The pre-race sail was a thing of beauty. We had this massive A2 spinnaker up and were doing over 6 knots in maybe 8 knots of breeze. The only glitch was a concern that maybe it was, well, too big...to be legal that is. Even though we are rated for oversized kites, we didn't have a chance to measure this one and we didn't want to sacrifice our team's chances by taking a DSC--the Sloop Tavern team of Muffin, Nefarious and Kotuku was in first place, after all.
So down came the big sail, up went the jib, and into sequence we went. Unfortunately, our strategy and our execution were both impaired by other boats, and we weren't able to start where we wanted to (at the boat) or cross the line on the board we wanted (port). Instead we had to clear traffic and then gybe behind the fleet. Turns out we should have gone with them anyway, as the starboard gybe boats made big gains and we found ourselves at the back of the pack.
That was about the only thing that went wrong though. Despite fluky wind that seemed to go from "oh yeah, this is what we are talking about" to "um, where did all the wind go?" and tricky currents, we shifted gears and ground back through the fleet with solid upwind speed and good reaching to finish second. Again.
Boy, that black boat is good. We had moments where we thought we could save our time, but mostly Absolutely has owned the South Sound. Will be interesting to see what happens when we move north for the Center Sound Series.
Results are here:
http://www.ssssclub.com/toliva.htm
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