Swiftsure was interesting.
We started out with very light wind and again, after a reasonably good start we clawed our way toward Race Rocks. Things were going quite well until we tried to pass our friends on Alchemy. We ended up in the "gas" from their sails and lost momentum -- ouch. We weren't able to recover and started slipping slowly back.
To compound difficulties, we were of course sailing against a flood tide so the net result was that we sailed as hard as we could just to stay still. Slowly the wind built and we were finally able to sail through the Race without much difficulty.
The wind continued to build as we sailed up the Canadian shore with a fair number of the fleet. By the time we got to Sheringham the wind had built to 30kts and we decided to cross over.
The wind stayed in the 20s as we crossed but started to drop as we closed on the US shore -- in retrospect crossing over too early was probably error #2.
Error #3 was clearly when we missed the big wind shift that took us back out into the Strait rather than tacking -- we were worried that there was no wind on the shore.
After rounding at around 2:15 we started the homeward leg still in the very light wind trying various sail combinations in an effort to just get Turicum moving. As is the usual case as the morning came with it came the wind.
We ended up having a great sail home to what looked like a 3rd place finish. Unfortunately another boat finishing behind us corrected over us dropping us to 4th.
All in all we finished in the top 3rd of the race and we were generally pleased with what we had accomplished.
A video clip can be seen at http://gallery.me.com/jamesdoane#100449
Next stop Van Isle
