It’s been a very long day! I found out yesterday that there was a Finn regatta this weekend hosted by Bay Waveland YC (it’s actually opening day at the club). So I had a look at the weather, pack up my Finn and headed over for a day on the open water. Just me and my Finn with no crew to yell at!

The day was perfect, Southerly breeze 10-15 kts with about 12 Finns racing 80 degrees. Let me back up a few steps, I haven’t sailed my Finn for a month or two and before that it was in moth balls for roughly a year while I focused on the Star boat.

So rusty is a massive under statement. I purchased a Finn mast from Kiwi Sailor Dan Salter and matching sails. It makes such a huge difference when you have proper gear. I had good pace upwind, but got tangled up at the weather mark in a crossing situation that I would call marginal but I did my 720 penalty turn, so instead of leading around the first weather mark, I was about 10th after the herd went ripping by me, see previous sentence, speed was good I managed to battle back and finish the race 2nd.

So happy with my ability to battle back in trying conditions but gave up a point in the series. The second race saw the pin favored (as in the first race, but the r/c didn’t move the axis and the breeze was fairly consistent) I had a decent start about 5 boats up from the pin, had nice speed upwind and made it to the weather mark overlapped for 2nd and this is where things went ugly… While after the offset I was the inside boat and I wanted to soak low to get some gauge on the boat to weather and get some clear water. Well it worked better on paper than in realty I rolled the boat a bit to hard and rolled myself right out of the boat, massive death roll.

OK so now that I have come to the realization that my boat is nearly upside down with the boom still in the air and sailing away from my upside down it became shockingly clear that wow hoss I have never capsized in my Finn before how do I right this thing? At this point the center board was nearly all the way inside the center board trunk in the down wind position, it’s getting more ugly by the second. Then James Hunter who rounded the weather mark asked if I was ok and I said I have no idea how to right this thing. Now here comes the cool part. He actually stopped to help me out finally after getting the tip of the mast unstuck from the bottom of Bay St. Louis. Soon I was right side up with mud all over my gear and the rest of the fleet nowhere in sight so I decided to head for the barn.

It took about 2.5 hours to clean up the yard sale I had out there. It’s amazing how mud gets everywhere, just plain nasty. I hear there are a few more races tomorrow we shall see how it goes.

Later!