Day one: things do not go as planned

Here we are in SF, it’s Day One! Yay. But there were a few stumbles…

To be clear Day One means the first day of the pre-Worlds; the actual World Championship doesn’t start ‘till Tuesday. This weekend is a practice regatta, and boy do we need it.

The day began sunny and clear, if a bit cold; that’s our cute little AirBnB by the way, a typical San Fran row house (1,300 sq ft, 3 bedrooms, and Zillow says $1.8M!).

First, breakfast, but the first place we tried was closed (thanks, Google), and we ended up at this place, nice fresh bagels, good lox, bad Engrish. I did leave my briefcase there – sigh – but fortunately it was still there when I came back for it. Whew!

(I have developed a bad habit of spraying my stuff all over and not tracking all of it; on the long list of planned self-improvements 🙂 )

Then I almost got run over by one of these … public transportation – so that’s what it looks like! All very exiting until you turn the wrong way while crossing the street. Another bullet dodged.

We get to the club, and there’s a lot of activity in the boatyard; 60 or so 505s are getting ready to rumble. Lots of last minute fixing and rigging and doing of stuff.

We had a few things to do to Spot, too … that’s her on the way to be launched. In no particular order – we had to rig a new spinnaker, more on that later (!) – we had to setup a new rudder, it turned out to be a collection of parts, some assembly required, deferred to tonight – and we had some miscellaneous tweaks to make, including retrieving the reef line from inside the boom; less said about that the better, but it was done.

Biggest decision for me was whether to wear a full wetsuit or foul weather gear. I opted for the wetsuit, and was happy I did; SF water is cold (60) and air about the same.

Note the hatch in the bow called the Launcher, where the Spinnaker comes out

Quite a queue leading down to the launch ramp. I will never get tired of being at an international regatta, seeing the different countries on the sails, and hearing all the different languages and accents.

Spot about to get wet. Whee…

Heading out to the course! It’s a beautiful day, 12 knots or so, a mite chilly but sun shining.

See all those boats off in the distance? It’s a pretty sight; 60 or so 505s starting a race. But wait!? If they are starting a race, why aren’t we in the mix? Well.

As I mentioned we have a new spinnaker, a brand new never-before flown sail, and on our first test set sailing out the retriever line pulled off the sail.

{
A digression. Like most racing dinghies, 505s have three sails. The biggest one in the back is called the “mainsail”. The smaller one in the front is called the “jib”. And the colorful balloon-like sail used to go fast downwind is called the “spinnaker”, aka “chute”, aka “kite”.

The spinnaker is pulled up out of a tube which leads to a hatch in the bow, called the launcher. If you look at the picture of the 505 bow-on above, you can see it. After you’re done using the spinnaker, you pull it back into the Launcher with a retriever line which is attached to the middle of the sail.
}

Anyway, yeah, we couldn’t use the new spinnaker, and we couldn’t race without one, so we had to sail in and get another one. This took time, and we missed the start. Boo.

We did get some nice shots of the fleet sailing however 🙂

How’s that for a nice shot? All those 505 spread out racing downwind, with the Golden Gate in the background.

So, onward. We had a few more problems including some bad starts (505s use a “rabbit start”, a different way of starting than usual, I’ll tell you more about this another time), some bad tacks, some bad jibes, and a few near capsizes. Many lessons learned.

Looking back at the jibe mark, it can get a bit “exciting” when many boats get there at the same time. Lots of yelling involved, and sometimes a little kissing between boats.

So it was a fun day but also a frustrating day, and we have a long way to go. But yeah, first day of the practice regatta, so no serious damage.