We all knew it was going to be a tough race, with a strong ebb dominating the day and two wind main wind events during the day. The first starters were to see a solid Northerly giving way to a Westerly at 'some point' later in the morning.
With the strong ebb in the middle of the race, the plan was set: take Red Rock out of the equation by knocking it out first. For the other marks there is always a play regardless of the current, but getting around Red Rock on a full ebb can bring the toughest sailors to desperation.
I dropped and clean the boat Friday night as it would be an early start on Saturday. All night Friday the wind was howling at our home on the Oakland Hills. Good omen perhaps. It was still blowing strong we I left at 6 am. After breakfast at Oles with a few other crews we set off to the starting line. A busier than normal delivery since there was no one else on the boat to rig it up and prepare it for racing. Autopilot on, I got to the process of rigging everything up. With a nice Northerly filling the bay I hoisted the main on the lee of Treasure Island and put the outboard away. Took a quick detour to scout our escape lane.
The plan was after the start to head North over the top of Alcatraz and over towards the Berkeley flats (as a hedge for current relief). Checked a few other boats on the earlier starts with the same plan and it was looking good.
But in this sport your best plans are often spoiled. Not ten minutes after our start at 10:12 the Northerly on the Central Bay started to teeter off and five minutes later it was gone. Shut down. This left me drifting in 100 feet of water with no hope to anchor at the mercy of the building ebb. And the ebb did build, putting us on a fast track towards the North Tower of the Golden Gate. Would this be a repeat of last year?? It wasn't for the lack of trying... I tried the Code Zero, then the kite, then the Zero again, maybe the jib would be a better drifter, so we tried that again, as we continued on our West bound trajectory. All that work got me pretty hungry so I decided to break for lunch before deciding my next move. By this time the radio was already filling the air with drop out calls and things weren't looking that promising for me. Around 11:45 the kites under the gate began to billow. The Westerly was here, and in good time, as we were now just half a mile from exiting the bay.
What now, is almost two hours from our original start time and we are still nowhere from a racing perspective. I was still hoping to get North and never thought of given my current position of abeam of Blackaller and less than a mile away to just knock that off (something to consider next time). So kite up and we started working our way East, with an ebb already pushing pretty hard against us. On my last gybe before heading North I noticed another parking lot just East of Pt. Blunt, while all the boats near Yerba Buena looked powered up. I've lost races trying to get around Yerba Buena on a ebb but I though I had good boat speed to tackle it. So there went the plan to take out Red Rock first. Off to Yerba Buena.
I took another gybe just to make the approach on less current closer to Treasure Island. It paid off, I made quite a bit of ground on the boats in front. But at some point you need to stick your nose out, and the river was flowing.... The first attempt to clear the corner failed, but on the second try, only a few away from some really scary rocks we got through.
The next piece was some of the nicest sailing to be had. Clear sky, nice 10 knots close reaching with full VMG towards Red Rock. Took advantage of some ebb out of the South Bay, the hedging towards the Bekeley flats to avoid the ebb. The ebb was there, as I quickly approached the whole Northern fleet just sitting there, a mile South of Red Rock, not able to make any more Northern progress. And so we joined them. It took us and hour and a half to cover that mile. The 2 knots of boat speed just wasn't a match for the full ebb. We finally managed to get around Red Rock at 4:30 pm. Only two and a half ours to complete the course, we still needed to round Blackaller (wishing now I would have rounded it when the breeze first filled in). We still had some (now) favorable current and so we started our beat towards Racoon Straits. While most boats tacked South after RR, we stayed on port tack towards the Marin shore and better pressure. This was the best move of the day. It payed hugely. We rode the last of the ebb to the South edge of Racoon Straits and played the shifts along the shore. And as we exited the straits we got greeted by a solid SWesterly. Even with the now building flood it was a fun and quick ride South across the Bay. I started catching up some boats ahead of me.
It was dark now. Even with an almost full moon it is nearly impossible to find the unlit Blackaller buoy. There was an Antrim27 and a Synergy1000 just in front of me at mark, that did the mark finding for me. They were both doublehanded so I wasn't officially racing them, but it was nice to pull a singlehanded gybe set at the mark, get out the flood first and beat them to the finish line. It was an exciting last run to close the race doing 12 knots in a moonlit night, finishing a little over 8 hours after we started.
