Mills Race
 

"DSK" wrote in message
.. .
John Cairns wrote:
Sorry guys, didn't get my camera out of the bag the whole race, didn't
pull it out after we left the dock, felt we were too busy to be fooling
around taking pictures, and my camera isn't exactly compact.

http://community.webshots.com/album/550830749owCBob


Is that a J-33? Good name.


Probably not a bad thing under the circumstances, the boat got flooded,
probably 30-50 gallons on the cabin sole, under the quarterberths,
forward by the heads, under the icebox, sink, you get the idea.

Good grief, what happened? From the weather map I know you had an exciting
race.

Did a headsail change and the fellas used the forward hatch to stuff the
sail, it didn't get dogged. When we took a lot o water over the bow it would
force the hatch up and flood. Since we only had five crew, by the time
anyone got below to notice most of the water was already there.


.. .I had laid my camera and bag on the port quaterberth cushion,
sometime around 2 or so in the am I noticed my bag floating upside-down
in 8 inches of water piled up next to the sink. Fortunately, the bag was
water resistant enough to prevent the camera or the contents of the bag,
a Sigma and fairly expensive Canon IS zoom lens, from being damaged. The
towel that the camera was wrapped in felt damp, however.


Do you have a way to dry it out, like say in a vacuum chamber? Good thing
to make sure. Dan (dbohara) recently posted some notes on recovering
electronic equipment that has been dunked, but it doesn't sound like yours
was bad.

Camera neve actually got wet, the towel that it was wrapped in was damp.
Just lucky. Dan has a more serious issue, sailing in salt water. I had a
digital that got a slight dunking in salt water-not even a real dunking,
just got salt waer splashed on it, never worked right after that. The
humidity on the boat would cause it to malfunction. Basic low-res model, not
worth trying to fix.

http://community.webshots.com/photo/...31781966uYrccn





http://www.toledoyachtclub.com/mills...inishes_R1.pdf

Note the # of dnf's, we were lucky, and under the circumstances, ended
with a pretty good result, 12th overall and 3rd in class.

That's pretty good.

Under the circumstances it was a little disappointing. Better than last
year, IIRC, but for the amount of work and physical discomfort...........

.... RacerX lost a lower, Hellion lost steerage at a rounding and hit the
bouy, punched two holes in the boat, Kicks broke their tiller. You read
and they tell you how every little bit of speed counts, it never becomes
more apparent when you calculate how much you lost by. We lost one place
overall by a little over 2 minutes in a race with an elapsed time, for
us, of over 13 hours. Do the math.


Not a bad result. Sounds like other boats had worse problems than a little
flooding (whatever caused it). One reason why I've learned to do
fiberglassing work is to beef up stuff so it won't break when the wind &
waves get up... it's not the waves so much, it's the landings! And a
couple of bad waves could make up (or cost you) more than 2 minutes.

Hellion patched the holes at the dock. IMHO, what killed us more than
anything was the lack of ballast on the rail. Even with the heavy #3, we
were heeled waaaaaaaay too much. We did a pretty good job of calling the
waves from the rail, and everyone basically had the same conditions as we
did, but I think they generally had more weight on the rails.


Any good spinnaker action?

Thank god, no! You can get by-barely-with 5 crew in a distance race with few
tacks. We did Bay Week last year with 5, youngest crew member was over 40,
it was pretty brutal, our results bear this out. One bright spot, we beat
another J33 with a crack crew of 8 on the final day, these guys won the race
on day 2. It was only a 4th, but we were whooping and hollering like we'd
won. We had a fairly sedate A-sail + staysail run on the final leg, caught
the other boats up and passed them, but not good enough to improve our
position.

John Cairns

Fresh Breezes- Doug King