Big Ocean Small Boat

Sold my 505 today. Mixed emotions.

Aaron R. from Santa Cruz bought for use as a fleet loaner or some such. Nice guy and active in the fleet. It turns out the previous owner, Dan, was a friend of his. When I showed up at TISC, he was already packing up the boat. I gave him a few bags of sails, he handed me a check. I sort of felt I had borrowed their boat for a few years and they were picking it back up.

I put a lot of imagination into the idea of sailing 505s, and never ended up sailing either one I owned that much. But I think I had a couple of my best-ever days on the water on the wire of a 5-0. I found the boat hard to rig, fragile in our heavy weather, and the fleet a bit advanced and impenetrable. But who knows, maybe I’ll sail one again someday.

Down to 1 sailboat. Better buy a Laser.

Joined the San Francisco Single-handed sailing society with the intention of racing their interesting season as opposed to the OYRA or HDA season.

First race of ’08: The (in)famous Three Bridge Fiasco:

The 3bridge is a pursuit race, where you can choose your own course around three marks (Blackaller, Red Rock, and TI). Pursuit is fun: You can tell how you are doing by how many boats are left in front of you.

Garth and I thrashed Abba Zabba and ourselves in this double-handed all-day moving mishap of a Race in ’06 (sorry about your boat, Charlie). We had a much better day on the water this year. Unfortunately, we chose the wrong direction, and even sailing at our best, there were a lot of boats heading home as we headed to the finish. And the finish put the fiasco in the Fiasco. Way ahead of our fleet, we pulled an all-ego spinnaker hoist for the last 400 yards, missed the mark, then got swept west by the ebb. 20 minutes later, we made the line. I hope it entertained the RC on the deck.

We didn’t do that well.

Quote of the day: “How is that f*ing Moore and that f*ing Calatalina coming up on us from behind?” Answer: “They are anchored, and we are moving backwards at 2 knots”.

Good clean fun.

Unless you are buoy-banging one design racer, the only thing cooler than the Transpac/Transat/Fastnet/Sydney-Hobart circuit are the various round-the-world races. However, there seem to be a lot of them, and they change names. From Bruce Schwab’s site, here’s a list of the various races for the near future:

2007/2008:
Barcelona World Race (doublehanded nonstop on Open 60’s)

2008/2009:
Vendee Globe (solo nonstop on Open 60’s)
Volvo Ocean Race (crewed with stopovers on Volvo 70’s)
Portimao Global Ocean Race (solo or double with stopovers on 40’s and 50’s)

2010/2011:
Velux 5-Oceans (solo with stopovers on Open 60’s)

2012/2013:
Same as 2008/2009…..

We raced the OYRA season as practice for the big race, and then missed the second half of the season, but I double-checked our standings anyways: 7th out of 15 in MORA.

Clearly this is a win-by-attrition campaign. The way it looks to me, almost no one raced in our division in the late summer/fall. Though clearly the 2/3 in the Drakes Bay series helped our placement. Of course, we did race most of the races double-handed in the full-crew division.

Any excuse to say “Midget Ocean Racing Association”.

Any remaining Transpac trauma must be over, since I’m trying to plan this winter’s racing, and decide what to do next season.

The Olson 911 is a member of the SFBay 30 class, so we’ll race where the majority of the fleet does this winter. It seems to be down to the Golden Gate YC (first Saturday of the Month, November-February) or the Berkeley YC (second Saturday of the Month, Nov-Feb) midwinters.

It seems like several people also do the Corinthian mids, which seems to be a full weekend in January and a full weekend in February. I remember that being a fun series, but it might conflict with Sundance.

As far as the summer goes, I’m torn between doing the OYRA series (maybe doublehanded again) or getting a full crew together and racing the HDA series. That’s how I got my start in bay racing, so it would be nice to race and be competitive in that fleet.

Several people (including a couple O911s) race in the Singlehanded Sailing Society series. That’s another option. They have one of the coolest races around, the LongPac: A 400 mile race from San Francisco to any point on Longitude 126°40′ West and return, open to singlehandled and doublehanded yachts. Since they also have the 3 Bridge Fiasco and the Singlehanded Farrallones race, it looks like I will be racing that series almost by default.