Wind tonight was 6 to 8 knots from the west northwest. River level was 8 feet and dropping. This week we had only one crew and myself. Aaron got stuck in traffic and could not make it in time for the race. The course was "TT", Start-1-3-1-3-Finish. We used buoy 2 as number 1 mark. We were a little late to the start line, but by design this time. I really did not want to be in the crowd at the start. There are 15 boats starting at our pennant. We tacked to port once across the line and made our way to the Washington side. Tacked to starboard and continued till we tacked to port to make our starboard approach to the mark. We tacked to starboard in front of Wildheart and joined the line of boats to the mark. I went forward and handled the whisker pole while John took the helm and managed the sheets. At times on this downwind leg we were 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in our class. We rounded the leeward mark with 4 other boats. We were on the outside because we were leeward of three boats coming into the mark. We had to give mark room to the 3 boats.
We tacked to port and again went to the Washington side of the river. We did not go as far as Blew Streak who was a good 6 to 10 boat lengths ahead of us and to windward. I did not want to press too close to the shore with the crew we had. We continued on starboard tack and basically mimicked the first leg of the race. We had trouble with jibbing after the windward mark and lost ground to most of our class boats. We managed to make of time and get ahead of a few of them, but Blew Streak was way ahead of us. We rounded the second leeward mark having to give mark room to two other boats this time. John went forward at this mark to take down the whisker pole. We managed to dodge Vaporware's whisker pole going into the mark. Somehow it ended up in the water at the mark. We ran into problems with the head sail wrapping around the forestay. I had to go forward to free it. Meanwhile John got mixed up as to where the finish line was and started to head upriver to the I-205 bridge. I was able to get back to him before we got there and turned the boat around and finished before Vaporware who had to give way because we were on starboard tack while he was on port tack.
We returned to the slip about 8:35.
To see a full size plot go to https://www.cad2cam.com/tracks.html
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