Shields Fleet 9

Race 4
At 4pm it was hot with no breeze. Off the porch in t-shirts and shorts was the call. Would we have yet another cancellation? As we realized nobody brought along foul-weather gear, we chuckled about the time last year (or the year before) we paddled off the mooring in similar conditions, but was hit with a good 18-20 knot blow in a matter of 10 minutes. Robin announced.. “Better to have one good one than two bad ones, so we’ll give it a go”. We came around the corner in a nice 6 knot Southerly, with super flat seas. Alright !!, finally.. our conditions! (Equus seems eerily fast the lighter it gets — don’t ask us.. we don’t know why.)

So we get a reading… and wait.. spins coming toward us from both directions? Big righty? RC boat moving again?.. the westerly finally fills in. With the flooding current, it seemed that the boat would be favored.. but a few top boats are hanging around the pin anyway. Hmm. We attempt a mid-line / clear air / running start.. but pushed too far and ended up in the pin end group. We had good speed and we were particularly pleased that a few of the leeward boats were over, giving us a pretty good lane. We march on over to the left, with Stubby on our hip, but are stuck over there until all the boats phase over, and a few just didn’t want to. So against our pre-race call, we made some good headway on the left, being conservative, minimizing tacks, and keeping clear air. Then, while anticipating the developing pile up at the mark we overstood just enough to have a fast approach, a little high, and we rolled over several boats all stalled together trying to round. Nice move Jed! At this point we hit our high of about 6th place. All downhill from there though. Our run wasn’t so hot. As they say, “we’re stuck in the middle…”.. as we tried to keep clear behind us, I think we might have been digging a bit too deep for the velocity, because the fleet compressed on both sides of us sailing at hotter angles. Or, the wind just did a nice job of super compressing us. We loose a few boats. With that, we found ourselves at the bottom pinwheeled on the outside and loose a few boats. We come out of the turn and… what’s this? The main won’t sheet in.. UGH.. it’s tangled tight in the blocks. We loose a few more boats. Our final blow to a decent finish? As we kept fighting for clean air, we committed to the pin end … with a heavily favored boat end finish. Final tally? Fro m 5th to 15th place. That was only our second outing on the boat this season.. and “Wow.. we are rusty!” It’s not bad to start at the bottom and work your way up to lower mid-fleet.. but to be upfront and go so far backwards… that hurts the most.

I couldn’t tell, but from the standings I see 226 and 224 fought it out for 1-2. Congratulations to both on what must have been a great race to the end. (I think we were dousing our spin at the time.) After we crossed the line, the talk on 222 immediately switched from the race.. to phrases like… “What a beautiful night?!” , “Ah what a great day for a sail?”, “Well that was fun, wasn’t it?!”.. “What’s for dinner?” and.. “So how was work today..?” and in the process, we covered just about all of the euphemisms for … “Dang we sucked, didn’t we?”

Race 5
But wait… there’s more!

Blue Square! Yippee! Time for some redemption. Robin and the tremendous RC team pulled it off. We were setting up for a second race. Same course. West wind. Thoughts on our boat? Well, whatever we just did.. do the opposite. We opted for a boat end start, but still fought for a good leeward space as momentum was going to be key. We flopped over heading for the current lee of Rose, but we were a bit too late. Our angle, even footed off a bit, along with a great lift, put us just outside of the island’s lee and into more current than we wanted. We hung on with 226 below us, but they were making much better speed in less current. As we tacked onto starboard toward the mark, we found a great lane as it seems the majority of the fleet went left this race. Okay.. what did we miss this time? Anyway, we’re getting lifted on Stbd, heading right for the mark, and moving fast. No sense tacking now as a slight change would put us above the lay line. We know we’d surely get set below it, but we just didn’t want to risk a corner spot this far out. So we mushed onward with clear air… and came into the mark about 6 boat lengths below and frantically looking for a hole over our right shoulder. This is the place you really never want to be… but there it was right behind Anthony K. sailing with the 224 guys and we’re pretty much within the top of the fleet !! (It’s been a while…) Bang, onto port in the hole just enough to cross the lay line and back to sbd. Again, we stayed high as the incoming fleet on port were all stacked up below us. We rounded about 5th. Now… let’s not blow it. Held on for more angles and this time went hard left at the bottom so we could come in on a tight, inside position, on stbd at the mark. Why didn’t we think of that last time? Anyway, with our heads a bit clearer, but still not quite 100%, we lost a few at the rounding but we were happy to just stay above Team FOX on 232 for the finish. Given our past season, we’re perfectly thrilled with an 8th place. Martini time on Washington Street was a bit sweeter thanks to that second race. Congrats to Team Edenbach on 36! Nice race — was anyone even close to them?

Thanks to Robin and all of our top-notch Race Committee for giving us yet another great night on the water.

Bill Doyle
Equus 222

Shields race #3, May 28, 2008 Sailflow’s predicition was absolutely right. They had predicted that the northwest breeze would turn around in the mid afternoon, and it did. The race committee selected course 81 (“Q” off of Fort Wetherall) and “8” often referred to as the Mallory or Shoemaker mark.) Although the race committee had problems with the outgoing tide, they responded to the challenge by making the pin slightly favored and raised code flag India during the first and only starting sequence.

As for strategy we knew we wanted to be in the max current near the boat, but also recognized the pin was favored. We opted for a late start at the boat, but I failed to time it correctly and had to do a 360^o outside the boat. As we completed half the turn and the starting gun went off we could look down the line and see that everyone was below the line, but we still hadn’t passed under the stern of the committee boat. The late start did allow us to immediately tack onto port. As we approached the dumpling bell we realized that we had gotten back into the middle of the pack, which included several Navy boats, who obviously had good boat speed.

