scott.projectsomewhere

A race win for The Rag this season has been a long time coming, but we finally put it together on Sunday to take away a close fight in the last race prior to the JJ starting on Friday.

The margin was only 4 seconds over Hugh and the guys on Asko, who swapped the lead with us constantly during the race, and threw a whole bunch of tacks into the last work to try and get through.

Anyone would’ve through it was the last race of the JJ the way the crowd cheered when we crossed the line. Calligeros and Riss were loud as expected, the bookie on the ferry was grinning from ear to ear and horns were going off all over the shop. Very nice. The excitement for us crossing the line was almost as animated as the boat-park allocation for the JJ in the bar afterwards, when 7 pulled place 23 - the furthest from the ramp.

It didn’t seem like it was going to be our day early on though, with John still off the pace with the flu, and our main ratchet block packing it in before the start - the 3rd this season (we’re now changing them all to Harken). So even though I couldn’t straighten my arms after a couple too many chinups with my trainer… I had to go around the southerly course with 5 upwind legs and a heap of two sail power reaching… with no ratchets.

We were pretty lucky around the track, despite a few tangles and stuff-ups, we stayed close enough to get through when Akso’s last drop went awry. The spooners also bowed out early, after tangling with Langman (or was that Rollo on the helm?) and blowing their pole wire in a crash-tack capsize at the pin end. Club Marine also swam in the mayhem, and Smeg had an OCS restart but pulled through to 4th. Plenty on in top-end big rig conditions.

So hopefully we’re getting out stuff together at the right time this season. If we can just sort out the last few rough edges, and have a bit of luck fall our way, we could be in the placings at the end of next week.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 9:56 am and is filed under 18' Skiff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.