Day 1 – last to first to last

Hello Race Fans. Today has been what has been know .. well who the heck knows what its been known as. But I can tell you this, the day started early at 6am .. a nice warm shower.. yes i said warm for those of you that know I normally take a tepid to cold shower. I figured since it was the last shower i was likely to see for 3 or 4 days I’d make it a nice one.

Then It was time to get the laptop connected to the instruments set up. So many tasks:

• Import exclusion zones
• Import course marks
• figure out why specific data points were not making into the computer display
• Figure out how to use the boat chart plotters.. Raymarine.. ungh.. I hate those dang things, just not intuitive to me.

Then it was a very cool ride though the locks at the soo with about 15 other boats, I have to tell you it was REALLY cool. While we were going up coming down was the Kay M Barker .. don’t know what she was hauling to where to but always fun to see a freighter along side in the other lock.

Finally, pre-race meeting, nothing too awful exciting and I gave my weather and routing briefing to the team. Then the start.

Then the start

Then the start

Then the start

I say it like that because we had 1 knot of breeze and it was a crappy crappy start. two hours later we were DFL (Dead F’ing Last). Budt then I had the idea to try and seek the wind inshore and hope for a lift to take us over whitefish point. Well, it almost worked. For several hours we made up time and were getting lifted and then we were in first place for a couple hours. But the lift didn’t hold and we had to tack out into the lake .. well that took us back to last place as we skimmed the corner on whitefish point… there were actually people standing on the shore watching the race, it was pretty cool.

And then the wind died

And then the wind died

And then the wind died

….. In the Jungle

yes it was HOT and there was no breeze and all of a sudden we’re 6 out of 7th place again.

So here we are at 11pm and I’m fairly tired, but if feels like the team is gelling well, I’ve made some good decisions and provided the best intel to the skipper that I could.

Right now we’re desperately trying to figure a way to keep from sailing into a big hole on the way tot he top of the Keweenaw peninsula… its a crap shoot on the tactics so lets hope St. Brendan is on our side!

So all in all, an excellent first besides the results.