We just squeezed into third place for Torbay Race week on Santana beating 4th place by 0.5 of a point. Pretty amazing considering there were 3 Perrins on the boat all yelling abuse at each other. The other two/three crew need to take the trophy home for dealing with the Family Perrin for 6 races. Truly awful crew work at times and the worst chinese gybe in the last race 200 yards from the finish line that I have done in a long time. However, we survived each other – just – and the family holiday continues tomorrow in Cornwall with on shore activities. I am sure Dad will remember his 65th birthday celebrations with a mix of emotions. He is still trying to figure out how as a parent who provides a boat for his kids to race can be treated like an imbecile – kids will be kids Dad! We do love you.

I did the mid bow squirrel position on Chance the J120 at Aldo Alessio regatta and as usual with that crew I had a great time. Barry the owner is a great driver and skipper and everyone is very good at their jobs just leaving you to get on with your own. We ended up in 2nd place. The racing in the top three boats was pretty tight a lot of the time we were within 10 boat lengths of each other. The racing was meant to be over 3 days however, St Francis decided to make the Friday Ocean Race into a Cat 2 ORC with exceptions and the fleet decided they didn’t have the time to prepare their boats so as a fleet did not race. This left two windward leeward races on Saturday – the first one was a whopping 2.75 hours long as there was a large flood time and a round the bay course on Sunday. After racing finished today I jumped in the car and drove up to Tinsley Island which is a private island in the Delta owned by St Francis YC I am staying on a customers boat tonight and will be delivering it back to Richmond tomorrow. It is an early start of 5:30am.

For the race back only 2 boats were entered so we had a little match racing pre start action going on but it was drifting conditions and my little brother on the helm got pushed over the line early by the old guys on Imperator so he had to go back. We then worked our way out of the bay – very light upwind. At the 1st mark 7 miles away we were about 200 yards ahead of Imperator who is 5 feet bigger than us. It should have then been a reach for 70 miles to the next corner however the wind increased and it became a dead beat. With 7 crew on the rail Imperator took off as we changed down to a number three and went into a watch system with 2 on deck and 2 below – it was going to be a long race if the grib files were correct.

Imperator could not point and for the next 9 hours kept on tacking above us and then falling down onto us and ending up miles to leeward. We just stayed on port tack and watch them be a satellite! Finally we decided to have fun so when they crossed ahead really close my little brother Myles and I hid in the cockpit with Myles helming from on the cockpit floor so when they crossed no one was to be seen – they had 5 people hiked out at the time with way to much headsail up. Then they tacked a 1/2 mile to weather of us and started falling down on us. So we went to the next stage of having a laugh. Myles put on his ski goggles, Flavio got out the fog horn and I suited up in my lifejacket, harness and trapezed while Flavio sounded the horn. We were in fits of giggles. Totally against the rules however, we decided there was no way Imperator would protest as it was only us in the race and we weren’t gaining any advantage as we only did it for 5 minutes! Myles texted the race committee who were the best race committee I have had in a long time and admitted our infringement – a bottle of jack daniels was our penalty!

Imperator dissappeared to leeward again and ended up crossing in front just as the sun set by about 20 yards. The wind died in the night and shifted behind us so we hoisted the spinnaker we lost Imperator’s lights. When the sun came up we looked around and could just spot Imperator on the horizon behind us. They stayed there all day getting smaller and smaller we estimated about 9 miles behind.

Out ETA became 6pm at Ushant on Friday night – a very slow race and the sea was becoming glassy calm. The grib files looked really bad not even showing feathers on the wind direction. We again texted the race committee and asked if it was possible to shorten course at Ushant and that way we would still get results for the race. There was still 120 miles of the race left and there was no way we would do it before Saturday night when the prizegiving was going to be held. They left a message saying that we should retire and motor to St Peter Port as Imperator was retiring and had had a sense of humor failure and were protesting us for the trapezing! That was a surprise to us seeing as they had not flown a flag and not told us at the time of the incident so the protest was not valid. However, we decided not to float around being the only boat out there and turned on the engine heading for St Peter Port.

