This race is 450 miles from St. Petersburg, FL to Isla Mujeres, Mexico off of Cancun. What makes it extremely interesting is that the gulf stream flows at about 3 knots north up the gulf of Mexico, then loops south along the Florida coast. The race starts right off the pier outside St. Petersburg inside the bay. After a slow start at 10:20, with moderate running wind, Carinthia got out of Tampa Bay within a few hours with clear skies and warm weather. Early on a shoal draft J120, Tampa Girl, passed us at the outer buoy. As the sun set were on a windward reach with the code 0. During the night the wind shifted to 110 degrees and we gibed in the gulf southernly current. We then got pretty much on the rhumb line when then encountered the northernly current on the other side. At that point we made a hard right and crossed over to the other side of it. Once out we just followed the shore to Isla Mujeres. For some reason our GPS stopped calculating our position so we had to finish with handheld. I found out later that there was 32nd satellite added at the end of February and our Northstar could only read 31. This caused it to regularly get lost, especially the last 30 miles. Because we had two spare portables we still found Isla Mureres. We finished at 18:51 on Sunday night. In any case we finished ahead of Tampa Girl by about 1 and 1/4 hours corrected time. Carinthia won the spinnaker race division and placed 3rd overall in the entire fleet. As an additional plus I found out even though we were 4th over the line we beat the last record set by a TP52 named Rosebud. You can follow the race and look at the standings at http://charthorizon.com/races/2008_tamp
Under and past the Tampa Bay bridge with Tampa Girl in pursuit.
Although you can not see them well a family of dolphins came to play.--->
Mexican Navy at the finish(Comment on this)
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