A hot balmy evening in Cape Town.. Indications were that there might be no wind on the water... but there was.. For the start there was a NW.. The pin being favored... Our start was Class A and B sharing the line so much faster boats and even some 50 footers were jockeying among 30 footers.. not ideal and with stronger breeze not safe.. With this in mind, it did not make sense to fight it out with a bigger boat so tried to go down the line a bit... the problem is that a much larger boat below gives an easy leebow and to weather takes the wind... so either way, we needed to let the fast boats move away from the line as quick as possible... Notwithstanding that, Yolo got a mediocre start but in our class one of the better ones.. nice flat water making sailing easy... got the boat going and found a nice lane to tack into with only the Class A boats to worry about... Then a couple of well planned tacks using the wind shifts and setting ourselves up for a slight windshift we could see closer to the top part of the course... Getting to the weather mark among the class A boats and well ahead of Class B boats... then a downwind Sail to Number 2 mark... and what started as a fetch to the finish.. .with us sailing into the convergence zone where a ESE was making its presence known.. while in this zone the bigger boats had more momentum and those behind were still on the tail end of the breeze which allowed some of them to catch up... and two were able to pass us on this leg.. fortunately the breeze slowly came in.. and we were able to finish just behind them giving us the first place on corrected time.
This was one of those great evenings to be sailing in Cape Town.. warm breeze and flat water..
Aboard were: Dale, Ian, Sieger, Cath, Antoinio and Arran.
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