We rounded about 10^th at mark “Q” and jibed back towards the House on the Rocks. I can still picture in my mind in a race last year when Bill Shore and Andy Burton took this route with an outgoing tide and caught all of us who chose to sail the rhumb line towards mark “8”. Again this route near the dumpling bell did provide us some relief from the tide. By the time we reached the leeward mark we were fourth.

My second mistake was that during the rounding we got trapped to leeward of 101 and 38, and opted to tack away. This was a big mistake, since we hit a lot of wakes and we were in less tide. When things did settle down, we tacked back on to port and closed in on the pack. We were able to leebow 254, but overstood the finish line. This did allow us to reach and were able to hold off 254 and catch Jamie Hilton (217); however, Peter Clarke sailing Virginia (224)caught us and we ended up 5^th.

In retrospect we felt fortunate to get the fifth after the horrible start.

Congratulations to John Burnham (107), Kurt Edenbach (36), and Bill Shore and Andy Segal (101) who took the top three spots. Talking to John after the race, they and 101 had the good sense to start near the favored pin and immediately were able to port tack the entire fleet and sailed in free air the rest of the race. Kurt on the other hand started near the boat.

Dr. Shoe, 245

Race 2 Report:

On 107, we hit the water early on Wednesday and had time to sail up to the Dumplings and back in the solid 16 to 18 knot breeze with higher gusts. The tide was flooding, but not too intensely; still, it seemed that the conventional wisdom of heading for Jamestown to get out of the flood would hold, so that was our gameplan. The course, as we expected, was up to the second Dumplings bell and back to the special mark in the corner by the bridge.

The only snag was that we ended up reaching down the line from the committee boat a bit to be sure we didn’t get pushed over by Kim in 143 and Stubby in 59, so when we started (“You were all 15 seconds late,” says Ted Fischer who was on RC duty salivating at the chance to call some of his friends over early), we had several boats to windward and had to wait for them to tack before we could do the same. Still, we held our lane on a nice lift on the long port tack toward Jamestown with 217 and 224 immediately to leeward and a gradually easing breeze.

We tacked for the first bell at Dumplings well to leeward of Scott Ferguson in 254 who was leading the right side. Lucky for us Scott and several others overstood the bell; we passed it in second just to leeward of 254, only to both be crossed by Will Welles in 226 who marched in from Fort Adams in the lead. We followed both 226 and 254 up by Clingstone and perhaps because the breeze had backed a little, we weren’t getting the big gusts we’d had on our practice run; in fact the breeze got mealier and Jeff Gladchun in 108 came in on the port layline and passed both 254 and us. Although we didn’t see it, rumor has it that Jeff took an extra tack along the fort and came all the way across on the layline, almost catching 226 in the process. So much for conventional wisdom.

With the slightly backed breeze and plenty of flood, the run turned into a starboard tack parade, with Peter on 224 coming from several lengths back to within a couple lengths of our transom, as we also closed up even tighter on 254 and 108. Near Goat Island, Scott snuck in a nice jibe in front of us to protect the inside at the leeward mark, and we later jibed also when Peter hit a slow spot. For the benefit of the spectators, we caught our port spin sheet on the headknocker while jibing and wound up rounding into a mild broach; fortunately Matt dumped the spin sheet and we preserved our position, but we were late on our takedown and rounded the mark without any pace. Behind us, 224 had a perfect rounding and rolled right over us. To get current relief by Goat Island, we tacked to starboard with 254 on our leebow, but 224 blew by both of us in better breeze despite the stronger current to the right. Peter and crew were going so fast they passed 108 as well by the finish. I’m sure Will in 226, our national champ, was looking over his shoulder as he got the gun.

John Burnham, 107

Thank you, Narragansett Bay, for a wonderful introduction to the 2008 Shields Wednesday Night Series. What better way to start racing than a shifty southerly, flat water and loads of tide. We counted around 15 boats for the first week, ably run by Dr. Robin Wallace, who was put to the test from the get go. That nice little lefty we all were eyeing off Goat Island before racing never really came in. And when the wind went right as the time ticked down to the first start, Dr. Wallace was forced to postpone for the first time this year. Then, on attempt No. 2 with the tide ripping out, he broke out the 1st Repeater for the fleet’s first (of many?) general recall.

When the race got underway on the third start, we on the 145 were deep in the third row. The only consolation was that Hilton’s gang on 217 was next to us. The two of us tacked to port off the line and were heading right. Only problem is we didn’t have the conviction to stay to the right with him. There was loads of tide over there and (eventually) a big right shift. Instead, we tacked away and crossed all the way over to the left side. Reminder lesson of the night: Never go from one corner of the course to the opposite. While 217 and 254 led around the windward mark we were deep, fending off the Newport Yacht Club PHRF fleet.

We played the run slightly right of rhumbline and were able to make some gains outside the majority of the boats. Although we were in adverse tide, we caught a break when some of those close to Goat Island made their way out and back into the tide. Our big gains came on the second upwind, a nice long leg from the bridge up to Fort Adams. We stayed outside to the right this time, and crawled up to 4th at the second windward mark. There we stayed until the last 1,000 yards when we got nipped by Burnham’s marauders on 107, who seemed to get a left shift while we were to the right of him. The usual suspects took win (217), place (254) and show (245). Congrats. Here’s to a successful season for all.

The 145 would also like to apologize to all in advance for any loud and obnoxious comments coming from our cockpit. We have an America’s Cup radio personality in our crew this year who is intent on keeping his vocal chords at the ready for whenever (if ever?) the Cup returns to the water.

Sean McNeill, Ted Fisher, and #145