Almost-Bullet Blog: No. 39’s Surprise
We don’t normally feature a blog from second place, but since it was from a very unexpected source (US!), I thought I would fill you in on what goes on in the head’s of those typically in the back of the pack.
“Well, nothing bad has happened yet…!”
That became our quote of the night. We got out early for once, set up our strategy and recorded numbers all around the course. Then, the wind shifted from S to due W in a matter of minutes and it all went out the window. The warning went off, and we said… “well, head to Rose first to avoid the tide I guess.” Anyway, at this point we are now very unsure what to do, so we notice the all stars on 74 and 254 circling the pin-end like sharks around chum and basically said… just follow them!.
Start one, and we are set up with the A teams near the pin, but with a bad set up.. it all went to crap, so we were glad for the general. Start 2, we see the same set up for the all stars and follow the smart guys again and hover for a pin start. Well… it didn’t go so well again. We got squashed between 181 and ?? to windward with 15 seconds to go, with no way on, no steerage, and no options. So the gun goes off, and we sit there, pretty much going nowhere until the windward and leeward boats clear and we have have enough way to steer again, so what’s our options? We immediately tack on to port as soon as we had space just to get the boat moving.
Now, we are on port, all alone, from the pin end. The good news?… well, we have clear air!. Boats like 217 and others have started at the boat end and are sneaking up to Rose well below us for tide relief. Boats like 224, 156, 254 are all south of us. We are alone, except for 201 just below us, heading toward the bridge in max current, outside any relief from Rose Island. We thought… This isn’t going to end well for sure. Crap.. what do we do?!? We are smack in the middle all alone. So all we could do is observe what was going on around us while we kept the boat moving as fast as possible.
So, we notice, 201 below us is going slower and lower… we seem to be moving well, higher and faster, still all alone in the middle of the bay. Ok, that’s good I guess. Our numbers are improving, so lifts are good. Over our shoulders to the south, 224 was closest to us and was to windward at one point…. but now we seem to be climbing on her and going faster. More good news. There is a pack near Rose Island, are they gaining… wait! no, now it looks like we are moving on them. What about the hot shots that went way south of us? They must be doing better. No.. wait, it seems they are lower too and we are climbing on them. We still feel like we should cover them, but, we are moving well and our numbers are improving, Now, It looks like we are in about 5th place and we are positively giddy! (Yes, for a back marker, 5th is a place to be giddy!) But, should we tack? What do we do? OMG.. We are all discussing among ourselves. until our previously silent boat’s co-owner, who is on the boat for the first time this season, pipes up and says……. “Well, nothing bad has happened yet, so why tack?” …. Good point!… So, we kept on Port tack, all the way to the lay line, which was still far, far away, until it looked like we could lay it from mid-bay with money in the bank to scream into the mark… around we went!!.. First in the fleet!! Seriously?!?!… Now what?!?!. Do we even know where the next mark is???? OK, think fast…… go high, keep clear air and just get us out of there as fast as possible while the rest of the fleet rounds in a clump. So we did. We stayed high, with 156 on our hip, but with no real strategy beyond that.
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Then a squawk on the radio comes on. What? Was that a course change or finish? We don’t normally need to listen to those, as we generally have 10+ boats to follow. Anyway, unsure what to do, we set up for a rounding just in case. But, in the midst of rolling out the jib and about to douse the kite, we heard 156’s horn and figured it out.
For us, we were very excited to hold on for a second place for the night. Best Wednesday finish for our hack team in many years, and a much needed boost of energy for team 39/222. Wacky windshifts or not, we’ll take it.
Set up? Um… the forestay is flopsy as always. I have no idea where it is set. I never change it. Our sidestays are the same as when we launched the boat, but, I occasionally pull on the backstay tighter to shape the main.
As a PS, we got home with enough time for a martini sunset cruise around the harbor for celebration! Life is good. Second or second to last, we are glad to enjoy every moment we can on the water in 2020.
Bill & Jed – #39 Defiance, plus Lynn MacKesson, Jeremy King, and Ross Pearsall
Planned to Perfection
“It is great when the plan comes together. It’s even better when it works to perfection”
Our plan for this week started with getting to the boat on time. Although our “Reverse Vanderbilt Start” last week was exciting, we didn’t think it warranted becoming part of our normal protocol. Change is not always for the better you know.
After a close to “on time” arrival at the dock we then had a late crew change. Getting regular crew late in the season is always a challenge on 217, as several of our regular crew have returned to school. Kids these days far too responsible. In their absence we’d signed on one old hand from 217 days gone by, Michael “Danksy” Danks, and another one-time Shields sailor who will remain nameless but may be best known in the old circles for once having jumped off the Newport Bridge to make a Shields race. At the last minute, our extremely capable and highly entertaining bridge jumper had to cancel, at 4:10pm mind you. We did the only thing we could do, we switched in Mrs. Hilton who was going to watch the race from her RIB. Thereby going from a 205 lb Volvo Ocean Race veteran & America’s Cup winning bowman to a 106 lb one time Comet sailor as our 5th.
Unluckily the PeteCast had the wind in the upper range and the RC postponed for too much wind, so getting lighter and smaller was not our hope. But as it turned out, things were going our way.
When we got to the racecourse, our tactician/mainsail trimmer, Mike Marshall developed a sense that good things were going to happen on the right, as is often the case. The trick was avoiding the rush of incoming/adverse current in the deep water near the Green Bell. We had the wind at around 220-225. We had the line—before the RC boat changed its rode length —at an axis of about 140-330. We liked the pin but were not sure we’d be able to get out of there when we wanted, and we wanted to get right. We ended up in the boat third of the line and maybe a little toward mid line at the start.
