Day 4

We had a terrible day. But somehow, we are still in fourth place,,, 9 points out of first.

It started by me having the stomach flew. We all know what that entails so I wont go into the gory details. Needless to say, I wasn’t feeling my best. Next, we realize that the mainsail is torn, at the spreader, on the way out to the starting line. The coaches, Luther and Chris Bedford (Meteorologist), had to run back to the harbor, in our tender, and get some “stick back” to repair the sail. Got that done. Then we had a horrible start to race one and we are 15 th to the 1 st mark. There are only 18 boats so that was ugly. On the run, Phil slides off the bow and into the water. I did not have to go back to get him, but dragging him along for a few seconds was slow.

As the race progresses, we are not making much headway on improving our lie. But the wind died on the last lap and there was a chance we could have been saved by the time limit and the race having to be re-sailed. But nope, the first boat drifted across the line, 2 minutes inside the time limit.

OK Race 1 is over. Now, Race 2. IT is blowing 6 knots, max. We are over early at the start of race 2. This means we jumped the gun and crossed the line too soon. Phil is sure of it so we go back. So we are last off the line. But we go left, again Phil’s suggestion and we round mark 1 in 7 th place. Nice comeback! The wind is dying so the committee keeps shortening the length of the legs at every mark. We fight the whole race with Percy (GBR) and the Danish team for 7 th only to fall into a hole on the last leg and have Beshal (AUS) and Pickle (GER) pass us. At one point I thought the whole fleet might pass us as we were truly “parked”. A few boats in front of us were disqualified for also being over the starting line early and not going back to we got a few points back there.

We managed to get back to the harbor, put the boat on the trailer and get back to the “Palace” without any further damage.

Tomorrow, they have scheduled us for one race only. We now have a new element to the racing here which has been shifty and tricky to this point. Today we added “no wind” as a new factor and we had this element at some point during each race. This is another level of “tricky and shifty” as “no wind” is usually followed by “some wind” from “somewhere”. That is the tricky part. Hopefully we will figure it out better tomorrow. There is a lot of potential for movement up and down in the standings. We are 9 points out of first and 13 points ahead of 6 th . With the winds as fickle as they are here, anything is possible.