What a beautiful weekend for our sixth consecutive Race To
The Straits, put on by the Sloop Tavern Yacht Club. RTTS (as its known) starts in Seattle off
Shilshole on Saturday and ends at Port Townsend, approximately 30 nm to the north. Everyone overnights and we race home the next
day. It’s a reverse start based on PHRF
rating, which makes it a great pursuit race.
It’s been a cold wet winter in the PNW but the skies cleared for a
glorious weekend. The remnants of a cold
front on Friday had everyone starting under spinnaker with a 10 kt southerly,
with the forecast for a shift to a northerly mid to late morning which would
persist for the rest of the weekend.
125 boats registered and over 100 started. The first start was at 7:47 am for Ruby
Louise, a Santana 22 with a PHRF of 276.
Hamachi, with a PHRF of -3, started at 10:06 am and we only had two
boats that started behind us. It’s quite
a feeling to look down the course and see over 100 boats in front of you and
know that technically we had a chance to catch all of them. Team Hamachi split up for RTTS. Shawn and Jason sailed Hamachi (J/125) while
Alyosha sailed on Kahuna (Aerodyne 38), Lucas was on Square One (Farr 30) and
Chris was on Reboot (J/105). For Jason
and Shawn, this was their first time double handing Hamachi. In the quick four months since we’ve owned
her we’ve been out on the water less than ten times, and nearly all of that was
fully crewed racing where everyone had a role and knew their part of the
boat. Suddenly we had to pull it all
together in a real time racing environment.
To complicate things further, in typical fashion we showed up on the
course late and had barely 15 minutes to set our sails before the start. This lead to a small oversight that had disastrous
consequences.
Saturday was not a great day, and it all began as we left
the dock and discovered that we had four bananas aboard. We hit the start box late and managed to get
the main up just a few minutes before our allotted start time. We positioned the boat for our downwind start
and launched the A1.5 spinnaker. As the
kite started to fill in the 10 kts of wind the tack went shooting out (we
overlooked locking it down in our rush) until the martin breaker tripped the
clip, releasing the tack, and the spinnaker started flogging in the wind. Oh shit… We grabbed the lazy sheet and
started hauling in the clew. Shawn came
forward and pulled the foot of the sail, including the tack, on board. We weren’t sure what to do because the
forward hatch was locked and we had too much sail and wind to bring it down on
deck shorthanded. Jason grabbed the tack
and released the clew and dragged it forward to secure the second tack, only to
have it slip out of his hand (it was hard to hold the spinnaker in one and the
tack in the other…). Shawn came forward
again and we somehow retrieved the tack and secured it. We hauled it in just enough so that it
wouldn’t re-release, and slowly got the situation under control. This was all caught on GoPro…watch the outtakes.
Once settled we worked up the course and started catching
boats. We struggled to find our line and
the wind but eventually settled in working the western shoreline. The projected northerly was descending and a
wind hole had formed in front of us at Point No Point. We pushed up behind these boats and started
drifting as well, while we watched the few boats behind us reconnect. The boats that started much earlier in the
morning enjoy several hours of the southerly, as well as a nice ebb tide, to
carry them north and across the wind hole.
We started just as the tide turned so at Point No Point all we could do
is sit there and watch them sail away.
Eventually the wind line descended to us and we transitioned to the
Lt/Med #1 and sailed across to Whidbey Island and the only mark at Double
Bluff. Once there we tacked into Mutiny
Bay pointing high and fast, putting the hurt on a lot of boats. Tacking out of Mutiny Bay the wind continued
to build and we were over powered. We
debated between the Heavy #1 or #3. We
pulled the Heavy #1 on deck and into position, only to see 15-16 kts. It looked to be building further so we chose
to instead put up the #3, only to have the wind back off. Rapid double handed headsail changes on a
J/125 is an exhausting endeavor. We
tried to see if the #3 would hold, but started to quickly lose ground to the
fleet. As a result we dragged the Heavy
#1 back up on deck and executed a second peel.
Now we were back in our groove in 12-15 kts of wind, but had given up
valuable ground to Laffite’s Kyrnos, a custom 53 in our class, which in those
wind conditions was flying. We tried to
reel her in but couldn’t and finished Day #1 exhausted and in 2nd
place in our class. Further, it was a
day for the early boats, and we finished #42 overall. That evening we went over to have cocktails
on Kyrnos, and left our bananas on their boat...
After a great evening in Port Townsend, we hit the water
Sunday with glorious conditions. The
wind was 10kts from the north and projected to build towards 15 kts, ideal
Hamachi conditions. We had a great start
and successful spinnaker hoist. This
time we chose to fly the A2.0. Being one
of the last to start we had a full flood pushing us south, so sailed past
Marrowstone Lighthouse to get the current push, and then out into the channel
where we had great wind. We crossed over
to Bush Point fairly early to catch the rip up the shore and bombed past Bush
Point. We stayed wide of Mutiny Bay as
it looked like lighter air, and passed a lot of boats on our way down and
around Double Bluff. By this point the
wind had backed off to 7-8 kts (unfortunately), but we were making the right
tactical moves on the fleet. We worked
the currents around Point No Point and stayed slightly wide as we continued
south. We were enjoying better breeze on
the outside and passing boats, with most of our competition on the inside. North of Apple Tree Point we had a decision:
continue in and go head to head or stay outside and hope for more breeze. The wind was coming down from the north and
we thought we had better pressure and speed on the outside, so we made a few
jibes to stay in the middle of the course, only to have it fade again. Further, we watched our competition, who we
had reeled in, slip away on a completely different wind along the western shore. While the boats in the middle continued east,
we jibed back west to catch the shift.
This paid off as we put the hammer down on everyone, but our move was
too late to catch the lead boats that had already slipped away. We finished Day #2 first in class, finishing over 20 minutes ahead of our closest competitor.
However, our decision to stay outside cost us finishing in the top tier,
but we still placed #21 overall.
Congrats to our crew as Alyosha and Kahuna finished #11 overall on Saturday and #10 overall on Sunday, but their class was super competitive and they finished third in class for the weekend. Lucas and Square One finished third overall on Day #2 and third in the Farr 30 class for the weekend.
Race Track (didn't capture Day #1 start for some reason):
And of course the video...the good, the bad and the ugly:
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