I would like to address a couple of things here.

First of all, the skippers meeting was extremely brief realizing that boats were spread out -- didn't even have time to thank the sponsors and hosts and all that gobbly goop.., just ran straight into the classes and starting positions.
The meeting was over by 11:05

The start was scheduled for 12:00 but I saw that many of the boats had not arrived yet, so postponed for about 10 minutes. This gave all the boats, no matter where they launched, over an hour to get out there.
From Gilberts it was a broad reach to the course, and from other places it was either a beam reach or close reach in winds nearly 15 mph.
We were about 1.5 miles from shore.., so figure it out. If you headed for your boat and left promptly, you would have had no problem making your start.
The Sharks, which had the farthest drive from the skippers meeting, were at the meeting and all made it out on time. Sounds like some folk might have procrastinated.., not knowing that I like to start races ON TIME!

For Jennifer: Heavy air sailing is not all about weight.., a lot of it is technique. I remember in the Tornado I sailed with my 80 lb. son and I was around 190. Yet we were able to beat the Russians in heavy air with a crew weight over 350.
Being originally from Ohio, where light air sailing prevails, it took lots of time to learn the heavy air techniques and keep up with the bigger folks in the big stuff, but after plenty of practice, we were there.
Don't give up just yet.

And I must say the winds were pretty hefty. I had a wind guage with me that was obviously not reading correctly -- for the first race it was reading 22.5 knots average -- no way was it that much

I do believe the wind was nearing a steady 20 mph with gusts to 25 mph (not knots)by the last race -- folks might have noticed on the orange course that the leeward mark kept getting longer and longer. It made for a very good last race, but it was surely not intended -- of my three patrol boats, one was towing in a dismasted boat, the other was retrieving sailors separated from their boat, and the other never heard me calling.
When we retrieved the mark, the anchor, cinder block and all were intact.., just wasn't enough to hold the mark in place.

On the F16 Forum there was a complaint.., "Due to some very poor race decisions, we were put on the short course. The first day we didn't even have time to throw the spinnaker because as soon as it went up we were at the c mark. It was very upsetting and I did voice some displacer to race management about the decision." and that complaint reached me at the skippers meeting. An F16 sailor complained that they should be on the same course as the Low Portsmouth boats, i.e., Marstrom 20s and CFR.
He failed to understand that we take all the Portsmouth boats and divide them from apples and oranges to apples and then oranges, by taking the total boats and dividing in half by the half.
While he may have thought his boat was fast, it was definitely in the higher numbers and because there are some other boats that are slower in that class, we had to run them around marks that were shorter, but the course was still just as long overall.., we gave them two extra legs.
Rick