2022 Beer Can #1

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This is a late entry because I had to help my bestie roll in 32 with an excessive amount of laughs (and wine) this week. Wednesday was our first official beer can of the season! It’s now Monday (whoops) and I’m writing this from the passenger’s seat on hour fucking ELEVEN of our drive to CT to hopefully, finally, officially close on selling my dad’s house which is whole different post. Seriously people can we please normalize flying with well behaved dogs? Ok back to beer can.

I mean what can I say. It was a perfect evening. Checked predict wind <put link in here> ahead of time and I’m not going to lie, I was not a believer that we’d actually race. The conditions looked like shit. It was foggy and cold and the only model I checked (ALWAYS check them all) showed less than 5 knots all evening. Considering last week the poor race committee was literally BLANKETED with bugs I did not have high hopes for the night. Luckily I was 100% wrong and conditions were perfect. A solid steady 14-16 with calm seas. What a dream.

Our start was super rusty. We were distracted getting out there and only had time to make one pass at the start line which was error number one. Error number two (a biggie) Is that we completely misjudged the starting horn. We thought the one minute warning was the start and had to tack at the line. When you’re in green fleet you’re the first start so while you’re about to start a lot of the fast boats are trying to check in. A mistake here not only fucking blows for timing purposes but also can be a god damn mess. Somehow Dan always remains cool calm and collected during these trying times.

Anyway despite this our start was ok for first of the season. The rest of the sail was heavenly. Sailing with the new sails feels like we are just gliding through the air in the most beautiful way. Where we used to struggle to even punch upwind at 60 degrees we now can do with ease up to 40. First leg we pinched hard but would have had to tack either way. We were able to just jibe the job around the mark and on the downwind leg we ended up going wing on wing with the whisker pole on the jib. We then trimmed up for the last leg. Tried pinching but knew we were going to make it so we tacked once and then tacked over the line FIRST IN FUCKING FLEET with Success (literally the boat name and figuratively) right on our tails.

All in all- quality first race. Dan on the helm. Jeff and I swapped back and forth on the jib and I mostly did the main. Jeff did the foredeck work.

Goal for next race: read up on main sail trim.