No wind race

The crew was uncharacteristically late. Janet arrived at her usual time and appeared slightly distressed to learn that she was, unusually, the first to arrive. At 17:30 I put in a call and found out that Emi was in the parking lot and David was at Rees and Lake Shore. There were fewer boats to launch; the 'practise boats' were no shows. Fortunately there was no wind, so no hurry to get to the start.

There was some wind; at least enough for the RC to put the first divison into sequence. We lingered near the pin, a few boat lengths below the line, and waited for our start. I think we can say that there is virtually no wind if the warning flag droops! What flag is is it, 'Warning' or 'AP'?

We finally figured we were in sequence and slowly made our way to the start. We were on port tack but had no problem with rights. You have to move before you can have an issue with ROW! A somewhat bigger boat, a CS 30 (?), sailed slightly higher and we ended up being in bad air. Should we tack away or not? I opted to not tack since tacks would be costly; it would take forever to get 'power' back, and there was a risk that we would stall completely. The boats in clear air had a huge advantage. The RC made an assessment of the fleet's progress and, almost immediately after the start, announced "Shortened course".

Rounding the windward mark was tricky. The current had a big impact given the lack of wind. It was slow. We had to do a couple of painful tacks. On the downwind leg we tried to sail on a hottish angle. A beamish reach is not a great way to make progress towards a downwind mark, but it was the only way to have any speed.

Windlight had an interesting race. They were slow to start; way behind everyone else. She sailed on one tack much further south than everyone else in the fleet. In a sense they were doing everything wrong. The light wind conditions made the 'wrongs' right. They had clear air at the start. They did the minimum number of tacks. They had caught up to us on the downwind leg. With her bigger mast she was able to make the most of the very light wind and easily passed us.

We had caught up to Flawed. This was a similar situation that I had faced on the first upwind leg: whether to gybe/tack away when you are being shadowed by another boat. The problem is that in light air you have to sail at a lower angle; you can not sail towards the next mark. You also lose boat speed with every gybe/tack. When you make choices, to tack or not, you are never sure whether you made the right choice. In this race we had two incidences were one skipper chose bad choice "A", not to tack, while another skipper choose bad choice "B". Flawed decided to gybe away. I would say, after the fact, that bad choice "A" was better, but of course the evidence is subject to interpretation and the two incidences, although similar, were not identical. Flawed clearly had difficulty finishing.

We finished in darkness. We got the sails down and the motor on. Things were sorted just when Flawed finished and was ready for the tow back to NYC. It was a beautiful night. The moon was almost full. The Toronto skyline was in its 'cite des lumieres' glory. This was definitely the best part of the no wind race.