RACING SCHEDULE & RESULTS

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Swiftsure-04

Duwamish Head Race Results - 2001

By Rod Tharp (Strider)

For those of you who were unlucky enough to miss this race I will give you a quick recap. (This is really Dave Dupree's job as he pulled out the win in fine fashion.)  Below is the finish times and placement.

CLASS A RESULTS

As you can see four boats entered and Coral Reefer scored the low corrected time. A second is as good as a mile. My wife says that Coral Reefer has a bigger spinnaker than I do and should have a lower handicap ( but she is a little prejudice) What do you say Scott? Maybe lower Dave's rating 1/30 of a second. 

Picture this you stay at home folks - NO RAIN, A NICE NORTHERLY BREEZE, and A POD OF ORCAS. We started the race near the pin end on a close reach about two seconds behind Coral Reefer and Dragonfly who were in the middle of the line. Cuttlefish played it a bit more conservative at the start. Dragonfly was soon gone- one time flying a hull pretty damn high. Strider and Coral Reefer sailed side by side for a couple of miles with the wind shifting a bit to the North and us going close hauled. Finally through some magnificent sailing or just plain luck (take your pick) we were able to make Coral Reefer tack away. Shortly after that the wind filled in more and shifted a bit more onto our nose. Through some sloppy sailing on our part we blew a tack and Coral Reefer jumped ahead. We followed Coral Reefer to the turn mark but being a bit higher we were able to fall off a bit and get a little more speed. Prior to this we had noticed Dragonfly had already rounded the rock and was heading South under jib and main. We passed the mark a bit ahead of Coral Reefer with Flash Gordon in there somewhere. We then took off on that multihull specialty - the close reach. Some day I am going to get a knot meter so I can tell how fast I am going. Suffice to say we hit at least 15 knots. The Rock came up fast and we debated what to do next. We had made a bit of time on Coral Reefer and were started to feel a little competitive so we went to the big spinnaker. The waves were tossing us around and we are not use to waves. Budd Bay has fluky winds and small waves compared to the North Sound. We decided to run deep and that allowed us to control the spinnaker and the boat -- less on the edge but slower VMG (velocity made good). Suffice to say that Dave caught us and passed us at one point about a mile before the finish. In fact it was a bit of match racing to take the other guys wind and somehow we got to the finish ahead of Coral Reefer - 29.68 seconds before them and we owed them 30.8 seconds. So in truth they beat us by 1.12 seconds. We both corrected over Dragonfly by a little bit. Congrats to Dave who made some good calls and sailed as fast as he needed to.