First day again
May 28th, 2009 by kchapman
Alec already gave the lowdown on day 1, but I’ll add a few things.
The first is what is going through everybody’s minds before you shove off. Inside there’s a lot of thoughts being processed, from the “did we miss something” to “this is so cool” to “holy crap, what am I doing?” You feel weak until you walk about and see you’re not the only one with all this in your head. But then you gear up and hit the water, you’re in it, and the only thoughts that stay with you are the ones for sailing.
As Alec said we goofed the start pretty bad by getting to the line a little early and stacked in a bunch of boats at the committee boat. We opted to ditch out and come in again, but turned out as port against some starboard boats coming in. In short, DFL at the start! But we started working some boats and moving up a bit. When the wind started shifting a bit and picking up some, the chutes came out, got put away, came out, and finally stayed out as the course turned downwind somewhat. We found ourselves early on battling with Chums and Adrenaline, something that would repeat over the length of the race!. The water was absolutely clear coming out of the Keys, something we’re certainly not used to up here on the Chesapeake! Off the mouth of Biscayne Bay the water turned emerald green. Not much for waves, decent wind, two on the wire with the spinny, absolutely magical! Somewhere around there we rolled past Trey and Tad (looked they had something going on), and fought with them for awhile before resuming our previous position!
The wind dropped some, then piped up leading into the finish, where we got our first taste of reaching with the spin as we got into the building short waves near shore. We also saw the goodness of following the shore as we watched some of the boats make time on us along the shore. We dropped the chute for a little to figure out the wave forms, then it was back with the spinnaker for finishing. The beach at Hollywood was steeper than we remembered, and we approached under spin at speed I said to Alec “this is going to hurt” anticipating catching a bow in the sand and tripping. But we hit just right! Very cool.
Some other things – seeing our first turtle was awesome (it would be the first of many as it turned out)- it was just floating along the surface, looking like a bunch of seaweed. That served notice for us to not take the seaweed to lightly! Got to constantly keep an eye on when to clear the blades of all the seaweed we’d pick up. All in all an awesome day of sailing and a great way to kick off the whole event!