Vallejo 2

By Sue Estey

Sunday brought with it overcast conditions and some rain.  After a little breakfast with Mike at the Sardine Can, I met up with Mark at the Vallejo YC.   Mark crewed for the return trip to Richmond.  The forecast was to be from 10 to 20 knots again from the SW, but I don't think we saw more than 12 knots during the race with a few periods of no wind at all after some of the rain clouds passed overhead.

The wind at the start was just right to try out the new A5.  This is a reaching spinnaker, and with the wind just ahead of the beam it was perfect for the reach out of the straits.   We set up high on the start line to have some runway to set the kite, and as soon as we got a clear lane the kite went up.  We quickly passed most of the boats in our fleet and got to chase Outsider who got off to a clean start and was leading.   As far as I could tell we were the only boat flying a spinnaker and we were making good speed.  We got ahead of Outsider, but put the kite in the water during the douse and they caught up.  We again picked a high line to exit the river and it payed off well, leading the sportboat fleet out to San Pablo Bay.

We shore tacked off the north side of the channel to stay out of the main current, and took a hitch across before getting too close to the restricted area.  We were now chasing Arcadia and some of the Wylie 30's.  We had wanted to keep a loose cover on Outsider but we split sides at this point.  Initially the split worked for Outsider as they found some favorable current closer to the channel (a bit counter intuitive as it should have been flooding), but the angle was better on the left side and the wind eventually filled from the South ultimately giving us an advantage.

Around Pt. Pinole, a couple of rain bands started to pass through making things a bit miserable onboard, with the light winds and soaking conditions.  We found some emergency rum onboard to keep us warm through the worst of it.  We stayed patient and continued working the left side (South) of the course.  For the conditions we were holding our own as the lighter conditions upwind are not very favorable for JetStream.  The Hobbie 33, Olson30 and Express27, with their larger genoas were not far behind and well within the corrected credits.

We cleared the Richmond restricted area and set the reaching kite one more time to the finish.  It payed off again, allowing us to pass a few more boats in route.  We had a good finish boat for boat, but didn't quite put enough time on our competitors to correct strongly.  So the success of Saturday was not repeated on Sunday, but a good time was had nevertheless.  For the regatta we would finish 2nd behind the Express 27 Motorcycle Irene.  Link to preliminary results and race article in norcalsailing.