Tuesday, April 26, 2011
The wind built to between 14 and 18 knots for the second day of racing. With two races scheduled it was going to be a physically tough day and our team aboard Hydrocarbon was going to be pushed hard!
The going was tough and the competition of a very high standard! After a great start in the first race of the Hydrocarbon struggled for boat speed a bit up wind and made a small tactical blunder which resulted in a late call for the bow team to swing the gear. We never really recovered from that and despite a sterling effort we were disappointed to only score a 7th place.
The 2nd race saw us slightly too eager for the start and Hydrocarbon was called back to start again after being OCS! Working really hard we were back into the race by the 1st windward mark but never really made a sufficient impression on the rest of the fleet to gain the vital places we were striving for. The good news was our down wind performance was blistering quick and the teamwork improved greatly throughout the day.
Scoring an 8th in race 3 was admittedly disappointing but the good news is that we were only five minutes behind the leader today (yesterday we were 12 minutes behind), we improved our upwind performance significantly on the final beat, the downwind performance was superb and most
importantly the team have learnt a huge amount and are really up for a great day of racing in the glorious sunshine today. The sailing conditions really do not get much better and there is no shortage of smiles in Antigua!
