Saturday Racing

As we thought/feared, the NE Santa Ana and the prevailing westerly spent most of the day fighting each other. We drifted around for an hour before we finally got enought wind (like 4-5 kts) for the RC to start. Lots of 30 deg. shifts to get on the wrong side of. We ended the day in 10th place with an 11-7-13 string. The 13th was kind of disappointing. We were 5th through the last weather mark and then encountered a starboard-leeward J105, followed by an agressive luff from another Etchells and had to do a penalty turn. Here are a couple of pix the show the action on Saturday.

San Diego Sunrise

Friday January 9th -

We did some tweaking on the boat and actually managed to get out for a bay sail in the afternoon. We connected with another Etchells, for some tuning, but the afternoon winds were fluky making it difficult to learn much.

We all attended a seminar on the rule changes conducted by Dave Perry at SDYC. Good presentation and some of the changes are well worth noting. When you all hear us hailing "mark room" as we enter the THREE boat length zone, you'll have it.

Forecast for today is a NE Santa Ana wind -- hot dry winds that blow strongly inland and then bounce against the westerly sea breeze. This generally produces a dead zone in the racing area or strange course orientations -- like our easterlies in B'ham.

Looks like we should have about 20 boats on the line today. Towing out at 9:30. Joyce is on RC again this year.

Outta here....

Heading South

Etchells 1149 is finally headed south. We picked Friday January 2nd as our "weather window" The pic shows how it looked that AM. We hit snow at home, snow in Southern WA, ice & snow over the Siskiyous, but we managed to keep the trailer behind us most of the way. (Advice: Get a brake controller.)

Dropped off Joyce at Sacramento and picked up Blaine for the trip south. Arrived in SD early Sunday AM after a LONG day of driving.