Songline’s Double Angle Race, 2009

Left to right and top down: Dave, Martin, Zoe (dog), Marc, Dan, MJ, Monica, Zoe (human), Corie, Christina, Ariana

Last weekend Songline raced the Double Angle Race  hosted by the very salty Elkhorn Yacht Club. It features two starting lines, one at Monterey Harbor and the other at Santa Cruz Harbor. A novelty race, the two racing fleets converged at the center of the outer Monterey Bay at a point marked by the M1 Buoy, and thereafter ran the last leg due east to the EYC.

Double Angle on Monterey Bay

What made the race special was that it was crewed by a group of young college students, most of whom had sailed for the first time only one month ago. The one notable exception was young Martin, who came aboard only a week before the race and rescued our bruised and beaten foredeck novice, Dan. Our cockpit crew consisted of MJ, Ariana, Corie, and Christina. They really gave their all and we managed to sail a near perfect race with good speed and almost no errors.

After an inauspicious start, we rolled boats, one after the other, in a foggy, light air beat to Natural Bridges. The cockpit and foredeck were in complete synch when bringing the huge 150% genoa around. The we laid the mark and bore away for the long reach to the M1 buoy, making good speed as the breeze freshened. Finally, we rounded M1, set, and gybed. After running too deep for too long, we realized it was time to heat things up. We let the pool forward and started S-turning. Spinnaker reaching at speeds in eights was great fun. Everything was just perfect.  ….until the very end!

It was then that Captain Marc (yours truly), confused the harbor entrance with the finish line and went the wrong way! I forced us to sail an extra mile or so to the real finish line!  Had we gotten the finish line right, we would have been first to finish, though the Santa Cruz 27s in the fleet would likely have corrected out over us on PHRF handicap. Nevertheless, we had a great time and earned the respect of the other sailors in the race.

Well done, crew!

NOTE: We were not the only boat to make the finish line mistake. In their infinite wisdom, the Elkhorn Yacht Club race committee moved the finish, after many years of finishing at the harbor entrance. So it goes.

PS - Hey MJ! Go to this link to see the transAtlantic video clip. SONGLINE’S TRANSATLANTIC

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 9:12 am and is filed under Sail-the-Channel News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.