Annapolis Race Week 2002

Labor Day weekend and what better place to be than at Annapolis Race Week!

I kind of talked Bonnie into sailing, as she was not planning to do the event. But I wanted to see her and wanted to go racing. I brought my friend Joe along to be our tactician, so she decided to go for it.

Joe and I arrived on Friday night and Bonnie picked us up at the airport. We took care of getting lunches for the next day and picked up the race kit and had some dinner and then to the boat.

Saturday morning, crew arrived and we headed out to the course. Had 2 great starts and some pretty decent crew work. In a fleet of 16 boats, we finished with 2 fifth places. We were pretty pleased with our results. The J30 fleet in Annapolis is extremely competitive and does not allow for any mistakes!

At the party tent, we ran into the usual suspects...some familiar faces, and some not. Always great to see the crews from the Tripp 26 fleet, as well as others we've raced with and against over the years.

Saturday night, while we were sleeping aboard, we were awakened by the wind and the rain. We just kept hoping it would settle down by morning but no such luck. Sunday morning we made the difficult decision not to go out, as it was blowing about 25kts. At about 10:30 it looked like it was going to settle down some and we were deciding to head out and try to make race 2, when we saw the Division 1 and 2 boats headed back to the dock. They said it was blowing 28 to 30 out there and they were all glad to be coming back in. We decided to stick to our earlier decision not to go out and were hoping and expecting to see our division also coming back in, but we only saw one J30 return to the dock. We headed over to the Boatyard Bar and Grill for brunch. The place was jammed with sailors who would have otherwise been out on the race course. Here is their collection of Mt. Gay hats...mine is more impressive, (See the "collection" page in my photo album section.) but they have a nicer display case!

Monday brought conditions more to our liking and we went out and had 2 more decent races...with finishes of 9th and 6th. We had 2 more very good starts and some good boat handling. Too bad the wind died out on us completely during the first race that day, we were up near the leaders and got caught in the wrong place when the wind quit...a few boats got ahead of us before the finish. Sometimes luck just isn't with us.

All in all it was a fun weekend and the races we did sail, we sailed well. If they had canceled our division on Saturday as they did the others, so that those 2 races did not count, we would have finished 4th for the regatta, but since we didn't sail Sunday we ended up 10th in class.