Race two today started out with a couple general recalls, one of which we got a sensational start on. Then the put up the Z-flag, and we ended up doing a mid-line start. Basically the pin was heavily favored, enough that everyone was crowding down to it. So, we wanted to start as close to it as we could, without being in the traffic jam. Well, somehow I created & defended a lane perfectly, and the only problem was we were close to leeward of a boat which I was fairly certain was over the line already. Two seconds before the gun, we beared away, accelerated, and we absolutely smoked everybody near us. Basically what happened is that the boat above me was over, and although we were a little bit behind him, we blew him away anyway. Most likely we were over the line too, but the funny thing about sailboat racing is that if someone above you is over early, you actually *have* to go over early yourself too, or your wind will be blocked and you won't be able to start. The key is you have to be *less* over than they are. If you can't see the flag on the RC boat, then you can't tell if you're over, so the best you can do is be behind somebody - but only a tiny bit. If you are, then the RC can't see you, and if they don't see you, then you're not over. So, by extension, we were not over. Neither of us said a word about it for the entire windward leg, but both of us were thinking "Did we just win the start?" (Sailboat racing superstition: you never talk about doing well *while* you are doing well, or you will jinx it). Having learned our lesson from the previous race, we sailed to the compass *and* the course, and we held our lead (without acknowledging it) all the way to the windward mark. We had some very tight racing with Nigel Skudder from Great Britain, who is always one of the top 5 boats, and when he got close to us, I was amazed to see that we actually pulled away from him. It's one thing to get a great start, but it is entirely another to be next to a boat that has an excellent chance of winning the whole regatta, and pulling away from him. We beat Nigel to the mark on boat-speed alone, and 3 other boats on sailing to the compass. We rounded first.
The trouble with rounding first is that you don't have anybody to follow. We are sailing trapezoid courses, so we have two leeward marks. We sighted the wrong one, and started sailing towards it. We realized it after only about 30 seconds, and changed course to the correct mark. The other top 5 or so boats were farther down the course than us now, but we had the luxury of a faster angle to sail, having gone too deep in the first place. We picked off four of them, but we were paranoid about being too far from "the pack", so we headed too it rather than right for the mark. It doesn't make sense why we did it, but the thinking was something like "We don't even belong here, if we just can manage to follow someone who knows what he's doing, then hopefully maybe we'll manage to not screw this up even more than we already have". So, we rounded leeward 1 in 2nd place. We only lost one more boat on the way back to the windward mark, and held our position to round the reach mark in 3rd. We followed the two lead boats to the left, and two behind us went right. We had miraculously clean spinnaker work, and stayed with the #2 boat. The #1 boat was long gone by now. By going left, we were able to be on starboard gybe coming into the mark, which was important because the boats coming from the right had to yield to us. One of them had gained enough that he was clear ahead of us, but we were able to use starboard to hold off the other one, and we did our final gybe back to port to round the mark, managing to stay inside of him.
We came out of the last mark onto the final reach in 4th, with the Irish boat hot on our tail, and I mean really hot - they weren't even a full boat-length behind us. They also have been in the to 5 in nearly every race, and they are both lighter than either Dan or me. I said "Dan, we have to play this whole reach absolutely as hot as possible, they're going to try to roll us." Reaching is the fastest angle there is to sail, and with the spinnaker, it is literally doubly-fast. However, it is a threshold situation; The spinnaker can only stay full up to a certain angle, and then it will collapse - and then you lose half your power. To fill it up, you have to drive lower, which is slower. Marty managed to make us sail such a high angle that we collapsed our spinnaker four times, but every time, we managed to re-fill it in less than 2 seconds, and he couldn't get around us. All this while, watching Marty behind us, I had to keep my eye on the finish line too, and I noticed that while Marty was making us sail the absolute highest possible spinnaker angle, we were *barely* even going to lay the pin at that angle. Then the #3 boat collapsed his spinnaker, and couldn't fill it, and I saw him starting to douse it. The wind had shifted, and for him it was no longer possible to lay the finish line with the spinnaker up at all. I had a couple seconds warning before this shift hit us, so I knew what to expect, and I yelled out "We have to douse!" Dousing the spinnaker on a Laser 2 while on a port reach is the single most difficult operation there is on this boat. It is nearly guaranteed that you are going to either "go shrimping" (drop it in the water, and drag it), or drive over part of it. They say that you often do your best at something when you don't think about it, and we didn't have time to think about it, we just did it. It was our fastest *and* cleanest douse of the regatta, and we sheeted in, and close-reached to the finish, to maintain 4th place. Perhaps the most amazing thing about all of this is this race happened in 8-12 knots, nowhere near trapezing conditions, nowhere near the kind of wind where Dan and I expect to be fast (being one of the heavier teams in the fleet).
When we were just getting ready to round the last leeward mark, we had a moment to turn around and look behind us, and see 52 Laser 2's. If you've seen the signature print in my living room from my trip to Italy, you know what it looks like to see about 40 Laser 2 spinnakers and a few stragglers who haven't rounded the reach to put theirs up yet. You also know that I'm not in that picture because Kevin and I were such stragglers that we weren't even in the frame of the camera yet. Well, this time there may not have been an Italian lake hillside with a 400 year-old town of white houses with red-clay roofs as a backdrop, but take my word for it: This was a much more beautiful sight coming from the stern of *my* Laser 2 than the same thing in any setting from any other vantage point. We got a fourth place in a world championship regatta race with 56 boats in it. It jumped us up four positions into 20th place.
Back on the event organizer front, I made my first minorly catastrophic decision. We had our regatta banquet at the end of day two, and I had arranged for a band to play after dinner, so people could have a good time, and a dinner to really remember (In Europe, they always have bands at our championships). Well, I had to decide when they should start playing, and I decided to have them wait until desert was being served, rather than play through dinner, so they would be able to play longer. Unfortunately, I failed to coordinate for anybody to tell them when dessert was being served, so they didn't know. About 5 minutes after desert was actually served, there was huge cartoon dust cloud like when Wile E. Coyote has almost but not quite caught Road Runner, and when the dust settled, out of 141 attendees at the dinner, over 100 of them had vanished. I think I even heard a "ping-twang" following about 100 "Meep-Meep"'s. Well, hindsight being 20-20, most people didn't even realize there was *going* to be a band, so if I had told the band to start playing during dinner, then a) they would have known, and b) the people would have left anyway would have at least gotten to hear a band play during dinner. Oh well. The band turned out to be great, too. Minor management blunder number two was our regatta T-shirts; Matt made a great T-shirt design, and we both agreed that the idea colors for it would be white ink on navy blue heavy-weight t-shirts. I had emailed the T-shirt printer more than once to make sure that he had the specifications right, but I never heard back from him. I failed to take the extra step of calling him, or otherwise positively confirming that he had our request right, so our T-shirts came out white with royal-blue ink. They look fine, but white T-shirts do not last as long as dark ones, and just do not look as special. Again, "Oh well."
-Avram
Day 5