December 11, 2004 - Bob Lyons

Conditions were very light with the wind from the east and large shifts north and south, Ken ran the G course all day. Our focus for the day was to keep the boat moving in clear air. This required lots of adjustments to the sails and crew weight for each little puff, lull and shift. For the bigger shifts, we'd let the sails out first to keep moving and then slowly change course or bear off as aggressively as I could without stalling the rudder to get back on the wind.

The wind was hard right at the start of the first race so everyone was piled up at the boat. We took a port tack approach (along with John Powers boat), tacked to leeward of John and the pack in clear air early enough to get the boat back up to speed. It meant giving up the favored side but even the team that "won" the boat was moving slow off the line, everyone else was going even slower and had to tack to clear their air. We had a little bit better boat speed than John so we were just able to tack and cross them close to the port tack layline. Once you get out in front in these conditions, you have the freedom to stay in the best wind and tack at will, which tends to separate the fleet quite a bit.

The wind went hard left for the second race. Chris Bogan took the pin at the start and tacked into a nice wind-line above the port tack layline and walked away with the race. We got a bad start and tacked immediately to clear our air. We gave up a lot of ground but worked with what we had available and just tried to stay close. A few boats ahead of us had problems holding their spinnakers on the reach leg with the apparent wind well forward and switched to the jib. Rob had the pole down near the deck and on the forestay with the guy eased to get the sail out and away from the boat. This and with everyone to leeward gave us enough to keep the sail flying and allowed us to close on the boats ahead and pass one on that leg. For the third race, the race committee dragged the pin back to square the line so we focused on finding a hole near a wind line. There were no particular defining moments in this race. The only difference I saw was that we were able to keep our speed pre-start and hit the line a full speed with no one near us. This allowed us to stay in the wind lines and ended up at the weather mark with a good lead.