Today marked the first day of regatta races and our position was outside of Falmouth Harbour at “Rendezvous”. The committee boat mooring’s position had been changed from previous years and was much further away from shore than in previous years, which proved to be a big issue for us during the course of the day. The painter to the mooring ball was very long but with the team on board we managed to shorten the line and get us onto our catamaran’s bridle after some work. The wind direction was such that if we put the start line between us and the shore the boats would only have a short run into shore before having to tack so Steve opted to lay the start line on the seaward side – but we hadn’t accounted for the drop off in depth and our start line drifted 4 times during the course of the day and we had to break off the race sequence (putting up the “AP” flag each time), reset the marker buoy, and restart our sequences each time; this was confusing for many of the competitors and caused some dissent amongst the boats but in the end we managed to get every boat off on the one race of the day. The seas were a bit lumpy at anchor but the Catana committee boat proved to be more stable than it’s predecessors so all was not lost.
Prize giving ceremonies over for the day, I walked around the docks for a bit before heading back to the boat and having my thawed brisket dinner and reading in the cockpit for a short while before falling into exhausted sleep.
