QCYC Series 1, Race 1
It’s good to be back! After a long, hard off-season, Panache launched on a sunny April 14. Since then it’s been difficult to find nice weather, but she’s been sailing a handful of times. This week, the rain didn’t look like it would ever let up, but almost as if mother nature loves QCYC Wednesday night racing as much as we do, we got a few hours off for the first race night of 2011.
Despite the dire weather predictions, Phoebe, Perry, Dave and Frankie all came out to crew. It wasn’t raining, but it was really windy. It didn’t take long to realize that we’d want to reef the main and we sailed with our little #3.
We’ve been moved to a new division this year, which will make things interesting… no longer are we racing the guys on Blythe Spirit, nor One More Time. We’re racing with the big boys now. Literally. There’s an Alberg 37 in our fleet now… it’s about three times the size of us. It was a pretty poorly attended night overall – the fair weather sailors might start coming out next week, but so it was a good night to shake off the rust of 6 months of winter.
Before the start I remarked to Perry that with so few boats in our start, it would be a good night to try to win the jug… sometimes I impress even myself 
Frankie counted us down and Dave urged me up as we crossed the start line just ahead of our good friend Bruce on Bandoleer and a couple boat lengths ahead of past-champion Eric on Alpha Omega. Right from the start we were dealing with new, bigger, faster boats in our start. It didn’t take long for Bandoleer to pull ahead and Alpha Omega to run over us… and then we saw an old nemesis, Skeena skulking around to windward. It was unexpected because they were supposed to start 5 minutes ahead of us, but either didn’t realize when their start was, or more likely just wanted to get in our way. I’m more convinced than ever that they race just to screw with us…
So even with so few boats on the course, we still had some traffic around us, but actually only one other boat in our fleet that we were racing against: the aforementioned Alberg 37 Gone with the Wind II. By the end of that first upwind leg, we had fallen in just behind them. Since they owe us 9 points, I figured that wasn’t bad, especially with the big winds favoring the heavier boat.
On the downwind we were flying, even with just a reefed main and tiny jib that was mostly flapping around, and we kept up with them it seemed.
That is, until we got to the downwind mark and tried to head back up.
It had happened once before, in a race last year: the jib, while flapping around, had wrapped itself around the forestay… not usually a huge problem. Except our #3 has battens which prevent it from being easily unwrapped. So instead of being able to head back upwind with the rest of the racers (i.e. going the right way), we had to continue downind (i.e. the wrong way) for a minute or two until Phoebe and Dave wrestled the jib back into the right orientation. About a four minute round-trip? Not great.
After that, we tried a little different strategy on the next down-wind, going on a broad reach towards the city before gybing into a broad reach at the mark… that didn’t help at all. Probably hurt us even more, but we had nothing to lose at that point.
At the end of it, we finished well back of <em>GwtW2</em>, but again… I think it would be really difficult for us to compete against such a heavy boat in strong winds. Also, it didn’t rain on us at all, AND we won the free beer for being the first over the line in our start. Nobody went overboard and nothing was broken. All-in-all a successful start to the season 
