Today was our first day as both start and finish boat and we had a difficult start. At first we made good progress and started laying our lines, but then our pin boat managed to get the line caught in their prop while streaming the mark behind them. The three of them couldn’t quite untangle it from aboard the boat and they weren’t going to go swimming. I couldn’t swim across since there was nobody else to drive our boat and then “Elvis” came to the rescue – they saw our predicament and one of the crew members jumped into the water with a mask and within a minute had the line untangled. Elvis slowed down to pick up their crew and were soon gone, and our pin boat started streaming again and we laid that mark. Unfortunately, when laying the next mark the pin boat managed to get the prop fouled yet again but this time they were able to clear it themselves. By this time we had all of the beach cats hovering around us in anticipation of a start but we weren’t quite finished and had to delay the starts. When we finally got into sequence we thought we’d had things worked out but ended up doing a general recall on the first race. After that it got better and the beach cats seemed to have fun on their very competitive and fast boats. One dismasting and another retired due to sail problems later the day was done for us.
Phaedo 3 was seen in the distance and I barely had time to get my camera out from below decks when one of the hulls seemed to fly right over me and it felt like I was pointing the camera straight up to catch the two crew members leaning out!
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