It was a 24 hour motor to the finish and the engine started spurting fuel out of the lift pump as the gasket had failed so there was a bit of babying going on – the rpm’s would change as the engine would be starved of fuel every so often. We couldn’t fix it as we didn’t have a new gasket.

Peter Chantres the JOG secretary was standing at the fuel dock with nozzle in hand as they were closing 5 minutes after we pulled up and we filled up with diesal. He had also kindly organised for us to stay on the fuel pontoon for the few hours we stopped there which was very kind of him. I have never come across such a great race committee!

In St Peter Port we ended up with the trophies as they had already been made so it was worth the motor for a nice Pimms jug! We had to sit through the your boat is a bandit conversation with Imperator and then went off for a nice pub dinner before leaving 4 hours later for the Hamble.

IDEC on the left and Santana the Capo 30 on the right with the black mast.

Looking towards Belle Isle low tide with lots of rock pools

The enterance to the gulf of morbihan see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Morbihan it is a beautiful part of Brittany.

Oyster beds in the Gulf of Morbihan

A race report by Myles (my little brother) will be posted next week. I am currently in france having raced to La Trinite with my little brother on Dad’s boat Santana a Capo 30. The sailing was the best I have had in a long time with a sunny downwind ride to Southern Britanny. It is very beautiful here. Prize giving was tonight and we got a beautiful trophy tomorrow we will be racing home.

Have a good week.

At the weekend I joined another Moore 24 crew for a regatta at Huntington Lake. My normal crew was busy so I decided to go as foredeck with Numa Boa 106. It is a long drive to Huntingon especially when you fight friday traffic out of the city so after getting lost going the locals way we finally got there at around 10pm. The rest of the crew had taken friday off and gone up on thursday with the boat. They had the campsite all set up and a delicous meal of potatoes, corn and steaks ready for us when we arrived. They had even caught some trout from the lake and cooked that up on a roaring campfire.

Stupidly I forgot a flashlight – not sure how I did that – however putting up my tent was not that hard as it is pretty simple and I had thankfully left it packed in a way that made it plug and play. The guys continued to party till 2:45 in the morning I decided to hit the hay around midnight. In the morning I woke to find that we were camping right on the lake shore.

On Saturday we had to put the rudder in the boat and attach our ‘borrowed’ tiller as the boats carbon one had gone missing. We launched the boat and went back to the campsite for breakfast. This is a relaxing regatta with 11:30 starts and short races in beautiful mountain scenery. We had three races on Saturday and our guest sailor was Gilles’s (one of the owners) girlfriend Sally who did a great job slithering under the boom vang. Sailing a Moore with 5 people is squashed. Our first race was not stellar but Mark (other owner) pulled off some great starts and race 2 we got the best result they have had in 8 years of a 3rd finishing overlapped with 2nd and 4th. Dinner on Saturday was chicken which had been marinated all day in orange vitamen water (for that citrus flavour) and soy sauce.

As we left the campsite to go to the bar thinking we would find Moore sailors we were slightly blocked in but Gilles managed to sneak the car through the space to which the women blocking said ‘good thing you are small’ which due to Gilles stature and the whole timing led to peels of laughter from within our car. In fact I have to say the Numa Boa crew is the most caveman like crew I have sailed with in a long time with no pretense at being the least bit refined! The jokes were like preschool full of toliet humor and there was a lot of sticking things up orifices if people didn’t shut up! It became a who can shock Ashley the most I think. However, with Sally and Anne Marie there the girls tried valiently to fight back and clean up the conversation – really to no avail.

Sunday we changed the rig tune a little. Gilles and I decided that both of our boats were examples of the cobblers shoes – with plenty of things needing fixing. Gilles has a business rigging in the bay and he is very good at it. Our other crew was Andy who has been on the Moneypenny program for the last few years and just returned to the Bay. It was a great crew to be sailing with as no one had to be coached. Gilles drove on Sunday and we lined up with the top boats for some speed testing before the start bouying our confidence by staying with both of them straight line. On the first race of the day we were in second place for most of the race getting a great start at the boat (shore) and getting every shift, with great height and speed. Downwind the fleet compressed as the wind came in from the back but we held second till right at the mark rounding when we had to let someone inside as they got an overlap on the last surf. From then on it was a reach then a short downwind then a short upwind. Unfortunately there was a little melt down on the boat due to the over excitement of our unusual position of being so far up in the fleet and we lost 3 boats at the end resulting in a 5th. A shame as a second was accessible for us and very possible. The last race saw the boat leading the regatta retire as they had won without sailing the last race and our first start was very good however the rest of the fleet was general recalled. Unfortunately our start wasn’t great and we played catch up from there. Gilles and Andy were staying Sunday night so lucky Mark and I were able to tie the boat to the dock and get on the road home.

A very enjoyable weekend with some really fun competitive sailing, good food and beautiful scenery.

After a lot of work to get the Quest 33 ready for Cat 2 racing Wayne the owner of the Quest 33 RYM is looking after lent us the boat for Coastal Cup. With a crew of 4 – Mark English (Moore 24 owner), Richard Leslie (Melges 32 owner), Olivier Lapparra and myself set off hoping all the forecasts were wrong.

You know you are in for a long race when Commanders sends you and email that starts

1) This does not look to be a lot of fun

a) can be a very fast race, but it looks really, really slow this year, especially tonight, Fri morning, and again Fri night

We didn’t have a good start – second row and very slow. There was a large ebb and we were well clear of the line for the start of Class A. So with a no wind and a rolling start sequence it took us 5 minutes to get to the line and I squeezed up between the J109 and the anchor rode of the start boat – they were kind to let us in was cheeky for us to go in there but with both of us moving at 1.5 knots it wasn’t in his interest to punch it up and push us out.

We tacked straight away so as not to sit on their wind and also because although the most ebb was on the city front it looked very slow going that way. We ended up tacking up to the bridge between Angel and Treasure cutting across to the city front around Blackhaller and then heading out very close to the south tower and working middle to left side outside the bridge. There was a very light NW at this point and we started reaching south at about 200 so that we didn’t close on the coast as per Commanders suggestion of keeping offshore.

All the other boats started to hoist their kites but weren’t even making it around Point Montara so we held off. Finally we decided it was time to hoist and just as I got the spinnaker hooked up a wind line moved towards us and everyones spinnakers backwinded. The light southerly has arrive way early it was only around 1pm. As we sat their trying to make 4 knots of boat speed a whale surfaced next to us several times – beautiful.

We beat till 5pm and dialed all the buoys to get real time conditions every one was showing southerlies less than 10 knots of wind. The crew made a decision it was time to go home – there were better things to do than drift offshore for 4 days. We hoisted the kite and to really show us how much it sucked that wouldn’t even set so it was time for the engine. We motored until we had 10 knots of wind and then hoisted the kite and sailed into a fog bank with about 200m visibility. When we sailed under the bridge you could hardly make out the underside of the roadway. We crossed in front of a container ship sailing at 10 knots missing it by about 250 meters and emerged into a beautiful sunset off coastguard point (sausalito). By the time we got back to the dock, cleaned up the boat and ate dinner it was 11pm.

It is 5pm on Saturday 55 hours after the start and two boats have finished and 5 are still racing. The Beneteau 42 is bringing up the back and is only 140 miles down the track with 137 straight line distance left to go…… I went Friday night racing last night instead with the Fennell family on Good and Plenty and had a good time doing foredeck.Back to making some bags.

 

Friday night racing was a bust only one boat finished in our class everyone else retired as there was no wind to speak of. 

On Saturday we did the Delta Ditch Run to Stockton it was a long race as we didn’t see any wind over 15 knots and mostly it was sub 10knots.  Check out some pictures below. Wayne did a great job of wing on winging with the asym down the last part of the river after a total of 72 gybes we finally finished! Every one guessed the number of gybes and the winner got to deliver the boat home! I guessed 75, Wayne 60, Delphine 100, Gus 110, Andy 99 and Rene 87.

We went aground while I was helming and managed to get off, were fouled by a J105 and well and truely got our ass kicked by the Moore 24’s and the rest of the boats in our class however we had a great time. The overnight delivery home was long 12 hour motoring and we ended up kedging off a shoal on the enterance to the harbour as we had a minus tide and even though we were in the channel there was some local knowledge we now know about!

