Carinthia finally made it to Newport, Rhode Island! I felt that the difficulty of preparing for this race an accomplishment itself. It is a ISAF category 1 event we needed to increase some of the safety equipment to those standards. It is a requirement that a portion of the crew take the safety at sea class and just filling out the paperwork.The race is 650 miles and crosses the gulf stream. I was lucky enough to get veteran Chuck Beyer as navigator. With the meanders of the stream with weather forecasts so it was important to get the right guy. Also aboard was Bob Declercq who has done many successful offshore races with me, the world famous Jeff "New York Times" Henderson, world traveling racer Lynn Kotwicki, Jim Best, who is truly a great all round offshore racer, the skilled Joe Mayfield, and Erik Witte, who has done quite a bit of ocean racing.
The race began in Naggausauget Bay. The starting area was packed with spectator boats. We had to weave our way through them just to get to the starting area. We put up the heavy #1 and ran the line. We got to the left end on starboard and tacked at the gun.We managed to get out of the bay on two tacks and went to our #3 when the wind picked up. We did get a small lift and went with the code 0 for a few hours but soon returned to the #3. We had down loaded the gulf currents and got a big push in the first one. At that point we were probably in the lead in our class. Then an amazing thing happened. 4 miles west of us the boats sailed on at 7 knots where we sailed on at 2 knots. At this point we were already 50 miles west of rumb.
At this point we could just not pull it out. Even though we kept the boat fast on a fetch we could not catch up to a full headsail boat. We did manage to stay ahead of the other J/120s but it just was not enough to do better than 4th on corrected time.
Result: 4th out of 13 in class 4, 24th out of 124 overall
Result Link: http://www.bermudarace.com/CompetitorsB
