Welcome to Newport

We had a new member aboard Crack of Noon last night. Derby Anderson isn’t just new to the boat, she’s also new to town, having moved here just a few weeks ago from Annapolis. However, she’s apparently done her research. As we were tuning up for the race, she said: “So I hear it’s all about the tide in this fleet?”

She picked a heck of a night to say that.

Last night was quite an interesting race. The tide turned at 5:38 p.m. in Newport, which means that by the time we started racing it was just beginning to ebb. Most of the fleet went right, toward the deeper water to the west of Rose Island. Our plan from the outset was to go left as I felt that was a quicker route to the tide. A poor start put us in a hole and we were a quarter of the way through a tack when I decided to stick to my guns and asked Ian to go straight. (Thanks again to www.iWindsurf.com for the wind readings from Rose Island)

As it turned out, the best thing that happened to us on that leg was a windshift to the left and some better pressure on the left side and we rounded the windward mark in second. But that was the beginning of the end. A third of the way down the run I looked to leeward and saw half of the 13-boat fleet lined up, bow to bow. It was a classic restart and we were on the wrong side of it this time. Jeff Johnstone made a radical move toward the cone of current relief south of Rose Island, taking a number of transoms to get there, and won the race. We ended up 11th. Ugh!

By the time we got the second race underway, the tide was beginning to really move, and it seemed to create all sorts of weird eddies up the course. We tried to be patient, and sailed the long tack—port tack—as long as we could. At one point we were looking quite strong, but fell out of phase at the top of the leg and rounded midfleet, which is where we finished. Better, but still plenty of room for improvement. John Mollicone and Rob MacMillan led wire to wire for the win.

Nice work by the race committee getting as much out of the breeze as possible. It died completely before we reached the dock at Newport YC.

Results for 5/15: 1. USA 5256 (2, 1) 2. USA 355 (5, 2) 3. USA 3969 (3, 5) 4. USA 5356 (1, 8) 5. USA 5291 (8, 3) 6. USA 4453 (6, 6) 7. USA 3360 (10,4) 8. USA 3328 (4, 11) 9. USA 3688 (11, 7) 10. USA 1600 (7, 12) 11. USA 4687 (9, 10) 12. USA 3148 (13, 9) 13. USA 3294 (12, 13)