2011 Vallejo - Part 2

Sunday was the return race from Vallejo to San Rafael, normally an upwind affair but a little shorter and with favorable current this time.   Due to our late arrival on Saturday, my participation on the night festivities was restricted (though sufficient).  This meant that I felt pretty good Sunday morning.

I stayed with the family in St. Helena and was a little late getting to the boat, but Andrew had everything ready to go.  Something about my text messages at 7 in the morning (seemed reasonable at the time).  We got to the starting area with plenty of time and setup for the kite run down the river.   We had a good start windward of Ragtime and immediately set the kite.   Sailed to the lee of Ragtime as they hadn't set and didn't want to give them the opportunity to luff us up.   We started pulling away from the fleet with the 11-meter on hot pursuit.   We were about 100 yds in front of our fleet when we arrived to a wall of boats blocking the whole river struggling with the last of the flood and light air.  Here it was a crap shoot.  First we tried the West side just to see pressure and current relieve on the East side.  So we crossed over to the East, things look good momentarily, just to see the wind build on the West side and watching as the fleet walked away on us.    So we were in catch up mode.

As we exited the river I wanted to take a few tacks along the wall before crossing over, but Andrew convinced me otherwise (he reminded me how it paid off for me last year when he was racing against us).  It was a good call, it was still about another hour before any real ebb materialized and there was good pressure and angle on the South side.  We kept playing the shallows 2/3rds of the way to Point Pinole where the wind line shut down.  By then we had worked our way into deeper water to take advantage of the current.  There was barely a zephyr of wind, but with the current pushing us into the wind, the increased apparent wind meant we were able to keep the boat moving the whole time.  It was enough to allows to get ahead of the 11-meter and the Tiger that had beat us out of the river.

The wind did eventually filled from the West with good pressure to get us to the finish line.  We just tried to play the wind and current with various degrees of success.   The Tiger caught up to us and got ahead close the finish and we could see Ragtime not far behind us.

We never really saw much of the Henderson, mostly because as I would learn from the results they were plenty ahead.   They sailed a great race.   We had a good race ourselves correcting to 2nd in our division.
Sunday Results

The best part of the day was Andrew's run from the Richmond Bridge to the Alameda entrance on a tight reach on fresh conditions.  It doesn't get old.