Oh My God

Well so much for the idea of doing timely updates during the race -- you have probably heard about this on the news by now anyway.

A short overview ---

We got out to the start and immediately decided on a single reef and the #2.
As we were turning for the start line, we jammed a runner because of the pressure from the mainsail and were basically unable to turn the boat. We had to gybe back to take the pressure off and then headed to the start line about 2 min. late.

This wasn't a big problem as the building wind was forcing other boats to change to smaller sails and we had already done that.

We then started planning for a spinnaker but put a stop to that as we saw other boats blowing up their sails as the wind continued to build.

We sailed on watching the other boats break things and turn for home. All of this time the wind has built from 20 or so to about 35 kts. We then decided to reduce the main even further and then things started to go wrong.

In pulling down the main, we had to head up into the wind a bit and this caused so much thrashing one of the battens broke and the main sail jammed. While that was happening the flogging of the #2 caused it to start to tear.
We immediately go it down and then went back to tying up the main -- oh yeh, the wind was now up to about 40 and gusting into the 50s. I don't even want to talk a bout the seas,

We ended up with a small fraction of a main up doing about 15+ kts. Things weren't too bad although we were getting concerned that once we got to Sisters we wouldn't be able to turn and come back.

We were now seeing steady winds of 50 with gusts of 60+. As we blasted past Sisters, we had no thought of trying to turn and decided to head to Deep Bay on Vancouver Island near Denman Island, we called the race committee to let them know where we were and then found the race was abandoned.

We had a reasonable sail up to Deep Bay and stopped in at the Deep Bay Yacht Club to clean things up and have dinner.
Here we found that that they had wind speeds up to 145km/hr which seemed fairly impressive to us.

It's now 1:30 Sat morning and we are headng back with following seas and a Westerly wind behind us.
We understand that one of the short course boats sunk and thankfully everyone was rescued. We never saw any other boats up here and thinl tha we may have been the only boat to reach Sisters.

Oh, I can't sell Turicum now because we hit the magic number --- 20+ kts -- virtually with no sail being pitched off a wave that looked more like a cliff.

It's nice to be warm and dry now -- the crew can motor us back to Vancouver while I watch the Nav and radar.

Cheers, hale