Great Pumpkin!

Pumpkins?

So there we were in the top three out of two hundred and thirty boats sailing in the 2011 Richmond Yacht Clubs Great Pumpkin Regatta Pursuit race! This was the fourth time I made an attempt at this race and in the past I took it a bit to serious and it sucked the fun out of it. It is a long pursuit race from Richmond around Alcatraz Island, around Angel Island and then back to Richmond with the chance of picking up floating pumpkins that subtract time from your score. All four years that I have done it has been light and fluky wind with a ton of current and i have never seen a pumpkin This year was not much different, though my attitude was different. This year I did the event on Luther's J24 "Little Wing," with Marnie, myself and of course Luther. Short handed and plenty of liquid refreshments. Somehow with in the first hour of the race we found ourselves in the lead of the race looking like we were going to be the hero's of the day! We had our kite up the beer was rations were still plentiful and the rest of the fleet was stuck in a hole at the start! With in minutes we found our selves caught off guard. the wind shut down and the current was ripping, oh yeah and the entire fleet caught and passed us...
We still had a good attitude and made a sacrifice to the wind gods and pushed on. Over the next hour we tacked a few hundred time as well we did a dozen sets and drops only to move a half mile. Our hard work and sacrifices payed off by the time we rounded the front of angle island the breeze was on!15+! One more sacrifice to the wind gods and we rounded Alcatraz in a hurry with the finish line in sight, oh yeah and I finally saw a pumpkin! Unfortunately all of the sacrifices and wind dances could not make up for the fact that we chose the wrong way to go around the islands. We finished third in the J-24 fleet and 151st out of 230. It's all about next year!