The first leg was at 75 degrees to weather in 12 knots of wind with the committee boat slightly favored. The course was marks to port. The mistake I made at this start was to to not get to the committee boat side on port before the gun because I was concerned about getting leveraged above Jayhawker. I tacked to starboard about 10 seconds before the gun so we had good speed at the start. Merlin got in trouble so they tacked on port immediately and later was leading the fleet. I stayed on starboard because I was not willing to tack behind Ihnsanity and Night Moves ot our right and it put us right into the fishing fleet. They were packed in so tight I could not find a hole to go through so we had to make a few ugly tacks. After leaving the fisherman I just tacked to port because we were getting knocked on starboard. Before the race I noticed that we were getting periodic shifts to the right at the masthead 25 degrees compared to deck level. With nothing to lose I wanted to get on the right side of the course because I felt there would eventually a total shift. We went behind all the J120's and tacked to starboard when we got another knock. Incredibly the wind filled in from the right and we got great lift. Even more incredibly Ihnsanity, NM and Jayhawker tacked behind us and overstood because we were already on the layline. We got in a little ahead of Merlin and Victrix, a large 50 footer blanketed Merlin, a little more to Mark W. We rounded it in 1st and saw about a 70 degree apparent wind with about 16 knots of wind. We were prepared to raise the code 0 and when Merlin did we did also about a quarter the way down the leg. At that point it was a case of covering Merlin. At the next mark we jibed and covered Merlin and NM. NM fell farther behind when they had spinnaker problems. With Merlin we had to first cover to leeward and then to windward. We went higher on the course than I would of liked but we could not let Merlin get too far above our lane. We finished about 20 boat lengths ahead of Merlin. This was windy code 0 day perfect for J120's. We got to blow through the whole fleet at 9 to 10 knots and kept our lead. The crew was a little short with each other because I think that everyone was nursing their hangovers from last night's Mackinaw award party (although it was pretty entertaining watching Colleen try to tie a bowline). It still was a great finish to the DRYA season. We finished 1st in windward / leeward, point to point, and overall in the J120's for the season.
Result: 1st out of 5 J120's
Link: http://www.drya.org/race2005/Results/gp
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