NAC Tuesday Qualifying

Tuesday was a long day for most sailors. The starting time was moved up to 1030 to make up for lost races on Monday. In the end, the fleet didn't make it back to the club till about 1800. Officially, three races were sailed but it seemed and was, much more. A nearly complete race was abandoned the exact reason I don't know. Whats worse was it was a good one for us and would have had us above the cut. Another general recall continued until most of the fleet reached the weather mark where the mark boat spread the recall word.

For some added fun, a bunch of us returned to the club after the abadoned race only to be told to head back out to the course. The ensuing CF as boats were returning while boats inside the harbor tried to tack back out. Must have been fun to watch from the upstairs bar.

We had a bad first race and figured we would need a top five to get back to even. We had that in the race that was abandoned but... After what seemed like hours of sailing around we decided to bag it and returned to the club. So we are in the Challenger division.

Computer issue suck!!! So remedy is AMY!!!

JFS NACs 2010
In which we do a lot of sailing and get pretty tuckered out.

What a crappy day to be race committee! Feeder bands for TS Alex passed over the area, bringing wind to around the low 20’s. Shifting and puffing, and full of dark rain squalls. Today was the qualifying series, which means the fleet of 50 is split into four groups. To make a valid qualifying series, they have to have three races. At the end of the day, the top half of the fleet becomes the championship fleet, and the lower half becomes the challenger fleet. (Maybe those names are wrong, but in essence that’s the deal.)

Postponements, general recalls that took most of the weather leg to rein us in, and abandonments made it frustrating all the way around. Race two was abandoned after the fact, though the RC made a good-faith effort to finish us at the leeward gate. It’s proof of our reliance on this strange semaphore language of flags and horns to communicate between the racers and the folks running the race that we, for one, went ahead and sailed back upwind into the white squall to finish – and got a horn.

We were not especially fast today – not sure if we were not yanking on the main outhaul enough, or if the mast weirdness continues, but tomorrow, we’ll drop the mast and check it all over again. Because tomorrow is another day, here in Mississippi (correctly pronounced “Ms. Zippy”), and the actual racing for the title starts anew.

Rumor has it that Kim and Dave broke their Givashit block. I've had that go, and it's a bummer. Hope we can fix it tonight. There were some other things broken...We had a mainsheet hanging literally by a thread, but it didn’t break, and there were no street-signs used (so far) for boat repair.

Al and Katie were just saying they had a babysitter for little Cameron for nine hours today – a long while to pay a teenager to watch a sleeping baby, and a loooooong time to be hiking my butt off in rain and wind. In the past 45 minutes, I have crashed my bike twice – once narrowly saving myself from a precipitous tumble off the seawall. I am going to sign off now, even though I can’t find results anywhere to link. Bad blogger!