Bob Hodges supplementing Bill Vining - Chris and I were the first boat on the water on Saturday. We first sailed upwind south of the Newport bridge and the breeze was probably 15-18 knots with maybe some higher gusts. We turned downwind and set the chute. No real problems as we sailed back to the bridge. We took the chute down before we got to the bridge and continued downwind to the starting area. We then hung out for about an hour and watched the breeze build. We were sailing the Gunboat 18HT that WF had just bought from Peter Johnstone. After a couple of what I thought were +20 knot puffs came through, I decided not to race as it wasn't my boat and I didn't want to break anything major before the LAC (this will be the boat we will race). We sailed back upwind towards the bridge and the breeze seemed to moderate back to the 15-18 knot range but once we got on the south side of the bridge, it really pumped back up so we had no regrets about coming in. We checked iwindsurf.com later that evening. They recorded 20-22 knots with +25 knot gusts in our racing area. Seven miles up the bay they were recording gusts over 30 knots. We were also happy not to get caught in the frontal line that marked the cold front coming through about 4:00 PM.

Sunday was a beautiful sailing day starting out with 10-12 knots at the start from the north. We led at the turn around the north end of the island but had quite a duel with Mark Murray. We got a break when Mark snapped a rudder gudgeon on his transom but he sailed beautifully to catch us napping at the end of the bay (we were not paying good attention to the current). We caught him at the Beavertail mark because he was having problems turning the boat upwind with one rudder. We got around the mark with a pretty good lead on the rest of the fleet. At this point, the breeze had shifted to a light SE seabreeze. We made a major error coming into the mouth of the bay as we did not play the east shoreline to get out of the current. We basically got stuck in the current with little to no wind and watched Mike Ferrara sail up to us. We finally got a puff of wind and squeaked into the bay and were able to set our chute and head for the bridge and the last mark. We now only had a lead of about 200-300 yards on Ferrara and we stayed that distance to the mark past the bridge. We thought we had Mike tucked away on the last upwind leg to the finish but we let ourselves sail into some bad air from the F-31's that were finishing with us and finished the race overlapped with Mike. I think he actually beat us across the line because he figured out the favored end. Good sailing on his part.