I got a bunch of “hey where are the blog posts?” voicemails, so I guess our friends are following along. Sorry for not posting more often this last week.
Inspection: The safety inspection went incredibly smoothly on Wednesday. I had everything laid out on the berths, the whole thing took less than 30 minutes. I suppose that all the (well-documented) fretting paid off.
Spinnaker net: The one piece of gear that everyone experienced recommended was a spinnaker net. We bought one from the Spinnaker Shop, who had it made by UK sailmakers in Alameda. I wasn’t impressed. It was really expensive (i.e. more than my storm jib) and consisted of about 40 feet of webbing and the cheapest possible 3-strand laid line. Oh well. It will probably work just fine.
The weather: This seems to be shaping up to be a “weird” year. The pacific high formed up quite nicely, but has subsequently been broken into a series of smaller systems seperated by flukey and light winds.
The course: We don’t want to give anything away, but suffice it to say that we will not be A) Going North, or B) Taking a Flier away from the fleet. We are adverse to sailing extra miles, but we have our eyes pretty squarely on the gribs and wfax charts, and they indicate that we need to punch through the adverse and variable winds that the local low has produced and get into the synoptic breeze (and stay there) as quickly as possible. This will likely mean a southerly course during the first 1/3 of the race.
The race: We rate about 290 on the TP race rating scale. That means that we are the slowest rated boat in our fleet (there are some bigger Aloha class boats with slower ratings). The rest of the boats (Cal 40s, an x119, a j100, etc) all owe us between 13 and 53 hours.
The events: The entire crew went to a TP-specific US Sailing safety-at-sea seminar on Saturday, which had portions (especially the weather section) that were extremely valuable. I went to the Skipper’s meeting today, which was really a cut down version of the same thing, with more administrative details around the start and finish. We all went to the Aloha dinner tonight, and I picked up the TPYC race burgee. As Bob pointed out, that’s one you can fly with pride anywhere you sail.
This is really about to happen.