SYSCO Thursday Night Summer Series, Non-Race 4

As the headline says, the race did not count. We raced for 1 hour and 45 minutes. That's when poncho came with the "N" and "A" flags flying to abandon the race. But it was a fun race anyway.

Crew this evening were Bill S. and Chris D. Chris is the new guy. He is filling the vacancy caused by the "old" guy Bill O.. He bought his own boat in the last couple of weeks and my not be with us long. We shall see. It was good to have him along. Bill S. is training him well.

We had a mediocre start. We were fourth out of five. Yes, all five boats were racing tonight. Blew Streak had the best start. I think he started by the mark while the rest of us fought it out by the committee boat. Again the wind was light at the start. We figured that the race would be shortened at 2. By the way, the race course was 14-2-14. The committee boat used the buoy 14 as the finish line and set a start mark to the Oregon side of the boat. We were third in our group and in dirty air. We tacked to port to get to the channel and clear air as soon as we could. But we had to give La Dolce Vita a lead so we could tack. She was above us and we could not tack in front of her. We had to wait until she passed to tack to port and get to the channel.

We got to the channel and tacked so we could avoid Ryan Point. On starboard tack we had rights, but did not need any. We were not challenging any leaders. We tacked twice after that to get to the windward mark. We rounded the mark in third place. We had improved our standing by one. We set the pole to starboard and meandered over to the 20 foot depth. We were closing on the leaders, except for Blew Streak, who was doing a fabulous job of leaving us behind.

The wind died on us twice. We anchored twice. We started sailing again about 8:30 and were doing 3 knots when Poncho III came by with the abandon race flags at 8:45. Since we were sailing we continued trying to catch Blew Streak, since we could sail. The wind was building to 8 knots. We did not catch her. She "finished", or should I say she went by buoy 14 a little before 9:00. We "finished" going by 14 about 8:59. We tacked to starboard and had a great sail back to Tomahawk.