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Autumn Series Race 3 and 4. Friday 21st October
Wind 8-10 knots, South Easterly.
Two short Inshore races are scheduled for today. The Bahrain forecast differs from the international, which expects around 4 knots of breeze. We arrive for our 9:00 briefing and it's flat calm, about 2 knots...
The plastic thingy at the top of the headsail furling foil has mangled itself, so Hamish is sent up the mast to sort it before we can furl the headsail. We don't have time to repair this properly, so we make do with just the foil, loose on the forestay. Mike's whiteboard does its second appearance of the season, and briefing over we get out on the water to very light airs. Division 2 boats start at 10:30 followed by us 15 minutes later, on a southerly start from the Al Bander Port Poles transit. We creep over the line on Port, with good boat speed on Rapscallion, and soon tack away to gain better air and then tacking over onto Port again find that we're right on the layline. Overhauling Rapscallion, by now well down-wind of us, we're much closer to the mark, but as briefed, "If the first boat doesn't reach the West-Pole mark, half an hour after starting, race is cancelled". Two blasts from the Rapper signals race cancelled. First boat wasn't at the mark in time, so we retire to an early lunch - Fish'n'chips for the whole fleet.
Back on the water for our Division One 14:15 start, we sail to the line at full speed, but thinking there's a severe danger of being early, do a quick 360 and cross late by exactly the same time as the 360 took. Typical. Best to play safe though, as the others would certainly have whinged. On the beat to East Bouy we pull ahead, round that mark and set spinnaker for Pumphouse Port. It's a dead downwind, a horrible angle for us, so we gybe our way down the course, wrapping the bitch into hourglasses at every single gybe. We've got Neil and Steve aboard and only Hamish and I have experienced the dark moods of our spinnaker...We struggle on, but to our relief find on the beat back from Pumphouse that we really start pulling away from the fleet, catching TNT up near the top mark again and sailing well 'in the slot' with great sail trim. We round East Bouy and set the spinnaker for a very broad reach to Green and White Spar, gybe (successfully this time) around this to head down to West Pole.
It's a lovely angle for us and we whisper along nicely, drawing well ahead, accelerating to reach West Pole before 15:30 (course shortening time). We go to take down the spinnaker when all hell breaks out: It's stuck. Jammed at the masthead on the headsail foil. Bloody hell. The only way to free it is to fill the sail with wind again, which carries us further past the mark. This happens three times before we can get it down, and it then hits the water transforming us instantly into a shrimp trawler. But at least we're not sailing any further south when we actually want to go North.
The bitch strikes again. She's been perfectly well-behaved all year, but I guess it couldn't last.
We finally get back on the beat, get the boat in the groove, get past West Pole (again) and sail on to the 'course-shortened finish' at East Bouy with a finish time of 15:41:10 having wasted about four minutes spinnaker wrestling. TNT pushes us into second place for the race by three seconds. So we ended up by giving them another win on a plate, just like last race! Graeme Lindsey is delighted and tells us that we really are very kind.
I don't feel very kind though.
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