July 16th was the 3rd Annual running of this regatta and our first appearance. This time I would be joined by Rob and Erik. The race is a tour of the Central Bay with a run down most of the length of the South Bay. The race started at the NE end of Treasure Island, with Alcatraz as a rounding mark with the finish at the entrance of the Redwood City channel. For me, it will be the first race South of San Francisco, but luckily the South Bay is Rob's home waters so we had all the local knowledge we needed for the second half of the race.
We started with the traditional feast at Ole's just to ensure we had enough energy for the race. With a later start, there was no need to rush through the breakfast. After loading up the boat we headed off to our delivery to the starting area. I'm sure we got more than our usual share of stares as we had a few cameras mounted on the boat. Both Rob and Erik like their cameras, so after a failed attempt of mounting a GoPro on the spreaders, we ended up with a GoPro mounted on the bow, another GoPro on Erik's head, a GoPro and a Flip on the stern antenna mast, and a handheld Flip with Erik. I'm waiting for the editing of hours of footage, but I'll be posting the results in the future.
Being Erik's first ride on the boat we decided to get the kite up before the start for a practice run. Good thing we did as we fixed a few bugs in the process. We focused back on the race and started planning for out start and upwind strategy.
The pin was biased and I wanted a port start, but with a large number of boats and a smallish start line my first option was to lead the starboard boats and close the door on anyone attempting the port start at the pin. We measured the 50 second line and came back early to the boat at the 1 minute mark. Most of the boats windward of us were positioning for a boat end start, so we broke loose and reached down to the pin to go for our port start. It worked perfectly. We got enough separation from the starboard group and tacked on top of the only other boat at the pin end, crossing the fleet on port tack. Our initial strategy called for hugging the TI shore for current relief, so after consolidating our port start we tacked back towards the island. We found a stronger current near the island than expected, so we abandoned that strategy and headed towards the right side. The runoff from the North Bay must still be quite strong as we had pretty good current until we reached the edge of Angel Island. There we found the main flood coming in from the Gate. At this point we had gained a substantial lead over the folks that stayed on the TI side of the course. You only really get one shot to call the layline before getting into the 'river' and we went of what we thought was a very conservative layline. But the river was really flowing and we weren't even close to clearing Alcatraz. At this point you are pretty much stuck in the current and your only hope is that the rest of the fleet misses the layline as well. After three more attempts we finally cleared Alcatraz and luckily hadn't lost too much to the rest of the fleet.
It was good to be done with the upwind part of the Race. This race was billed as the South Bay downwind run, so we were ready to bear away and set some kites. This course takes you through some of the most popular windsurfing and kiting venues in the San Francisco Bay, so we were excited about the wind possibilities. Though the forecasts were pretty mild we still had high hopes. So after clearing the edge of Alcatraz we set our A2 and head towards the Bay Bridge. It is a beam reach but we are holding the kite and start separating from the rest of the fleet. This is our sweet spot on the JS (well this and nuking downwind runs). As we get closer to the bridge, we need to come up higher to stay on course so we decide to drop down to the A5 (probably should have called that to begin with anticipating the course change). As we only have a single spin halyard and tack line, there is no peeling. So we unfurl the jib, drop the big kite, hook the small kite, hoist and furl back the jib. This is a process that we will end up doing a few times during the race as we would either be forced to change course and or the wind changed.
We really only had two tactical choices on the leg from the city to the San Mateo Bridge. Either sail low of the rhumb line to keep the kite up, or stick to the rhumb line course. With the flood current, the rhumb line course would give us a shorter distance plus better current. The lower course would allow us to keep the kite up and take advantage of the right hand shift at the bottom of the course to make the channel for the bridge. The low course also meant that you had to deal with a couple of shoals, so we decided to stick with the rhumb line. That just meant that we had to keep changing gears between the reaching kite and white sails depending on the pressure and changes to the apparent wind angle.
We had built a nice lead on the reaching section of the course, but when the wind finally clocked a couple of miles before the San Mateo bridge, we could see the boat behind us sailing a deeper course with their symmetrical kites start to make some gains. The pressure never really materialized and we were averaging around 8 - 8.5 knots on our run (in comparison to the 14 - 18s we can sustained in the 20+ knots known in this area). But we were still ahead and not complaining (much).
After a couple of jibes we were under the bridge and on our final approach to the finish. Rob called a perfect layline to the finish from across the bay and we gave ourselves and imaginary gun salute (you take your own finish time for this race as there is no RC on station). After double checking and recording our finish time we enjoy a nice spinnaker run down the Redwood City channel. We hit our top speed of the day at 13 knots (of course after we are done racing) and are having a great time in the new scenery.
We sail on to the guest dock of the Sequoia YC, where we are received with frosty cold beers by the Rear Commodore. The results come out and it turned out to be much closer than we originally thought with the top 3 boats in the spinnaker division within a minute of each other after a 25 mile race. Great day, great race with both first on time to finish and corrected. I think we'll be back.
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