On Friday I spent the day derigging a Santana 22 that my friend James just bought. The boat needs re rigging so we are bartering website work and rigging – pretty fair exchange. We cobbled together a set up that allowed us to drop the rig without a pivoting mast step – the boat is in the water and there isn’t a hoist at the marina to take the mast down the standard way. James had a clever idea to rig up a safety line from one bollard to another behind the boat so that when the rig accelerated down it would rest on that line. I would never have attempted this manouvere on a customers boat but it worked!

 Friday night we went racing Daniel didn’t come. We got stuck in the cove in no wind (for the first time in many years!) like we have seen many people do in the past and smugly we sailed around them. We were just behind Good and Plenty and tacked about 50 feet below their line as I saw the big boats coming up (we are in the same class as 40+ footers) and didn’t want to be in their lee. Well that was the end of that – two minutes into the race our fate was sealed and we sat in the confused air and no wind waiting to be put out of our misery. The crew decided drinking beers was the way to go and as I am a Perrin that doesn’t allow retiring when I am skipper we continued finishing last place a good 25 minutes behind first. However, James did get to fly the spinnaker which was good practice for him as he hasn’t done that much before and Delphine got her first sail in after coming back from India.

On Saturday Daniel and I did a doublehanded around the bay race. I helmed for the start and then decided the helm felt odd as it was loading one way than the other and the boat was sluggish so as I wasn’t enjoying it I handed it off to Daniel and crewed for the rest of the day. The kite went up and down a few times and we had a great run from Blackhaller to Southampton Shoals. We were short tacking up the city front with two other moores and were doing OK.  We passed them at Blackhaller as we had done a weather take down at Blossom so we just did a bear away set where as they had to do a gybe set. The downwind leg was a blast we were going pretty fast as their were some good gusts coming through. At one point Sunshine the other Moore was coming at us on starboard so we just gybed the main and Daniel did a great job helming with the pole on the same side as the boom until we cleared them and then gybed back inside of them aimed at Southampton. At Southampton we rounded a boat length behind Sunshine with JR the other Moore 3 boat lengths behind us. We had to let Sunshine in as they were on starboard coming into the mark and we were also worried with the antics of a cruising boat below us – we gave them a wide berth.

We lost an incredible 6 minutes to Sunshine on the beat up through Racoon Straits. I think it is down to rig tune and weight on the rail. We were giving them about 50lbs. Oh well. So Sunshine ended up 2nd corrected, JR 3rd and us 6th in class and 12th overall out of 77 boats that were entered. It was good having our own little match race going on with the other Moores and it was fun to out perform on boat handling but we are lacking in boat speed… now we need to fix that.

On Sunday I went with Gus and Delphine to the Mountain Play – The Wizard of Oz. It was a great event as usual. Maybe next year Henry will be old enough to go up there. It is fun to hike up to the amphitheatre and eat a picnic. As usual they had a fun added bonus – the dog playing Toto was cute and they had a plane fly overhead with a message from the evil witch to Dorothy.

Hope you had a great weekend.

After anticipating and getting ready for a 30 knot downwind flyer we instead had a long uphill light air slog which we finally retired from this morning into Santa Cruz. At the start we tested out the reefing and led both reefs just in case even though the lastest forecast was for it to lighten and become a beat but hopefully not till we were done. We also did 3 man overboard drills under sail with different drivers – lots of boats were staring at us…. I was all dressed up in my drysuit as the forcast looked like it was going to be a wet ride – I was all dressed up with no where to go!

Rob came from Idaho and helmed the start doing a great job (port tack at the pin) – that’s us way out front at the other end of the line red boat.

Chris drove up from Orange County and did jib trim. We did well in the fleet up to the North Tower and our first mistake of the race was to split the difference – some boats went Marin shore working their way against the flood (they did very badly). The main fleet worked the Mile Rock shore and did well. We did part Marin and then hit Mile Rock beach were there was early ebb hence the gain the fleet made on us. We were still however, up with the 40 footers although we couldn’t point like them and the wind was around 15 knots.

