Fleet Captain Travis’s quick HSC SOSA regatta recap:
We were surprised to encounter several rain showers on the way to Summerland but luckily it held off while we re-assembled the boat. We received a warm welcome from several members who remembered us from two years ago (‘The RS400 folks!’) We didn’t bring any warm clothing and were a bit cold the first night at our Airbnb but OK after that.
Saturday morning a light wind turned on early (hooray) and we took the start for Race 1 on-time at 10:25. I saw a gap in the line of boats that didn’t seem to be closing so I stuck the boat in. Unfortunately, a Dart (single-person catamaran) came in to Port and leeward of us, so he had rights – I tried to avoid by crossing over his bow but my insta360 camera on the end of our boom caught his forestay, broke off and sunk to the bottom of the lake! (groan). So, no video from this regatta. No other damage. Despite the poor start and resulting 360 penalty, somehow, we won Race 1 for our class which was ‘Everyone except ILCA7’. We had pretty good starts (and no more contact) for the rest of the regatta.
The course was a simple windward/leeward with a twist: the start/finish line was in the middle of the course and we were required to go through it on every windward leg of every lap. 2 years ago we got DQ’d for missing that. All races except R7 I believe were 4 laps. Poor Jungmi had to raise/lower the spinnaker around 35 times over the entire regatta!
I believe it was R4 where the wind changed 180 degrees twice on the same leg…we had just rounded the windward mark and put our spin up when the wind switched and blew us into the mark. Another 360…sigh.
I saw what appeared to be a pretty bad crash at the start of R5 - we had gotten away cleanly in first, but I looked over my shoulder and saw a bunch of boats pile into the Dart that we had collided with in R1, poor guy. Apparently, there was no damage however the Dart retired. We also had a bad spinnaker jam out of the blue and it took us most of the leg to sort it out. But somehow after all that we were in first place after 5 races on Saturday.
On Sunday the wind turned on early again but much stronger this time, 10ish kts. We were overpowered upwind and slightly underpowered downwind, planing on-and-off. The other boats were much faster in the stronger breeze and some were reefing their sails which I hadn’t seen in a dinghy regatta before. I was pretty happy with how we sailed, however by the end we had dropped two places for a 3rd place finish.
SOSA Regatta results.
