We launched the boat on Thursday and sailed over to PCYC on Friday. The Thursday launch meant that we could avoid the drysail area during the NYC Star regatta. We arrived at PCYC late Friday with just enough daylight to navigate safely. I tried to get a dock but a PCYC staffer was still on duty. She was patrolling the basin herding the new arrivals to an appropriate spot. We were directed to the J raft which already had about 3 boats.
Saturday was very foggy. The crew wanted to be at the club early so that we could get in a few practise tacks and spinnaker hoists. There was no wind and lots of fog. The RC flew an AP at the yardarm. The wind slowly filled in but there was still lots of fog. Apparently a storm was moving in from the west. Anyway we didn't leave the dock. The fleet was somewhat upset as clearly there was wind. Very little to do and it was very boring. I found out later that the Stars had three races at NYC on Saturday! The RC amended the SI's to allow for an earlier start and removed the time limit for the last start on Sunday.
We arived early on Sunday and were one of the first boats to sail out. The winds were light but steady from the west. The wind would increase for the rest of the day. I would say the conditions were prefect for the J. Steady winds of 10 - 20 knots and not too much chop. The course was windward leeward. There is windward mark and offset mark and two leeward gates, twice around.
Our performance was pretty much as expected. We were all a bit anxious of our performance. The J fleet is very competitive. Our starts were good. However, I tended to stall the boat and we lost a few boats for no good reason. It was hard for me to get into the groove. This may have been because of my older sails. The main's luff luffed. Jaimie was able to keep me out of trouble with lots of room at the start and good direction around the boats when we had to duck. We sailed a very conservative course without too many tacks. We overstood the windward mark layline in order not to be knocked by other boats. Our boat handling was OK. We recovered from screwups and we were able to do what needed to be done quickly.
We had one interesting encounter at the leeward gate. We were on starboard inside of a port taker B who was inside a starboard tacker C. Inside of us was another starboard tacker A who took way too much room to round the mark. I couldn't head up port B since he was restricted by C. In order to avoid hitting A I ended up doing an uncontrolled gybe. The main sheet got tangled in the traveller and I couldn't haul in the main as we headed up around the mark. A new boat arrived and of course wanted us to head up. There was lots of potential protests here but no one bothered. The result was that we got pushed back. That was an example of our inexperience. There were two near collisions. We were on starboard and two port tackers either didn't see us or thought they could pass. These guys were protested.
After the event we sailed back to NYC with a nice westerly breeze. We ended up in second last spot, but the goal wasn't performance; it was to have fun. We had a great regatta.
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