Torturous Vallejo

This last weekend got complicated real quick.  A late season change to the SSS schedule meant that I was home alone with the kid for the weekend, a new Sportboat championship regatta was setup for Saturday (with my guidance) and the SSS season closer of the Vallejo 1-2 all coincided.  What would get dropped?  Well the kid trumped the sailing (what kind of sailor am I), it can only be a 1 day sailing weekend.  Next, what race to do, the sportboat regatta on Saturday or the return from Vallejo on Sunday.  Rob and I were leading the double handed season coming in to the last race, so we decided to try to secure it.  Babysitter lined up for Sunday with mom returning early afternoon, so Vallejo it was.  I had tried to line up skipper for Saturday Sportboat regatta but that didn't work out.

Thankfully Rob and his buddy Charlie were available to deliver the boat to Vallejo on Saturday.  They have their own story to tell about that.  Instead, I did soccer, pool, and a lot of driving.   We made a brief cameo to the race committee at the Vallejo Yacht Club taking some of the finishers of Saturday's racing.  That too was hard to watch as boats just yards from the finish got swept back from the strong current and the light breeze.   Sunday eventually arrived, little breeze and strong adverse current.  At least we didn't get stuck on the mud trying to exit the marina.  We were only leading the double handed fleet by a very narrow margin.  We would have to beat the second place boat, Arcadia, or finish behind them in corrected to keep our lead.   We knew it would be a torturous day that we will have to see through to the race deadline at 6:00 PM.

After a 30 minutes postponement the race got started.   I know the RC was hoping for more wind that we knew wouldn't come, so all it did was result in even more current.  Oh well, they had good intentions.  We had a good start, we decided to go with the Code 0 hoping for a more stable sail to catch the little wind available.   We thought we were going to escape the current, but with no place to seek relief in the river whenever the breeze dropped, so did we, back to the starting line.  Eventually, we switched over the A2 and did a little bit better.  At the end we lost track of how many times we switched sailplans, from Code0, to A2, to jib.  Only the Farr36 cleared the river on the first pass.   The rest of us saw G5 multiple times.  There was a transition zone at the river entrance that proved difficult to connect without getting dragged back.

Eventually we crossed it, but not before Arcadia had caught up to us, even after starting 10 minutes behind.  The lack of breeze and current pretty much erased that gap.  We probably had 8 lead changes (just between JetStream and Arcadia) before leaving the river.  We finally got past G1 at the river entrance, this was well past noon.  It had taken us over two hours to cover 2.5 miles.  An exhilarating 1knot VMG.  It wouldn't get better for the next hour, barely making over 1knot of VMG along the sea wall on the North side of the channel.  Short tacking on 5 knots of breeze against a 2 knot current its not JetStream strong point.  Sailing by brail trying to keep a couple of feet of water under the keel, Arcadia stretched out a lead to a few meters, and even the U20 started gaining on us.  We were trying hard, rolling every tack and fighting the ****ing battens to get them to pop to the new tack every 60 seconds.

At this point the odds were starting to switch agains us, given how much time we've already been on the water and not being anywhere close to the halfway point, the likelihood of us correcting ahead quickly diminished.  We started hoping the the clock would just run out.  But no, just to dig in the dagger a little deeper we could see the breeze filling in across San Pablo.  Both Arcadia and us got the breeze at the same time and we started making our way to the shallow water on the South side.  At this point we were the leads of the pack as the two trimarans in front of us retired.    The U20, just hanging around behind us.  Arcadia smartly kept a loose cover on us.  At this point it was still a light fill and we struggled to make any gains, but as the breeze continued to build we began gaining.  Just past Pinole we were to be beam to Arcadia about 100 yards to the North, in a bit deeper water and more (now favorable) current.  This was going to be a race to the finish if the conditions held, and they did.

By the time we hit the Brothers we had gotten a bit of a lead.   We wouldn't beat Arcadia, so the plan now was to get to the finish as quickly as possible and hope that the time would run out for the rest of the fleet.   But the same current that conspired against us at the start of the race by holding us back, would conspire again with a favorable current to allow the boats behind to finish in time.  And so it went.  Arcadia had a hell of a race and so did the U20.  Ultimately, three boats would place between JetStream and Arcadia, more than enough to secure Arcadia's win for the DH season, a well deserved win.   We gave it a good fight in difficult conditions.  It was a nice consolation to be the first boat over the finish line, but that wasn't the ultimate goal.

Big thanks to Rob for awesome crew work, movie making and overall great attitude.