Elite Keel '08

So this last weekend we were up in San Francisco and raced the Elite Keel Regatta out of SFYC. Looking at the forecasts we were a little nervous seeing calls for 20-25 knots, the last time we has seen these conditions was over a year ago in Santa Cruz. However, despite only Adam and I haven seen these conditions before, Geoff, Christine, and Ricardo all stepped up and we went on to win this regatta. We were blazing fast upwind with our new Ullman's. Scary fast, we started off with a poor start on my part that had us over early at the boat end of the line, but a quick restart and great speed still had us first around the windward mark.

Unfortunately our closest competitor on Full Throttle broke his head stay at the start of racing the second day, and with us taking a bullet in race 4, we had already won the regatta before the last race started. Not a team to give up, we still raced the last race and ended the regatta with another bullet.

While we had a great time, there were a couple of negatives, first our spin halyard is slipping again when it starts really blowing, so we need to fix that. Also, we snagged the windward mark with our keel (our hull didn't hit it, the mark anchor line was stretched out to windward) during the 3rd race, but we were able to recover to finish 2nd place in that race after Bones tried to pinch us out at the finish line and was disqualified from the race.

Big thanks to Geoff Davis, Ricardo Papa, Christine Pai, and Adam Storey for working their asses off and getting us our first win in a one design event! It was great knowing that we were actually out there racing and looking for more speed when a lot of boats where just trying to survive the conditions and get around the course. It was great that the San Diego boat was the one to go up to SF and kick ass in their conditions. Next on the one-design schedule is Long Beach Race Week end of June. I am off to Hawaii for a couple of weeks to spend some time with the wife and for a friend's wedding.

More Pics
Write up from SF Melges Fleet
Results

Peter Lyons of Lyon's Imaging was out shooting photos. Link here.

All Packed up and ready to go

This is what Karma looks like when she is in travel mode. The hull covers are there to prevent the hull from getting damaged during the trip. They are a new addition to the program and will hopefully end up saving us time when traveling because we won't need to spend 2 hours cleaning the hull before every regatta. Geoff Davis is towing her north Thursday morning, so if you see him on I-5 headed north honk and wave, but please be careful when passing!

Adam Storey is going to bring his helmet camera to Elite Keel, and if the forecasts are right is should be blowing so hopefully we will get some cool video to post next week.

CRA Opening Day Regatta

On May 10, we sailed the CRA Opening Day Regatta. This was to serve as our last tune-up with our new main and jib. While our results don't show it, we had the best crew work out there. We passed boats with quicker gybe sets, better douses, and overall better boat handling. All of this still was not enough for us to make up our rating of 60 on a windward/leeward course. Crew for this race was:

Geoff Davis - jib trim
Bruce Harris - main trim
Christine Pai - bow
George Roland - helm
Adam Storey - spin trim

Our roll tacks and roll gybes were great, things are getting very smooth, now we just need to head up to SF next weekend and compete against some other Melges. Race 1 was pretty clean, and and the new sails did allow us to perform very well upwind, but we still had no chance in the 8-10 knots of breeze in holding off our competition. Race 2 we suffered on the second beat because we got bounced between two shifts and did about 4 extra tacks. Pics of the rest of the racing can be found here.