First Race!

Damn it's good to be racing again!

We did our first wednedsay beercan race tonight, despite the lousy forecast. The weather was quite cold, down in the forties, but the wind was pretty light, at 4-10kts out of the northeast. Lots of chop made it pretty tricky to move the boat around, so it was definitely a challenging night.

Tonight was a great night to apply some theories on skill "loops" on the boat. Niki was handling the mechanics of the boat; sails, gear, and etc so that we were always ready for what was next. Jacob had the tactical end of things, and was always working on either wind, course or competition position, and Brian had the speed loop going, and we seemed pretty quick.

It was unique competition tonight, as we had no other Shields around, and total turnout for the beercan was about 14 boats (it was _real_ cold) so the RC gave us one start en masse. It worked out pretty good for ol' Peanut, and our plan for a conservative mid port start (it was big pin favored, and port tack beat as well) turned into a go-for-broke pin end start (we were 1 second away from not making the pin!) and a port-tack-the-fleet start. Quite thrilling to start a handicap race as the slowest boat, yet crossing all the fast guys! Competition was a number of 30-40' somethings, a couple T10s, 2 J105's and a Bene 40.7

Upwind was tricky, with big sloppy chop and little wind. Brian and I got the boat moving ok. For him this involved a lot of twist in both sails, but with pretty firm halyards. For me this was the Shields nightmare of sub-6kt breeze; just keep it moving! Jacob really came through for us tactically, as we had the rockstar start, and also kept in phase pretty well upwind despite the skewed leg. Along the way, we got rolled by the 40.7 (but it took half the beat!) and lost the 105 upwind, but gained them back in some short tacking at the top mark.

We rounded 3rd, which was quite cool, as we rate 176, and the boats ahead rate 96 and 42, and were within throwing distance. Downwind sailing was tricky, as it turned into a tight reach, which in a Shields usually means drop the spin and go whitesails only, yet it was so much fun to have the spin up we kept it going past the point of usefulness. We finished about 4 minutes behind the 40.7, 1 or so behind the 105, and barely got beat by a T10 at the end (they rate 126)

Peanut won her first thing tonight, and we got some rum for the corrected time win, which went to Jacob as a housewarming thingus. The new systems on the boat work really well, and the crew seems to like it all. New chute is extremely purple. Racing handicap was surprisingly fun, and I'd like to do it again. For a while I thought we could pull out line honors, but that's being a bit optimistic! More than a win though, it was great to be racing again, and some of the organizational/team ideas I had over winter seem to work well with our crew. More development on that later, but the long and short is we had a good night, with great people and fun racing; viva la beercan!