After a lot of work to get the Quest 33 ready for Cat 2 racing Wayne the owner of the Quest 33 RYM is looking after lent us the boat for Coastal Cup. With a crew of 4 – Mark English (Moore 24 owner), Richard Leslie (Melges 32 owner), Olivier Lapparra and myself set off hoping all the forecasts were wrong.

You know you are in for a long race when Commanders sends you and email that starts

1) This does not look to be a lot of fun

a) can be a very fast race, but it looks really, really slow this year, especially tonight, Fri morning, and again Fri night

We didn’t have a good start – second row and very slow. There was a large ebb and we were well clear of the line for the start of Class A. So with a no wind and a rolling start sequence it took us 5 minutes to get to the line and I squeezed up between the J109 and the anchor rode of the start boat – they were kind to let us in was cheeky for us to go in there but with both of us moving at 1.5 knots it wasn’t in his interest to punch it up and push us out.

We tacked straight away so as not to sit on their wind and also because although the most ebb was on the city front it looked very slow going that way. We ended up tacking up to the bridge between Angel and Treasure cutting across to the city front around Blackhaller and then heading out very close to the south tower and working middle to left side outside the bridge. There was a very light NW at this point and we started reaching south at about 200 so that we didn’t close on the coast as per Commanders suggestion of keeping offshore.

All the other boats started to hoist their kites but weren’t even making it around Point Montara so we held off. Finally we decided it was time to hoist and just as I got the spinnaker hooked up a wind line moved towards us and everyones spinnakers backwinded. The light southerly has arrive way early it was only around 1pm. As we sat their trying to make 4 knots of boat speed a whale surfaced next to us several times – beautiful.

We beat till 5pm and dialed all the buoys to get real time conditions every one was showing southerlies less than 10 knots of wind. The crew made a decision it was time to go home – there were better things to do than drift offshore for 4 days. We hoisted the kite and to really show us how much it sucked that wouldn’t even set so it was time for the engine. We motored until we had 10 knots of wind and then hoisted the kite and sailed into a fog bank with about 200m visibility. When we sailed under the bridge you could hardly make out the underside of the roadway. We crossed in front of a container ship sailing at 10 knots missing it by about 250 meters and emerged into a beautiful sunset off coastguard point (sausalito). By the time we got back to the dock, cleaned up the boat and ate dinner it was 11pm.

It is 5pm on Saturday 55 hours after the start and two boats have finished and 5 are still racing. The Beneteau 42 is bringing up the back and is only 140 miles down the track with 137 straight line distance left to go…… I went Friday night racing last night instead with the Fennell family on Good and Plenty and had a good time doing foredeck.Back to making some bags.

 

Friday night racing was a bust only one boat finished in our class everyone else retired as there was no wind to speak of. 

On Saturday we did the Delta Ditch Run to Stockton it was a long race as we didn’t see any wind over 15 knots and mostly it was sub 10knots.  Check out some pictures below. Wayne did a great job of wing on winging with the asym down the last part of the river after a total of 72 gybes we finally finished! Every one guessed the number of gybes and the winner got to deliver the boat home! I guessed 75, Wayne 60, Delphine 100, Gus 110, Andy 99 and Rene 87.

We went aground while I was helming and managed to get off, were fouled by a J105 and well and truely got our ass kicked by the Moore 24’s and the rest of the boats in our class however we had a great time. The overnight delivery home was long 12 hour motoring and we ended up kedging off a shoal on the enterance to the harbour as we had a minus tide and even though we were in the channel there was some local knowledge we now know about!

On Friday I spent the day derigging a Santana 22 that my friend James just bought. The boat needs re rigging so we are bartering website work and rigging – pretty fair exchange. We cobbled together a set up that allowed us to drop the rig without a pivoting mast step – the boat is in the water and there isn’t a hoist at the marina to take the mast down the standard way. James had a clever idea to rig up a safety line from one bollard to another behind the boat so that when the rig accelerated down it would rest on that line. I would never have attempted this manouvere on a customers boat but it worked!

 Friday night we went racing Daniel didn’t come. We got stuck in the cove in no wind (for the first time in many years!) like we have seen many people do in the past and smugly we sailed around them. We were just behind Good and Plenty and tacked about 50 feet below their line as I saw the big boats coming up (we are in the same class as 40+ footers) and didn’t want to be in their lee. Well that was the end of that – two minutes into the race our fate was sealed and we sat in the confused air and no wind waiting to be put out of our misery. The crew decided drinking beers was the way to go and as I am a Perrin that doesn’t allow retiring when I am skipper we continued finishing last place a good 25 minutes behind first. However, James did get to fly the spinnaker which was good practice for him as he hasn’t done that much before and Delphine got her first sail in after coming back from India.

On Saturday Daniel and I did a doublehanded around the bay race. I helmed for the start and then decided the helm felt odd as it was loading one way than the other and the boat was sluggish so as I wasn’t enjoying it I handed it off to Daniel and crewed for the rest of the day. The kite went up and down a few times and we had a great run from Blackhaller to Southampton Shoals. We were short tacking up the city front with two other moores and were doing OK.  We passed them at Blackhaller as we had done a weather take down at Blossom so we just did a bear away set where as they had to do a gybe set. The downwind leg was a blast we were going pretty fast as their were some good gusts coming through. At one point Sunshine the other Moore was coming at us on starboard so we just gybed the main and Daniel did a great job helming with the pole on the same side as the boom until we cleared them and then gybed back inside of them aimed at Southampton. At Southampton we rounded a boat length behind Sunshine with JR the other Moore 3 boat lengths behind us. We had to let Sunshine in as they were on starboard coming into the mark and we were also worried with the antics of a cruising boat below us – we gave them a wide berth.

We lost an incredible 6 minutes to Sunshine on the beat up through Racoon Straits. I think it is down to rig tune and weight on the rail. We were giving them about 50lbs. Oh well. So Sunshine ended up 2nd corrected, JR 3rd and us 6th in class and 12th overall out of 77 boats that were entered. It was good having our own little match race going on with the other Moores and it was fun to out perform on boat handling but we are lacking in boat speed… now we need to fix that.

On Sunday I went with Gus and Delphine to the Mountain Play – The Wizard of Oz. It was a great event as usual. Maybe next year Henry will be old enough to go up there. It is fun to hike up to the amphitheatre and eat a picnic. As usual they had a fun added bonus – the dog playing Toto was cute and they had a plane fly overhead with a message from the evil witch to Dorothy.

Hope you had a great weekend.