Santa Cruz Yacht Club Spring One Design

May 2004

Bill Jenkins

 7pm Friday – Goals at work more or less accomplished. Car gassed up, on the road somewhere near Poway, heading up I-15. ETA Santa Cruz is 3am the next morning. With a couple hours of sleep in the car on the way, we should each have a good six hours of slumber under our belts by the next morning.

 3:00am – must be the sleep deprivation… we’re driving aimlessly through the streets of Santa Cruz.

 3:30am – drop the boat off at SCYC, break into an apparently abandoned structure nearby for a few hours of sleep.

 8:30am Saturday – turns out the house is occupied by another 505 sailor. What luck! Nutritious breakfast at a nearby tacqueria.

 10:00am – rediscover boat in SCYC parking lot. Begin rigging, writing checks, giving Andy Zinn more crap than he gives us. Sun is out, so we expect some breeze.

 12:15pm – launch. It’s the usual drifter out to the starting area, but the wind soon begins to build.

 1:20pm – first start following a ridiculous number of keelboat classes. Setting the theme for the rest of the weekend, Team Phlegm got off the line well in front of the rest of the second row-ers. Went right to get clear air, knowing that the big wind was closer on the left side. Not exactly top half at the weather mark, but passed a few boats at the gybe by not capsizing. The wind in the upper part of the course was in the high teens; 10ish at the bottom end. A little different from San Diego conditions as we reset everything at the leeward mark for medium wind, then progressively de-powered going upwind.

 2:45 – second start even worse than the first as we struggled to clear the RC boat anchor line in a sudden lull/header. But we were committed to the left side this time and rounded the first mark ahead of a couple boats. Details of this race are fuzzy, but I do remember that we capsized twice and still managed to beat some boats. Wind at the top of the course was by then around 20kts. Depowering and keeping the boat moving was the key.

 3:45 – third start. One of the keelboat classes went in, so we had to wait a little less that time. Team Phlegm managed a first row start with clear air (the only one of its kind for the weekend) and held onto the first row until the breeze started moving into the upper teens toward the upper end of the course. We got things going again by depowering aggressively and were top-halfish at the first mark. We were a bit lucky with our gybes and didn’t capsize. Had a lot of fun riding the boat at high speed. Dan’s illegal GPS recorded a max speed for the day of 16.6kts.  Ended the day in 10^th place overall out of 17 boats.