Silver Eagle - A long race on the San Francisco bay
We did the Silver Eagle race on Twist yesterday. First time for me with the new "shortened" course, which is "only" 47.4 nautical miles long. We sailed short-handed, with only 4 crew on the boat, which consisted of myself, Ian (veteran Twist bowman), Brian (former Mini owner, sails small keelboats like Antrim's), and Chris (until yesterday, a non-sailor). Finished the race in ~9 hours, 34 minutes.
We made a few critical mistakes at the first few marks, getting the crew organized and figuring out if/when to deploy the kite. After a while, we got our act together (Brian did great forecasting what the wind was gonna do and where we should go), but we had already let most of our competition past by that point. Oh, and the spinnaker was *always* on the wrong side of the boat, so all sets were "windward" sets... a great Magoo trick!
There were at least 3 restarts in the race, when the wind dropped to 0, and all the boats that we fought to pass caught up, making it impossible to get enough distance from them to win the race (at PHRF 48, we were the fastest-rated boat on the course).
Most of the sailing was delightful. The blast reach across the slot in 23kts of wind with the Heavy #1 flying and a swarm of 110 kitesurfers doing the Chrissy to Berkeley downwinder (Kon was in that swarm, somewhere) in front of us was somewhat terrifying (but we did hit 8.5kts of boatspeed!). The last two legs of the race brought us some rain (what? in July?) and some pretty rainbows (one of which seemed to originate from the sewage treatment plant on Treasure Island). The sunset, lighting of Pacific Heights and the city was absolutely beautiful.
Here's how the day unfolded:
07:20 - leave home
08:00 - arrive South Beach Harbor, rig boat, head over to GGYC start
10:30 - race start
20:04 - race finish, return to SBH, clean up boat
22:00 - leave South Beach Harbor
22:45 - arrive home