We were able to hold our lane off the starting line — THE MOST IMPORTANT THNGS IN ONE DESIGN RACING. Be able to hold your lane! We knew we had to observe the green “can” toward the southeast corner of Rose and we knew we did not want to tack twice, if we could avoid it, to get around it. Luckily some nice people had anchored their very large white Jongert built ketch at the exact spot that marked the layline to the “can”. Any rumor spread by Peter Schott that we had planted them there pre-race is purely FAKE NEWS. However, fortune favors the lucky!
So we started, stayed on starboard until the people on the ketch started to get really nervous we might hit them and tacked. Several anxious minutes later we cleared the can by about 3 feet, maybe 4. Not 6. When we tacked onto Port the compass read 270-272. The boats on our port hip were looking fairly strong but Mike Marshall had said they would before the race even started. When we passed the can we were down to 280’ish. When we tacked onto starboard out near the main channel we’d been headed to 295’ish. Luck was once again in our favor, although it could have been uncanny layline calling by Mike Marshall as I think about it, twice. We laid the bell off Clingstone with 1⁄2 boat length to spare. From there all we had to do was not f’ it up, so we didn’t. Martha Fortin, bow person / jib trimmer and the true heart of the 217 team, and Danksy had stellar sets and drops.
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The RC moved the second windward mark in, so going right again was not going to work as it did the first leg. The wind at the bottom was nearly exactly the same direction as it was coming off the line. We stayed left to avoid the incoming current, went to the layline and tacked. Gun! Boom! Trophy please! Thank you!
For rig settings we’d gone 5MM shorter than “base” on the headstay and were plus four turns tighter on the D1s. At times we were a little underpowered as the breeze lightened up but were aided there by the extremely flat water. We felt the boat was moving very well last night.
Our thanks and gratitude to the Bill O’Hanley and his stellar Race Committee team. Our continued thanks and gratitude to our Fleet 9 leadership. And might I add, in this season of fleet elections where our fleet leadership is concerned, ” 4 more years!” “4 more years!”
“And that’s the way it is”, respectfully submitted from the 217 on September 16, 2020. Thank you very much.
Jamie Hilton
A Tale of Two Breezes
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times (content deleted, copyright infringement claim)…
Another gift of an evening on Narragansett Bay as the forecast very weak southerly surprised most everyone by strengthening enough to get a race in. The RC set up by special mark C, along the Jamestown shore almost in the shadow of the bridge, with a course up to special mark Z (just short of Clingstone), twice around. After a 15 minute postponement to let everyone arrive (with the exception of John Dory, #217, which executed a reverse Vanderbilt start, arriving at the line at the gun under chute!), and with a warning about the strong ebb, we went into a sequence with about 4-5 knots of breeze.
The pre-race plan on Grace, #107, was to go left to get into the stronger ebb, but we noticed that the wind went left at about three minutes to go, making the pin strongly favored. We managed to be first row, about a third of the line up from the pin, and although we had set up a bit on the high side and were worried about boats to leeward pushing us over, we were able to accelerate and ride over them; at the gun we flipped to port and crossed everyone to our right. The majority of the fleet continued on starboard towards Rose Island.
Experience told us that there would be a lefty off Rose Island, likely with better pressure, and so we spent a good deal of time looking over our shoulder, but we seemed to have better pressure, and eventually sailed into more of a southerly, then southwest breeze, getting headed maybe 20 degrees. We tacked to ride the lift over those coming in from the left, who seemed to have picked up more of a south-east breeze, with a bit less pressure than we had. We rounded first, closely followed by #224 Virginia and #201 Hope.
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Team Grace (107) round the leeward mark and tack left on a light-air night. Andy Segal/Robin Wallace photo
Before we get to the run, a word about our set-up upwind. We went with our standard Newport setting of a fairly long headstay, 800 on the uppers, maybe 250 on the lowers. Outhaul somewhat eased, traveller fairly high, being careful not to stall the main with too much fine tune, with little backstay on (I love it when there is enough to put a bit more on to open the top of the main a bit, but we hardly ever got there last night); jib eased enough so top telltale broke maybe 40% of the time. We strove to keep weight to leeward and roll through the tacks. With that said, we were never really alongside another boat long enough to figure out if we had good speed and point….
On the run, we jibed towards Jamestown after a dozen boat lengths or so, hoping to avoid the worst of the ebb and perhaps find the breeze that had helped us upwind. A number of boats, including #156 Bomba Charger, seemed to do well aggressively pushing in towards Jamestown. 224, Virginia, played the right side of the run well, and seemed to come up with some better pressure at times; 217, John Dory, was most aggressive on the right and made big gains on the leg. With our Professor of Puffology Rachel Balaban calling the breeze, Ted Hood trimming the chute, and Dr. Pete Schott handling the foredeck, John tried to sail a conservative, down the middle course, which seemed to work, allowing us to round C with a comfortable lead.
From there we tacked to the left for the current and better breeze, came back short of the layline to cover, (nervously watched 201 make big gains by going all the way to the port tack layline), and were delighted when the RC shortened the race at the weather mark.
Kudos and thanks to Bill O’Hanley and the entire RC for getting in a solid race. BIG kudos and thanks to the 21 crews who came out in mid-September for great racing. Let’s do it again next week!
Reed Baer, Grace, #107
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