Tesara - Race Results

2003 Racing Notes:

09/17/03 The third time's the charm! We sailed a fairly good race, and we won! (Of course, it helped that the other boat in that division couldn't find the unlighted buoy that was the first mark and dropped out! Thanks to the LORAN and Elizabeth's excellent night vision, we found it without much difficulty. Now that the race committee and I were in agreement on the direction to take marks, finishing the race was no problem, and damn, it felt good to hear that horn at last!

09/10/03 Prior to the race, we visited all the marks and snapped LORAN waypoints. A gamble on a wind shift in the first upwind leg really paid off handsomely in our favor. There's nothing like the feeling of tacking across the bulk of the fleet and finding yourself far ahead. That is, until we rounded the first mark, and due to a rigging malfunction the lower block of the mainsheet disconnected from the traveller! In a moment of heroic ingenuity, we refused to admit defeat, and improvised a jury-rig with a clevis pin and Charlie's key ring. Unfortunately, while this was happening, we were practically standing still, and all the boats passed us. Undaunted, we kept going, and we crossed the finish line.

Alas, I was of the opinion that marks were to be taken to port, and the race committee disagreed. They shouted this to me as we finished, and in the confusion of turning around and crossing the other line in the other direction, I hit the mark. (This normally would incur a penalty, but at this point, we were dead last, so it didn't matter.) But to add insult to injury, the rudder caught the line between the floating mark and its anchor, and started dragging the damned thing with us! The committee boat was chasing after us, wanting their buoy back!

In spite of the comic element of a boat dragging a huge yellow inflatable buoy, there was a really big problem, namely that we couldn't start the engine to return to port with anchor rode hanging in the general viscinity of the prop. Fortunately, my crew came through with flying colors, and managed to get the anchor rode free. So we had another DNF.

08/20/03 We raced a pretty darn good race, in spite of the fact that we had a mere 300 lbs of crew to keep the boat upright in a fairly brisk wind against boats with several times as much crew weight. I was happy as a clam, at least until I realized that I couldn't find the finishing mark in the dark. DNF. Oops.