Zoiks, I thought Smith Point was exciting. The winds were well into the 20's from the NW at the start. We entered in the spinnaker class along with Cheetah and Pursuit. Only Pursuit put up a chute. We were hitting 10's often on the long downwind leg to Hooper with double headsails. Most of the way to Hooper, we set another speed record for the boat, hitting a crazy 12.1kts....twice! Then promptly had an epic crash that put water up over the cockpit seat lazarette. Good thing it was latched and I'm glad we were not in a J-24 or we would have sank. We put the 2nd headsail away (#1)...took almost 6 minutes to wrangle in the mess. That is the wiggle on the track plot. After rounding Hooper, we needed to put in a reef, which Steve put in pretty quickly. It was funny when he said...that's it? Most of the way we were reaching to No-Point with the main resting on the spreaders...for a time I though the spreader might break. With the bigger broadside waves, the main would touch the water. We tried to trim it back, but the boat would spin out if we sheeted any harder. At No-Point we turned back and it was LUMPY! So wet, so bumpy, the water kept coming in and we got quite a bit of water downstairs. We could see the boats ahead...but just too far to catch the spin fleet. We did keep up with most of the boats in our rating range, finishing right with Shermax and ahead of Walkabout.
Thank you to Steve and Charles for putting up with this one. :)
Here is a link to our track:
http://www.tqci.net/~jkriz/AkoniHooper2010.htm
Next weekend is the Fall Invite...who's in?
crazy, just crazy!
