Day 2 didn't start out so well. I went to bed the night before with with a throbbing ache in my left elbow, and more than the legal over-the-counter dose of ibuprofen (Advil) in my stomach. I could only flex it through the middle half of it's range without excruciating pain and the feeling that I would be causing permanent damage. The Advil was helping the pain a little, but the range of motion wasn't any better. I was in serious danger of not being able to sail, or at best, having to use both hands on the tiller.
Three weekends ago, I suffered a bizarre injury playing poker; I smashed my "funny bone" down on top of a glass, and the rim of the glass crushed the nerve and bruised the bone behind it. For three weeks I've been restricted in how much I bend my left arm because if I go to far, the swollen tissue squeezes the nerve, and makes it feel just like hitting my funny bone. It was almost better, but now somehow after working my arms so hard in 26 knots yesterday, there is new internal swelling. So, a big part of this mornings task was to somehow get this swelling to go down & regain the use of my left arm. Fortunately, Matt Cottam, from the Newport Laser 2 "Zero Down", is a trained EMT, and told me that ibu doesn't reduce swelling, that I needed to take acetaminophen (Tylenol). I never use Tylenol because it doesn't work as a pain reliever for me - but it turns out it does reduce swelling. He also figured out how to wrap a cold pack around it while we were rigging that didn't prevent me from being useful. By the time we got to the racecourse, my elbow was as good as before.
We got a decent start in race 1, but just didn't have the boat tuned right, and got rolled badly (translation: everyone pulled away from us). We ended up 24th overall, though, just slightly better than mid fleet, so that's fine. In race 2, we got a better start, but again just couldn't get boat-speed going right. We also had a boat barge in on us at the leeward mark who didn't have room. We called to him 3 times, and he just ignored us, until I had to turn to avoid him. He tried to claim that we left him enough room by accident, and we told him that that was just us avoiding hitting him, and that he ought to do his penalty turns. He didn't take our advice, and after racing, when we filed, he admitted he was in the wrong. He was upset with me for protesting him though because we were beating him overall and we beat him in that race. I explained to him that he rounded the mark inside of 5 boats at that mark, not just us, and it is our responsibility to protest him for it, on behalf of everyone else who he took advantage of.
On race three, we absolutely rocked the start, we might even have won it - but then there was a crazy 45 degree right shift, and we had gone left. It ended up being one of our worst races. On the fourth race, the wind picked up pretty big, it was about 15 knots at the start, and built to about. We got a fairly clean start, although nothing to write home about (so I won't write any more about it). But after that, we totally rocked. One of the guys who won race 2, in the 20+ knots had told me how to make the Laser 2 plane upwind in big air, and he finally got it to make sense for me, although I've been told before. We tried what he said, and we must have picked off 10 or so boats because we rounded the 2nd windward mark in about 10th place. We had a clean downwind between them, but we noticed that our diamond shrouds had fallen off the spreader *again*. We decided we shouldn't put the spinnaker up for the reach without them, for fear that we would break the mast. So we ran a screaming planing reach on main & jib alone, and only got picked off by three boats, including the Mexicans. We pulled off another clean downwind, didn't lose any ground, and were just about to pass one boat at the 3rd leeward mark, when somebody shut off the wind. It went from 18 to 2 in less than 5 seconds. We should have been about 2 minutes from the finish, instead it took 20 minutes. It was so bad we even had to douse the spinnaker, but we eventually made it.
In the middle of the day, the race committee waved for me to come over to them. This was highly unusual, because CORK runs extremely professional races, and one of the things that means is that competitors are not allowed to talk to the race committee. I started trying to think of whether I had done something horribly wrong, when the head race officer called me by my first name. I luffed up along side, and he started talking to me about meteorology and shifty conditions, and what type of course he was planning on setting. Then it hit me, the head of CORK had introduced me to him during registration, and he had asked me what my sail number was, so that he could discuss fleet-affecting decisions with me. I thought "Wow, I'm special! I get to talk to the RC!" In other regattas that I've been in, often there is somebody who breaks the taboo of not approaching the RC, and it's usually somebody important, and look at that - this week, I am that guy! The next day, we sailed up to the RC on our own to talk about what to do for the day, and afterwards, my crew, Dan, said to me "We are the only people on this race course who are allowed to do that!" We finished day 2 in 24th place (down from 14th, thanks to a pair of mid-30's finishes), but with that 13 under our belt, we still felt pretty good about it.
Day three was a total floater, we had about six attempted starts. Three of them were abandoned because there were shifts so bad that you couldn't lay the pin from the boat. Three others were general recalls, the third of which I got Z-flagged on. I hate this - we decided to do a boat end start, which I can't stand. They are incredibly difficult to accomplish, because, to state the obvious, there is a boat in the way. Not only that, but everybody always wants to win the boat, so it is a complete traffic jam, with boats bumping up against each other, so even if you do "win the boat", you're not going to be able to go anywhere. Well, if you do manage to both win the boat and defend a lane so that you can actually accelerate, then the problem is your sail number is the easiest one in the fleet to see. In this case, some kid who had no business trying to get in at the boat in the last 15 seconds, came up behind me, hooked my boom with his shroud, and pushed me over the line. Thus the Z-flag (and the 20% scoring penalty that comes with it). Fortunately, that race was a general recall, so we didn't end up having to clear an OCS. We had a couple more abandoned starts, and numerous chats with the RC on what to do about the light & shifty conditions. All in all we spent 4 hours on the water without a single completed race, which worked out sensationally for me, because apparently the Z-flag penalty has to be attached to "the next race that happens that day" - and since there wasn't one, we never got hit with the penalty! That is the end of boat-end starts for me.
-Avram
Day 4