a much better light and only took about 10 minutes to finally. In the end once figuring out how the "spring" (which really was just a hinge) and the key fit together a simple sliding to the left action on the keyboard snapped the key in place. What a relief.

The boat had water in side again. There were a couple of times the rail was under water so I am going to have to investigate caulking the rail. It is either that or taking the toe rails off the boat and resetting them. That would entail taking the 100 screws out and a lot of time.