D5, 2012

Tonights race ended the regular season of Wednesday night racing at the KYC.  It was anything but a typical night's race with chaos all around the race course.  We had between 2 and 15 knots of wind out of the SW to NW.  The course was SADAF but the D mark seemed to be located way down the race course close to Bear Creek.  The first start for A fleet was a general recall but at least half of the boats did not acknowledge it and raced all the way up to A mark and back before realizing.  We started right at the pin with about 10 - 15 knots of breeze and quickly tacked away in search of clear air.  Rounding A mark we went for the gybe set and wrestled with the kite all the way North along the right shore as the wind slowly worked it's way W to NW.  We got into a tricky situation with Shadowfax just North of Sutherland Bay.  We were both flying kites as the wind shifted far right and were quickly running out of water along the shore.  The only way to douse the kite was a risky floater drop.  Our rock star crew managed to get the kite back on board without shrimping and running it over and we sailed on a close reach up to D mark.  We were well out front for the D mark rounding a hung on to that position almost all the way back to A mark until the wind totally died and caused massive fleet compression from behind.  All three fleets were how floating at the A mark waiting for the breeze to fill back in.  We finally rounded and did a bear away set barely managing to fly the chute all the way to finish.  The RC must have been losing their mind trying to score everyone at the finish as about 30 boats all crossed the line within 3 minutes of each other.  It was an awesome summer for racing with much better than average wind conditions and not one single rainy day on the water.  We will switch to Sunday racing as of this weekend with a NEW START TIME of 10am.  Check the OK Sailing forum section for the new sailing instruction posted as of today as well as the year end results the the entire regular season.  Congratulations to the J29 TBD for a first place finish followed by Pentameter, Ghost Rider and just 3 points behind, Litonya.  This will be my last post for a few weeks as we will miss the first couple of Sunday races.

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