The main Heineken Regatta event began today, with winds still in the high 20’s and a significant swell at sea the conditions will make for some spirited sailing for all of the classes. Sunsail had required that at least one reef be put in the mainsails and the contestants that we started adhered to that, although in one class on the other start boat they skippers had agreed that they wouldn’t fly any spinnakers that day but once they went on their downwind runs we saw the chutes pop out after all.
During set up we had some issues with the horn system that Paul Miller had set up for us. He used a simple relay to keep the high current used to blow the horn from the very long line leading to the button, but during dismantling of the horn the day before one of us had pulled all the plugs off the relay rather than just the battery and horn connectors. We sat down with a multimeter to re-connect it but I couldn’t see a way to do this (it turns out that a pigtail connector was in the hidden) so we called Paul and he had a backup unit shipped out to us. The first boat with “RC” that approached us didn’t use the fenders that we’d put out and threw something in a bag that got caught by the wind and went into the water. Mark quickly got his dinghy going and picked it up – but it ended up being two (waterlogged and very recently expired) cell phones. Leo was not happy at losing his cherished push-button phone! We still cannot understand why that boat didn’t just come alongside to the fenders we had set up and merely handed over the item. Several minutes later a large water taxi service tender came up and used that system to successfully hand over the new relay assembly for the horn. Although we put it together in a hurry and tested it, the day’s starts were done with a backup handheld horn for some reason.
My task for the day was to assist Nancy with identifying starting boats and those who might be over the line during the start sequence. So, armed with my binoculars, I spent a lot of time identifying starting numbers and we did an acceptable job. There were often fewer competitors on the line than in the sign up sheet, so we did spend some time looking for boat numbers that were in actuality not present. Nevertheless the Committee Boat “B” made it through the day with few problems and returned to the anchorage, via a short detour around the gorgeous Stad Amsterdam at anchor, for a relatively early end to the day.
Since we were all quite busy during the start sequences for the races there aren’t too many action pictures so I’ll make it up by posting more non-action ones.
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |