The King’s Day Regatta was our first time in a boat in a while and was full of some interesting and unexpected events. The weekend started with us leaving Atlanta at 2am on Saturday morning (we all had things we wanted to do in Atlanta Friday night) so we were dead tired after a full day of racing on Saturday. But at least we were super early for registration and rigging! Conditions were beautiful, although quite shifty and puffy. Still, we enjoyed about 12 kts of breeze on average throughout the weekend. It was even cold enough on Sunday to wear spray gear for the first time this winter! RC did an awesome job, even with the wind being difficult. We ended up in 15th, which was disappointing to us, especially since we usually do a lot better. But we discovered right before the very last race part of the source of our frustrations. Read on to find out what happened!
Right before we left the dock, the screw that held our forestay to the mast detached and we had to do some last minute repairs. We owe a HUGE thank you to Jodi Weinbecker for helping us out, providing a replacement screw, and even towing us out to the race course so we could make the first start! Throughout all of the races on Saturday, we felt like we were going slower than normal. In fact, it was pretty reminiscent of our first 2 regattas before we had gotten a chance to put in the time and effort to tune the boat. We would be sailing on the same tack and in the same wind as other boats, but somehow they would be hiking and shooting past us while we just felt so slow. It eventually occurred to us that the forestay issue we had probably messed up the tuning. Props to Wheeler for noticing that pulling on the wire wouldn’t make the forestay snake like it normally did. We added a few blocks behind the mast to fix the rake as best we could and felt like our speed was a little better for the very last race. It was reassuring to finish in the final race next to the competitors that we normally are close to, although frustrating that we didn’t figure out that our tuning needed to be fixed until the very end. For most of the weekend, we had blamed our racing strategy on our poor tactical decisions and performance, which definitely still contributed, but it was nice to do well at the very end after fixing the tuning. This coming weekend at Sanford Sailfest, we aim to look at our rigging again and adjust the settings to get them back to our normal tuning.
During Saturday’s racing, we also had to fix the jib cloth adjustment line on the water. The line wasn’t fed into the pulley at the bow correctly, so every time we were adjusting it, the line just became more and more frayed until it snapped. I think we have gone through just about every repair we possibly could have with this boat which has definitely been a valuable experience. The more stuff that breaks, the more we learn about the boat and how to maintain it!
We don’t really have any individual updates for our positions, so we aren’t going to write those for this or the next blog post. Just continuing to try to get better at our individual positions and working in a team.
Overall, it was a great weekend and we were happy to see some old friends from college sailing (@Lauren Yapp). Thank you to Darby’s brother, Michael for letting us crash at his house and to Emma Newton and him for hanging out with us, giving us racing tips, and taking good care of us. We loved getting to sail at beautiful Florida Yacht Club and they did a wonderful job with the regatta. See us in a few days at Sanford Sailfest for the last regatta of 2019!
