Hey guys,

Just a quick summary of our first JYC.  We were assigned as the scratch boat in B Spinnaker, a very fortunate move as we usually end up the slow boat in A.  We had a decent start (JYC is dock-starting this week and next at a minimum) and by the time we got to Z we were clear ahead of the rest of the class.  We had good point against High Energy and our new Tuesday night sails seem to be pretty good.  I will be getting some pics to Quantum soonest.

Off the wind we stuck to the numbers and sailed at close to the polar-specified wind angle for the entire leg, gybing to stay in the pressure.  This was a winner as we extended on everyone.  In the light breeze (8-12) we used the 1.5 with great success and kept the boat moving.  By the leeward mark (13) we were farther ahead of B boats and had actually made up some real ground to the A fleet.  After an excellent Mexican we sailed back toward the Jamestown side, but passed under center span to stay in better pressure.  We continued to stay in the middle of the bay as we worked towards the finish line, again due to wind.  High Energy played close to the Jamestown shore and it hurt them.  Our point and speed remained excellent for the return and with fog closing in we set ourselves up for a near pin finish, crossing first in our class but correcting to second out of seven boats.

One of the J-24s corrected over us but they were too far back to really do anything defensive with them.  Our division covers almost 80 rating points (seconds/mile) so even after 3 or 4 miles boats will be too separated to really interact in any meaningful way.  It is what it is.  I’m sure we’ll get our revenge when the breeze follows the more traditional “dying” scenario near the end of the race, we finish and those guys drift for another twenty minutes.  : )

I was really happy with our crew comms, especially since our last race was six months ago.  There is a lot to keep an eye on, boats around us, the environment, instruments, our own sails, etc etc.  Splitting this up effectively is good for us and we did that well last night with literally everyone contributing meaningful data along the course.  Also, we sailed a really “clean” race — no issues at all.  That all helped us in the long run.

One of the things we didn’t do much of before and during the race was watch the oscillations and try to get in phase.  It worked out okay since the first leg strongly favored a long starboard tack, the second leg favored going over by Rose and all legs favored just remaining in visible wind pressure, but for races where we have longer legs in which one side isn’t significantly favored due to current, we’ll need to get in phase.  Need to practice that.

Thanks for a great night and as a fun data point, if we had been in A fleet with the big guys we would’ve come in third — pretty respectable for that group.