We turned left and there was no cracking off in fact the breeze just kept on backing and getting lighter. We were in with about 8 boats – White Dove, Phantom Mist, an Elan 40, Sapphire and quite a few others. Short tacking the shoreline seemed to be the way to go. Dinner of chilli and rice which was eaten out of the dog bowls but unfortunately we had made a tactical error and left the cutlery in the car – lids of coffee mugs work great as spoons! We turned on the nav lights as the sun went down and had to replace one of the bulbs (good thing we had extras). At 11pm Gus and I handed over to Rob and Chris. We had been short tacking to within .5 miles from the shoreline and only out as far as about 2 miles. It was very hard work as the instruments were playing up – every time you tacked you had to reset them. I know relying on instruments is not a great thing to do but with no moonlight and the swells pushing the boat into the wind making you think you were pinching they were a help.

6 miles before Pigeon Point we split tacks with the 40.7’s and went an extra .25 miles offshore of them before tacking back onto starboard. To our delight we killed them there was a right hand shift that lifted us to about 1/3 mile ahead of them from having been about 1/4 mile behind. However, the extra 7 feet of waterline paid off and despite tacking above their line we fell below White Dove and ended up in their lee with them passing within 1 1/2 boat lengths of us to weather. They were yelling out asking who we were. We tacked away to get out of their lee and stopped pretty dead with the swells on our nose it was a hard tack to steer. We ended up ducking hard around the starboard tack Elan probably could have made it but it was too close at night. The Synergy 1000 did not have nav lights showing which was very disconcerting and unsafe. It was really really cold out there last night.

When I went down the batteries were at 11.7 and I mentioned needing to charge sometime soon. What we didn’t know but I was nervous about as there are only two AGM’s onboard is that there are not seperate service and start batteries so when you are on 1 on the battery switch you are draining both batteries. Bad news for us when I woke up 2 hours later to hear the engine trying to start. The voltage was down to 9.7.We pulled out the tools and turns out there is no way of hand cranking the engine, we tried flicking the compression switches but nothing worked. So that was the end of electronics, lights etc. We turned everything off and pulled out the battery powered nav lights which we strapped to the stern and bow – good thing we had just bought those from Svends. Then it was handheld GPS and flashlights to look at the windex – oh what fun!! So when the sun came up everyone had got away it wasn’t safe to stay short tacking the shore without depth and an engine so we had to stay further out where it turned out there was a lot less wind (we found this out after talking to people who finished) – White Dove got in before 10am which was when we were pulling into Santa Cruz.

The owner Wayne woke me apparently Chris, Wayne and Rob were all chicken about coming down to Ãsk’ me about retiring. They made the decision to retire and then Chris and Rob told Wayne he had to come tell me! I told him it was his decision – he is the client if it was Rob or Chris I would have told them Perrin’s don’t retire and to stop being a weanie – but I don’t know Wayne well enough yet.

We decided to give the engine another go flipping the compression switches, pouring fresh boiling water over the batteries to warm them up etc. No good and we gave up not wanting to fry the starting motor. So we sailed into the fuel dock at Santa Cruz mis judging the momentum and falling a boat length short of the dock going sideways towards shore away from the dock. Quickly we unfurled the jib and backwinded it spun in the turning area and set ourselves up for a better landing. Quick boat clean up, plug the batteries in to charge, breakfast at Aldo’s, fill up the boat and delivery jerry’s with diesal, hook up the autopilot and we pushed Rob and Wayne off the dock to deliver up to Half Moon bay tonight and finish it off tomorrow. Meanwhile I drove home with Chris’s wife Julie (and the rest of the crew)who stayed the night in a hotel room in Monterey on her own waiting for us. You had to be there to think this is funny but it took 3 of us from the crew to get Gus’s boots off at my house and required the use of a screw driver – I will leave that to your imagination.

We learnt more about the boat and the job list got longer – batteries being on the top and the wiring of them.

Back home and now off to work tomorrow reinforcing stanchions on a J105.

Thanks to UK Sails for rush building us a bullet proof spinnaker which unfortunately we didn’t get to use.

Hope you have a good memorial day weekend!