A familiar crackle was heard out on the water… familiar but not recent and this had us all tilting our heads to one side like dogs to a whistle. What the eff is that we all thought and then the gun went off so we just got on with it. Ten Moores LAST in the starting sequence and getting off the line after the first fleets were headed to the bar already! Did we get the cheap seats or what? Well, what is the answer as by the time we collected a first place whistle (don’t invest a single shotgun shell for us!) it was a dollar of entry fee per minute of racing. Consolation is that the $$ is going to a good cause so we just sent the chute and rushed home before getting wet.
The waiting had us strike the # one in an expensive wet ball and opt for the three only to last minute unwrinkled the # one again and averting certain disaster. Conrad was playing similar games but he opted for his old # one as the new one is too pretty for racing! The clouds were coming in and the wind shifted a bit to the south but it was all looking like the normal stuff before a front so we got on with our PRB’s and giggled as the big cats came racing through the starters. We also told stories of a certain high ranking fellow with a rock sized divot in that smooth keel of his. Silly bugger, treat these 35 year old boats with some respect man … that’s what I’m talking about! Kinda like crashing that Mustang that your dad kept for all those years just waiting for your pimply face to turn 16!
In the end, the racing was actually fun, ebb on the sides and the last of the flood in the middle and we had to sample it all as the only two marks of the course took us to Blackaller and back. We set up a tad early and were stopped on the line at 45 sec to go and of course this caused some agony but we got chugging, Kernot below low and fast and Fennel down there with em. Lahr (well that Seifers guy on a borrowed Lahr boat) was on our hip and we just had to find our groove and let Hackworth do his painful thing in that characteristic Laser slouch of his. We chose to just stay on the same board all the way, Rowan tacked out, Kathryn tacked out #6 tacked out and we were all pretty close at the mark.
The chairs went for relief from the ebb on the shore despite not sailing for the finish and there was some more of the head tilting sound and then they gybed over and fell into the parade. Nice to see all those familiar spinnakers out there again. Kernot with that pretty purple that was a miss-order, Moore Cowbell and Paramour confirming their colors in my old head and then… something completely new. Ragtime – whaaaat! I tried for 20 years to but that boat from the bone yard of Alameda Marina and now finally that plum colored hull is gleaming like it was 1977 all over again (well sure they will get out the buffer, er… spray gun soon).
Waving at the Paramour at the finish and then suddenly we understood… Vicky is back on the bow and we were all tilting our heads to her commands!
Next race is April 26/27 Santa Cruz.
Simon
