TP 52 Update Audi MedCup, Cagliari

The wind turned 180 degrees today and we had a mistral of up to 30 knots. There was enough carnage after race one that the committee sent us to the shore where we waited a short time until they called it for the day.

Onboard Desafio, we had a decent result finishing 4th, but unfortunately did not leave the race track feeling really good. How is that possible?

After a perfect start at the pin end of the line with the left hand side of the course being favored, we were first to the first windward mark by 20 seconds over Mutua Madrilena. As we rounded and hoisted the spinnaker, now blowing 30 knots, the spinnaker tore on the hatch. It did not even get full, so we had to take it down and put up the back up. This took 45 seconds, pretty fast but still Mutua passed us. So we got the back up spinnaker up and started planning down the run at 21 knots. In fact we, went so fast that we caught up to Mutua, blocked them from gybing and then re-took the lead.

Being a bit gun-shy, we were overly conservative with the spinnaker drop and sailed for about a minute with no kite. Better that than what some of our competitors did?shrimping we call it. (That is expensive shrimp when you go shrimping with a $30K net.) Artemis gybed at the bottom of the run and took the favored gate. Here again we were conservative, just went straight and rounded the left hand gate to save a gybe in 30 true.

So Artemis had a two boat length lead on us when we crossed about ten minutes up the second beat. We rounded the top mark about 20 seconds behind Artemis and 12 seconds ahead of Matador. We sailed pretty fast but Matador was able to block us first and then we got free enough to gybe, but they gybed on top of us. In the fight, they rolled us, and then when the air got clean, we were slow and the gust knocked us over.

It was a pretty frustrating few minutes there and we even got rolled by Mutua just before the finish.

So that was fourth after being first. Now you can see why we weren’t ecstatic with our 4th place.

We are still 6th overall, not far ahead of Matador.

Tomorrow we will sail up to three races. The mistral wind is forecast to die and a sea breeze should build tomorrow, an 18 knot sea breeze. So the race committee has changed the start time to 1000 in order to try to get three races in before the 1530 cut off.

For complete results go to www.medcup.com