2011 Swiftsure

[Capt. Woogy]

It looks like some of our SJ21 sailors from Fleet 5 - Canyon Ferry, MT not only sailed Alan Bock's Laser 28 in the 103 mile Cape Flattery race in the Swiftsure Classic, but ended up kicking some butt as well. After 28 hours of sailing out the Straights of Juan de Fuca and back, it looks like they finished 2nd in class and 3rd overall. I'm sure we'll get a full report from Bob Abelin once he's recovered. Well done guys!

[bluepearl]

Thanks Chris. This was a pretty surprising result for us too. Despite a terrible weather forecast, the race was actually pretty nice with a variety of wind conditions and no rain. We started in really light wind and bad current and spent two hours trying not to get flushed into the San Juans. Some boats never made it to the start line. We made about one mile of headway in two hours hours, not a good start for a 100 mile races. Finely the breeze came up a bit and we made our way past Race Rocks and out into the straits. Had about six hours of really good sailing and made about 30 miles in 10-15kts of breeze. The wind died down as night came and we made slow but steady progress till we rounded the mark at the edge of the pacific at about 1AM. The next 8 hours were pretty slow, but we sailed about 15 miles back down the strait till the forecasted strong winds started blowing down the strait. The next 35 miles went pretty quick with 8-10 kts of boatspeed in about 20 kts of breeze with a following current. Unfortunately we had lost the entire fleet in the night and had no idea what our position was We couldn't see anyone behind us at all so we were pretty sure we were DFL. It wasn't until we got back to the docks that we realized almost no one in our fleet had finished yet and we had pulled in less than and hour behind most of the much faster boats. We ended up only one minute out of second place overall after practically giving up a few hours earlier. Lesson learned, NEVER STOP RACING. All in all it wasn't a bad result for a bunch of unknown sailors from a landlocked state that hadn't sailed at all in 2011. Next time maybe we'll try the race in the SJ 21 instead of a Laser 28, or maybe not.