John and I joined Chris on his F-27 for the 5th race of the YRA Inter Club series. It was in the southbay, it was windy, and it was wet.
Two notable things on this race:
1. The fastest I’ve ever been on a sailboat. 23.5kts on a GPS with 4-second sampling time on one hair-raising spinny run. Chris and I were working really well together, steering and sheeting. We had some white-knuckle moments where the bow would start to submarine, but we were quick to depower and kept the boat upright.
2. The best spinnaker takedown I’ve ever done. We were finishing with our record-breaking spinny run and we realized we were way off course. We needed to get the spinny down, fast. With John releasing the lines, I did a leeward takedown in ~20kts of wind. It was incredible, everything went right. The spinny was down and packed in about 30 seconds. I think I even ran the tapes as I was stuffing it into the bag!
We had a great sail back down the estuary, where Chris gave John and I a chance to sail together under spinny. It’s a bummer school starts next month, I really enjoyed sailing with Chris this year.