Easter Surprise

Happy Easter everyone and welcome to the brand new sailing season.  This year has brought  about many new changes to the traditional Kelowna racing scene.  One of the biggest being the redesign of the racing course.  In an effort to make it a much more square windward/leward course the mark locations have been moved.  Yesterday was our first race around the new course and my first imperssions were quite positive.  The only drawback that I saw had to do with the starting setup.  It is my impression that the start can happen at any of the marks, depending on wind direction.  The only problem is that if the comittee boat arrives at the starting mark too late, the sailing fleet can not reach the prestart area soon enough to run the line and get prepared to race.  This happened to us yesterday.  The start was at the new C mark but we have just enough time to sail to the mark and get the course written down and were then immediatly into the starting sequence.  A little too rushed for my liking.  It was a spectacular day out on the water with a steady North wind of about 8 knots, clear blue skies and about 18 degrees, not bad for March.  The course was CDACAC and was definetly much more square than in previous years.  I also liked the fact that we were never racing close to shore with the dangers involved with very low spring water levels.  We had great boat speed and hung onto 2nd place behind Bad Dog down to the leward A mark.  We rounded just ahead of TBD and tried to hold our position directly ahead of them by a few boat lengths.  That boat actually managed to pinch up and sail through our dirt just beating us to the windward C mark.  As we started to hoist the kite the wheels quickly fell off for us.  We blew the shackle on the spin halyard causing us to jib reach all the way back to A mark.  A few expletives were let loose as we saw our hard fought position crumble and all the boats sail on past.  Lesson learned, always tape the spin halyard.  No excuses next time.  We are very happy with our precieved improvement in boat speed with a fancy new bottom job, and look forward to next weeks adventure.

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