Today definitely DID NOT go as planned. The wind forecast for today was for a stronger 10-15 knot breeze in the morning dying off to a steady 10 knots as the day went on, but mother nature decided to not stick the plan and gave us a steady 10-15 knot breeze with some bigger gusts. The first race today was going well until the kite run downwind where we overstood the downwind mark. We dumped the traveler and kept pushing ourselves to keep the boat sailing high but we still couldn't make the mark. As soon as we decided to douse the kite we stuffed the bows and had one crazy pitchpole, with Erick flying completely around the bow and the sterns in the air for a bit. After about 10 minutes we finally got the kite doused and the boat unflipped but by that time the fleet was finishing. The next race came around and we were in a pretty good position in the top 10 when, while jibing and dousing the kite at the leeward gate mark, the spinnaker got wrapped around the end of the spin pole. We had to jibe back and as I went out to the bow to fix this mess the pole snapped because of the kite dragging in the water. After another 20 minutes I finally got the kite back in the bag and with a broker spin pole we decided it was time to go in.
Not surprisingly we weren't the only ones with broken equipment! Another boat had a broken spin halyard and John Casey had been involved in a collision (I'm sure others had smaller technical failures). Today unfortunately may have been the most expensive day of the regatta! Overall, this trip has been a great learning experience. We worked extremely hard all weekend and it shows in our results from the past two days, excluding today's 4 DNF's. The most important skills I have worked on this weekend would have to be starts in a bigger fleet. With 26 boats on the line, our timing and boatspeed had to be perfect in order to get off the line in the first row and to pull away from the fleet with some of the more experienced teams. This event has been a memorable one and I will definitely consider coming up here to Hyannis to race next year!
Check out the final results here! (Bad last 4 races on day 3...)
Check out the final results here! (Bad last 4 races on day 3...)