Here are cliff notes for those with attention issues:

Carnage is a strong word for the situation we had Sunday. Tucker (F16) pulled the bolt rope of the main out of the mast during a capsize. The boat and sail are undamaged in fact there was no damage to any of the boats. Heck the only damage occurred when the stay master on Dick's boat backed out and dropped the stick on the beach. The stick is fine it just has a little impact ding (ha!) at the top of the mast, all is well.

Full story below:

It was fun weekend! Only a youth team (Tucker and Isabell) and Dick MacDonald and myself showed up. Saturday Robbie coached us for a couple of hours and gave us a list of things to work on.

Sunday... we had some breeze which we were thankful for because we need in the practice. The breeze wasn't too bad it was consistently between 18 and 22 knots with the biggest puff being recorded at 28 knots. The gulf is what you expect, short steep pain in the butt chop, a bit like Hyannis. The days course was from Peir 60 (Clearwater Beach) and around Anclote Key and back. The first leg was due north and the breeze was due south so a downwind start. The teams were Tucker/Isabell, Robbie/Don
and Dick/Dave. Everyone set their kites Robbie sorted things out quickly and had a jump on the fleet followed by Dick and I then Tucker and Isabell. Of course Dick and I were the first to eat it and I took a rocket ride to the front of the boat... that was fun! Then Robbie and Don went down putting Tucker and Isabell in the lead but their luck ran out in front of Dunedin pass and they went down. In the process one or both fell onto the main only pulling the bolt rope out of the mast. While trying to right the boat Isabell got seperated, Dick and I sailed by and Tucker sent us to retrieve her. We found her quickly but pooched the pickup and during reset we capsized! Fortunatly there was a sweet looking power boat that was kinda standing by monitoring the situation and we were able to get there attention and they picked up Isabell and brought here back to Tucker. Tucker called it for the day and they went to Dunedin beach where they met Jill with the powerboat. We continued on to Anclote because we were chasing Robbie. As we were heading north we saw him on his way back and I remember thinking holy crap he's killing us! But come to find out later Jill called him to the beach to help get Tucker and Isabell sorted for the tow.

While Robbie, Tucker, Don, Isabell were doing their thing Dick and I kept sailing for Anclote. As we approached the north end of Anclote (our turn mark) we had to jibe and we blew the jibe putting us in the drink for a third time and three times is my limit, nobody dumps me three times in one day! :-) I pulled the plug and said no more jibing lets go back upwind :-) On our way back to Clearwater here comes Robbie! How cool is that, the guy came back to keep us company, actually he came looking for us to make sure were were ok but I like my version better and it's my freaking story. The upwind was uneventfull and drama free.

Good day, decent stories told on the beach. Really looking forward to Miami – Key Largo this weekend!

As a side note: everyone had phones and everyone was being tracked.