Nanook of the north, a.k.a. Chris
As usual, I arrived late, having phoned Chris to cover the skippers meeting and take careful notes. Praise be to the wireless phone providers! After arriving and quickly stowing (what seemed like) several tons of equipment below deck, we checked in with the race committee just as they were leaving the dock. Playing catch-up already, we left the dock in a hurry without setting any sails.
Chris wrestled the main in place as I pampered the engine, steered, and attempted to determine which way the wind was blowing, if at all. Foolishly believing the overnight winds might have something to do with the early morning winds, we wasted most of the start time rigging the spinnaker, which we would not need for hours.
The initial beat towards the mark, located some 8 nautical miles away off the south west shore of Antelope Island, was light and drifty. During the first hour we found one good puff of wind that lasted about 15 minutes, allowing us to catch the tail end of the fleet, and then bounced on the waves for another half hour, watching the boats with taller masts drift away. dJinni, at 22 feet and less than a ton displacement, was the smallest boat in the race.
Realizing we were going nowhere fast, we tacked to port and decided to look for wind on the right side of the course. We found some, and several of the bigger boats notice and tacked to take advantage. We tacked back to starboard and found we had managed to pass two boats, a Ranger 22 that was our real competition in this race, and a Catalina 30 that was struggling in the light winds.
As we proceeded up the lake, the winds built steadily until they reached 5 to 7 knots, excellent conditions for dJinni. We were still close to the Ranger 22 and Catalina 30, so we began to actively search for strong puffs, noting our boat speed as we tacked first up the lake then across towards Antelope Island. We began to develop a feel for the wind shear leading down the western shore of the island, tacking to avoid the drop in breeze near the shore.
Somewhere about this point, Kelly caught this beautiful shot of one of the boats chasing wind signatures on the water from the deck of Trioomph:
We were navigating with my Garmin GPS-II hand held satellite navigation system. We had Chris' GPS-48 on board as a backup system, along with a spare 12v battery for the VHF ship-to-shore radio and 4 gallons of extra fuel for the outboard motor. Sailing in cold water does present dangers and we wanted to prepare for dire conditions as well as possible.
As we neared our turning mark in the race, the Meira Spit buoy, we watched the bigger boats in the ``A'' fleet converge on the mark. It was quite interesting to actually know accurate distance and bearing to the mark; much of my racing time in the past was spent trying to find various buoys and race marks with binoculars from unreliable hand bearings and wild guesses.
OK, the pictures are terrible. These were taken with a disposable 35mm camera, developed at a one hour photo processing station, and scanned with a cheap parallel-port scanner. One of these days, I'm going to buy a really nice digital camera and be done with film.
You can barely see the three lead boats as white blurs on the horizon in this shot; one is behind the mast shroud at the left, one just inside the shrouds, and one dead ahead on the horizon. When we saw these boats converging on a point, we realized we were nearing the mark rapidly. (Click on the pictures for larger images.)
Kelly sent me a few pictures taken from Trioomph that are quite a bit better. Here's Trioomph following Kairos in a ``parade'' up the beat.
Soon the ``A'' fleet boats began rounding the marks and launching their spinnakers. I was unsure about what to do at this point; Chris had never sailed with a spinnaker before, and I hadn't had dJinni's spinnaker out of the bag in over 3 years. Normally, you want a crew of three or four for spinnaker flying, there are a lot of jobs to fly the chute well. We rounded the mark ahead of a few boats and bore off onto a broad reach with the genoa. It was obvious our boat speed was going to fall off drastically, so I began to carefully re-rig the spinnaker.
Fearing the worst, I pulled the spinnaker halyard, expecting the chute to hourglass and tangle, but it had been properly packed all these years. I hauled the halyard to the top, adjusted the pole, and settled into the cockpit to fly the chute. We were headed almost directly into the sun, headed straight towards our finishing mark and about 120 degrees off the apparent wind, generally an ideal spinnaker run.
The strategy worked, we managed to extend our lead somewhat on the run and finished in front of the Ranger. It was a fun day, and we sailed better than I had hoped for. Most important, we had a fun and safe day of sailing.
Kairos - Leroy & Crew Skeddadle - Harden & Crew Photo Flow - Terry & Crew
with special kudos to Josh who, judging from Saturdays performance, is making a stellar recovery!Farr & Away - Tim & Crew Levitation - Richard & Crew Pack-A-Lunch - Dianna & Crew J-22 - Wes Peters & Crew Tri-oomph - Kelly & Crew
I'd like to thank everyone who participated, the volunteers who helped bring this together, the State Park Rangers who acted as our safety and support crews, and the camera crew from KUTV-4 who braved the elements to cover the race start. And most of all, thanks to Greta and Gary Record for the Chili dinner afterwards; I was really hungry by the time we got dJinni tucked away.
To be sure I don't miss anyone, here's Gene's list of the cast and crew that brought this event together:
Ranger Bob and Jeff Steel who provided a safety valve to the whole affair. Bry Pratt for his excellent committee boat duty and making of the certificates. Terry Martin for marshalling the press - We have it on tape in the YC, Terry in a parrot head shirt and movie star sun glasses! You would have thought it summer. Greta & Gary Record for the Chili gathering afterwards - (was very sorry that Greta was not feeling well - Greta, know that you were missed!) My wife (Jana Morgan) for the conception and execution of the blanket award.
So next year, I show up on time, we have a third and maybe a fourth crewmember... Maybe we can have twice as much fun!