I was more than a little bummed that I wasn't able to finish the race... see attached. As I made the Boggy Bayou light, I looked behind me to see how much the breeze and the wind-driven waves had built. I was still feeling pretty sporty, as I'd seen several capsizes of varying artistry all around me but I was still moving along OK. At #1, I turned up to beat back to #59... the last ARC to flip just south of #1 got righted and headed in just after I rounded. I sheeted in hard and ooched out to trap only to be greeted by a welcoming committee of five or six successive waves. That pretty much brought me to a standstill. I footed down to get some speed up and caught a nice puff, but the next set of waves just about put me on my ear as the wind tried to get under the tramp. And so it went for a while… when I finally got to where I could tack for the next mark (#59), I had to admit I wasn’t really racing. I was more just trying to keep the boat moving through the waves. I looked over my shoulder and saw the big boats headed back my way, took a look at the GPS, and figured I had about eight or nine miles to go just to get back where I was then, which was still seven miles from the finish line. I had been sailing for almost two hours in about 15 knots of breeze in maybe four-foot choppy, and sometimes confused seas. The boat was doing great and I didn’t feel out of control or on the edge, but I felt REALLY slow. My crew insists our upwind speed was between 0 and 12 depending on wave sets, averaging about seven. For the first time as a skipper, I quit. It was bitter, like chewing a handful of Bayer aspirin. Mike and the rest of the FWYC folks did their best to wash that taste out of my mouth with free beer back on the beach – great hospitality! Muchas gracias!

Not sure what this does to the Trident overall results – anybody have a handle on that?