Happy Disasters

Today was awesome and disastrous all at once. The morning started off with really light air and a postponement. When we decided to leave the harbour and go for a sail anyway people definitely questioned what we were doing, but there was no way we were going to sit there and drink coffee; we didn't come all this way to sit in the harbour. We took advantage of our time to walk through some hoists and douses; the source of a number of our frustrations yesterday.

When the wind picked up and boats started to appear out of the harbour, we were prepared. A course was set in reasonable time, but due to the fog you couldn't see the windward mark. We were very grateful for our tactic as the boat does not have a compass.

Our first race was full of frustration; we could not get the boat to move and we watched boats with sails trimmed like ours and weight in the same places just parade over us and we could not figure out why. After the first downwind leg we stopped racing to spend some time asking one of the coaches about sail trim; we had been choking the main and were about 3 inches from trimmed on the jib.

Thus, the second race went much more smoothly; we even felt like sailors. Our results weren't quite what we wanted due to making a couple of the wrong choices about which side of the course to pick, but otherwise we sailed the boat reasonably well, tacked quickly, hoisted, doused and rounded cleanly, even shutting some doors on other boats. We tacked on top of several other boats that then had to bail and protested a fast boat so they had to spin. Success!

Much the same feelings were echoed on GRTB II though they had a much better first race than we had. Unfortunately, we were forced to tack on them a couple of times in the second race but we finished within a couple of boat lengths of each other.

The most important thing is we are all having fun. The second most important thing is we are all learning a lot and it's a great experience to race against a lot of really experienced female sailors. The third thing is we are all dressed well and getting several compliments on our shirts and we haven't even pulled out the red ones yet; we're saving those for the party tonight!