Race Day

At the startline

 The saying goes that when you have more than one sailboat going the same direction you have a race.

Unless you’re talking about cruising sailboats.

As a rule cruising sailors don’t race—it would mean we’d have to put crap away and use a bunch of sails and stuff, which is work.

After we popped our spinnikar

 But today there were five boats heading the same way and Rich from Third Day proposed a race. After a bit of guilt tripping, peer pressure and bribery everyone signed on and a race time of 11:30 am was decided on (mostly to take advantage of the fact it was shaping up to be an unprecedented downwind run and we didn’t want to miss out on the easy sailing.)

watching Just a Minute cross the finish

 The next few hours were spent getting the boats race ready—I noticed Just a Minute storing away a bicycle and we wondered if we should do something with the huge water totter we have on the foredeck.

Maia was pleased to have an excuse to use her sailing gloves

 On the stroke of roughly 11:30 we all were almost ready to cross the line. We decided to fly the spinnaker (we have a go-fast image to live up to…) but it took us about five minutes to get the twist out. Fortunately that didn’t lose us too much time and when it finally popped out we accelerated ahead of the crowd.
Five miles later we were crowned the winners.

By a few minutes anyway.

Hotspur crosses the line.

One of the fun aspects of the sail was for most of the boats it was their first race ever. And even those who swore they weren't competitive gave it their all. It was pretty cool to see boats with *all* their sails flying. Most of us get a bit lazy and sail with the fewest number of sails needed to get where we’re going and still leave our awnings up and the bicycles out…

after we got the wrap out of the spinnaker --photo by S/VThird Day