North Americans Day 3, and Layday

Day 3 brought in a change in the weather, and wind. It blew 20 knots, which brought in a lot of fun sailing. Frank and I had a great start in the first race and rounded 8th at the weather mark. Unfortunately due to the lack of racing we have done in that wind, we had some troubles launching the spinnaker and capsized, after that it was a little bit of a self destruct sequence and we dropped to 21st. Looking back it was nice to see that in that wind we can keep pace with almost anybody in that fleet. Race 2, the fleet thinned out a bit, and we didn't get the same great start but still were up there with the leaders. We were fighting for a top 10 finish when we screwed up a gybe again because of our lack of racing experience in this wind. We finished 16th in that race. All in all, it was a great day and we had a great time.

Off the Water, we went on a pub crawl, starting off at Spinnakers Brew Pub, which has great Microbrewed beer. We then went to the Canoe Club which was also another BrewPub and again had great beer. The French team was there and they are a blast to hang out with, I think it has to do with their great French accent. After Canoe Club we went to the another brewpub called Swans, bit of a Cougar club. After that we went to The Strathcona Hotel, and a bar called Big Bad Johns, what a crazy place. There was so much stuff on the walls ranging from Bras, to Boots, to Business Cards, to Dollar Bills. Great night, BAD Morning.

Lay Day wasn't very interesting, just fixing a few things on the boat and adjusting some that we noticed needed to be adjusted and fixed during the windy races.

North Americans Day 2

When I said that Day 1 was bad, I never thought Day 2 would be worse. In both races we had awful boat speed and after starting the race pretty good, we would slowly work our way to the back of the fleet. Race 1 started with some decent wind and we managed to hold our own for the first part of the race until the wind died down, and we then started our march to the back of the fleet. Race 2, or what we thought was race 2 started off good again, and we were looking to be in the top 15 coming up to the downwind mark. The wind again died, but it also shifted 180 degrees and the race was subsequently abandoned. Once we started again, we got off to another pretty good start but then slowly fell back. It was a fustraiting day because we were unsure on why we couldn't sail as fast as we should. That mystery was revealed this morning when we looked at our rig and noticed that we forgot to set it up for our Mylar sails.

Off the water, we went to a local Cafe/Pub and listened to some live Jazz while we ate.

Measurement and Day 1 of North Americans

Sorry for the wait.

Measurement Day was quite long and boring. Nothing really interesting came out of it. Day 1 of North Americans was an interesting day, Frank and I didn't have our best day of racing and our results showed that. In the first race of the day we didn't pick the right side of the course and our boat wasn't going as fast as it should so we struggled a lot upwind. Downwind was a different story, we passed boats and had great speed. We couldn't recover from our bad upwind though and finished 28th. The second race we showed improvement on choosing which side of the course is favoured, but managed to run into some problems rounding the windward mark, as there was a very strong current right at the mark. We reached the mark somewhere around 10-15th but rounded the mark 25-30th because we misjudged how much current there was. Again our downwind was pretty good and we were able to catch up to a few boats, and then we had a pretty good 2nd upwind leg and caught up and passed a couple other boats. We finished 22nd. On the bright side we have a lot of room to improve. 2 more races today and we will hopefully move up in the standings and sail better races.

After the races while in the bar drinking some beers we saw a cruise ship come in to dry dock for some repairs. Its amazing how something that is that big and going so slow can captivate a group of people.