The Wind Gods Are Crazy!

Full Moon crew Michael “Nimble” Medina, Ian “Ballast” Mengedoht, Daniel “Temporary Skipper” Mengedoht, and skipper John “Not Again!” Mengedoht approached the starting line for the LED Night Duck Dodge on port tack, hoping for a hole, but faced a literal wall of starboard tack boats. When finally able to tack, a slow-moving boat blocked our path and Full Moon barely squeaked by the Committee Boat to cross the line.

The standard advice upwind is to tack on a header but it seemed like every tack resulted in a new header due to very shift breeze and progress to the AGC buoy was painful. A final tack to the buoy looked like a sure bet but resulted in just barely getting past without hitting the buoy.

It was a nearly full moon, which oddly doesn't ever seem to translate to racing success!

Once around, the anticipated southwest wind had clocked to the southeast. A delay in switching the oversized “turbo” spinnaker pole to the opposite side was just in time for the wind to clock back to the southwest. Flip the pole again! Finally, it was time to hoist the Equalizer, which flew between a beam reach and sailing by the lee (pole on the “wrong” side)! At least the drop was fairly tidy at the Freeway buoy.

Just past sunset over the Aurora Bridge.

The next leg was a straight shot to the Aurora buoy. Unfortunately, tacking around the buoy proved the spinnaker pole was trapped in the jib sheets, which took a few minutes to clear. The final leg was upwind in a very shifty breeze, once again resulting in tacking at precisely the wrong times. Full Moon finally made it across the line, not last but definitely not among the leaders. Time for beer!!