Leg 1: South Padre to Mustang Island
The Great Texas starts today at 10 am with a 100 mile long leg from South Padre Island to Mustang Island. Follow all the action Live today on the GT300.com web site. We will have Live Streaming of the starts, live tracking of the boats and Live streaming of the finishes. We hope also to broadcast a Happy Hour review with some of the lucky skippers at 9 pm tonight.
Big air is forecasted for today’s leg. Will the leg record of just over 6 hours be eclipsed this year? It could definitely happen with the big boats leading the charge.
The forecast is for 10-15 in the morning increasing to 20-25 later in the day. With the wind out of the southeast, it looks like a big sleigh ride straight north.
The tracking, sponsored by Trapout.com, will allow you to watch the entire fleet marching up the Texas coast. You can click on a boat and see the speeds that they are recording. Checkout Zhik 1, Zhik 2, and Cat Alley to see if they guys are up in the high 20’s on the speed charts.
Check out the forum page or the bottom of the GTLive page for the latest posts from the site.

is anyone able to get the feed on Justin.tv? I can't get the Sailing Anarchy feed to load and I can't find the race run feed. The thumbnail looks like the SA feed is broadcasting.

I can get the video, but it will not stream smoothly, just choppy bits. Interupted by frozen screen.

seems to be a bandwidth issue on their end. So much for live. . . .

same here and no trackers

click on event coverage live tracker link. I'm getting some of the team's updates, but they are sporatic.

grrrr...I wanna see somethin'!

The trackers appear to show pretty good detail but they're all on the beach spread out in a start line...wonder if they've launched yet?

zhik3 flips at the start, rights and keeps going. Zhik 1 (F20 - krantz / lennard) pitched just after the start and broke spin pole (which also supports the bottom of the jib). They're repaired and back underway.

Here's the South Padre weather report, notice what is says about winds later on today, SE, (on shore, big waves to get through no doubt) 20-25, no wonder they are crashing! More of the same for tomorrow, well, at least it'll be warm, near record high heat!

http://www.weather.com/weather/today/USTX1281

Without someone like Craig to run the SPOTs they are pretty much useless. I'm showing half the boats on the beach still.

Why are only some of the teams positions updating? The ones on the beach are not updated as of 2 hours and 45 mins ago. Do they only update when they move?

Are the trackers working?

Spots can be frustrating and touchy. It's all about getting a clear signal out; at least that's been my experience with them anyway.

conditions were apparently pretty mild for the start but expected to build. There was a pretty good chop though. The ground crew report I got said they didn't think Tomko's ground crew was going to be able to catch Tomko before he got to the next checkpoint. Could be a record setting day.

Start video from Clean

As posted on the blog from Mike Krantz on the Carbon 20:

"About 20 miles into leg 1 we made contact with something. With broken foil and hull leaking we turned upwind and headed back to the beach. By flying the hull we managed to make it back to beach access area on Padre Island

Ground crew is on their way to get us

Gt300 is probably over for us but we hope to repair for the Dash...

We're ok It could have been much worse

Team Zhik 1

Mike and Dave"

I also discovered a little more about the start. Mike and Dave only hit the back of a wave and broke the spin pole...the boat didn't pitch pole.

I had that happen before...it sucks!

That blows that they hit a UFO and busted the board!

good live feed now.

tomko first in

Part of the issue with the spots was several had an incorrect mode setting before leaving the beach. Should be better Thursday.

Good news for Team Zhik 1. Hull is OK, just a trashed board. We're (as in Dave Lennard) going to focus on rebuilding the board tomorrow and hope to join the fleet for the last two legs.

-Mike

Dude that sucks mike. I was really rooting for you guys.