I am going to make this quick, because I want to check our website stats before leaving for the weekend. I’m interested to see if anybody even reads these blogs. Obviously they do, thank you very much.

Mid Winters was a great time. It left me wanting more, and I think that all of the competitors would agree to this. Maybe that’s because two of the days got blown out.

We had a good regatta. “Sophie” was fast, and after two race we were tied for the lead. We had to come back from being over early in one of those races by the way. By tacking below the fleet on whats we perceived as a coming lift, we stayed in phase and in good air. We had to sail headed a bit to get into the coming lift, but by keeping our heads out of the boat, we salvaged a 5th that race.

Day 2 blew 30 and we abandoned without leaving the shore. Then we hit the beach.

Day 3 brought winds subtly shining to the right. Local knowledge paid, but we did alright considering. We took a 7 and 13, which with conditions being as challenging as they were, would have kept us in 3rd. However, as we went down wind for the last time of the 3rd race that day; which normally would have been to the finish, but in this race was the 2nd to last leg, since we had to go upwind to the yacht club anyway; the spinnaker halyard got stuck. The knot pulled through the block at the top of the mast and we had to capsize on purpose to swim up and untie it. We righted the boat, gathered our trash and finished 32nd in this race, to hold on to 6th place overall.

Day 4 was abandoned as 22 knot winds turned into 28 knot winds.

Still the same, we had fun, learned a ton, and can’t wait for the next regatta. For me, that’s nationals, because Carrie and I are having another son in May. Please let us know if you would like to see some funny video from midwinters. Andy and I failed at our first spinnaker launch before the first race. The good news is that we got the kinks worked out for the races. The bad news is that the whole thing was caught on tape.