What a great weekend of sailing! For me, we had some new found upwind speed that put us in the mix. Most of that speed came specifically due to a training clinic I had on the A-cat earlier this year.

The start was interesting and a lot of aggression was being displayed at the start. The line was set on a bit of a reach leaving the right side of the line heavily favored. I wanted to start there but with a couple of minutes to go, it was clear that the fleet aggression level was high so we laid back a little and started 5 or 10 seconds late (it was too late to reposition down the line where Ding wisely started).

From there, we worked up to Card Sound Bridge and held pace with all Ding/Bing, Karl/Tripp, and Zelmer with Zelmer taking point through the bridge. Once through (after avoiding the SC22 just ahead with the downed rig - a chase boat was already on the scene so no assistance was needed), a drag race to Angel Fish Creek ensued and we swapped the lead with Ding and Karl several times. We nailed the last tack to the creek and had a slight lead when we entered. Frank and I were tacking really well and managed to stretch out a little as we came through the creek. I'm not terribly familiar with the F18's ability to sail high with the kite and we were a little unsure about what angle to go for. We felt that the wind angle would have put us running toward the beach so after getting clear of the shallows to the south of the creek (probably a little later than we should have) we turned and single trapped on a deep reach in some pretty choppy stuff. We saw Ding turn much sooner (wise) and Karl set their kite letting it draw them down to the beach. We didn't want to be left out so we set our kite but immediately, the halyard cleat ripped off the mast. We fiddled with it for a few minutes while sailing low and slow but I decided that we should take advantage of the sharper wind angle now and go back to reaching while we figured out a plan. After about 20 to 30 minutes, the wind was clocking for a deeper run and we were really getting drawn out to sea making the separation from the other boats more and more risky. I had come up with an idea for the spinnaker halyard. We took a few more minutes to gut the mast rotation limiter, flipped the bar up on the mast, and fed the spin halyard through the end of the bar and onto the cleat located there (normally used for quickly changing the rotation between upwind and downwind). We didn't need the rotation limiter with the kite up...and to my amazement, it held just fine. Game on! We sailed hard trying to make up some of the lost time but didn't have much, if any, advantage on either of the two lead F18s in those conditions. The water was choppy with TONS of seagrass being blown out of the Gulf Stream. We must have cleared the boards and rudders 50 times. Occasionally we we find a set of waves we could surf but most of the time we're trying to keep the boat speed up while avoiding punching the bows and slowing down (so we were keeping the speed limited a little to avoid the slow down). All of a sudden, Karl came zooming into the field of view and we could see that his spinnaker was down. We sailed our course close enough to them to make sure we could see both people on the boat and in active condition (we could see that Tripp was on the bow working frantically on something and it looked like Karl had another spinnaker pole purchase in his near future)

From there, we weren't catching Ding so we tried to just keep him from stretching on us. We couldn't quite get the spinnaker hoisted 100% with our jury rig but I don't think it would have made much difference. We finished about 5 minutes behind Ding and about an hour behind the super boats.


Day 2. The start here usually kicks my butt and I haven't done this race in several years...so I studied the chart pretty hard for this one. There are shallows, a cut (going through a short bridge to the north of the Channel 5 Bridge) and then another oddly shaped shallow just prior to the channel 5 bridge. Avoiding the shallows altogether results in a lot more distance. Not taking some measure to avoid them results in really slow sailing (or damage). We found a pretty decent average through and got to the channel 5 bridge in good shape with the other F18s after having brushed ground only once. It was now an upwind drag race to the first cut. It seemed like the other F18s were sailing some different angles to weather and, in hindsight, I was starting to focus on that to much. There were probably lanes of breeze and I should have focused more on speed...but, we got to the first cut hot on the heels of Ding and with Karl right behind us. This cut is a marked channel through a very long shallow sandbar and it was upwind straight through it with an opposing current. The edges are poorly defined and hard to see so it was a real game of figuring out when to tack in the 10 yard width of the channel with decent depth. We brushed bottom a couple of times but managed to quickly tack and get through it. We got past Ding in the channel and saw that Karl had flipped. A couple more tacks and we were free of the channel with only the two Marstroms and the Nacra carbon 20 ahead...time to go! Frank and I sailed hard running from Ricky on the Nacra 20 while Ding and Karl struggeled to get out of the cut. I thought Ding was hanging around Karl to provide assistance if he needed it (and set my watch timer to make sure he received "adequate" time adjustment! ;-)). The yellow Marstrom 20, piloted by Lohmeyer, seemed to be off pace and showed a lot of twist in their main. We were able to keep up with them the entire way back and let Steve show us the way back to Key Largo (there's not many more familiar with this route than Steve). We had a really tough time getting through the creeks in and out of Tarpin Basin - I'm not sure what happened to us there. Ricky passed us in the last creek after getting a huge gust that we never saw. We seemed to lose a lot of ground to the boats behind us and in front of us there too. I haven't been able to figure out if it was just a random lack of breeze (bad luck) or if we were spending too much time on the windward side of the creek...or something else entirely. None the less, we popped out into Blackwater Sound with Ricky just ahead and Gilberts on the radar. It was a great two days of sailing in perfect weather and different water conditions and incredibly tight competition from the other F18s. I think the difference between Ding and us in 4th and 5th respectively was a minute or less overall.