Life on the Alameda Estuary

Great Success.

2011-03-30T21:26:00.000-07:00

Okay, a quick rundown of our victory in the Oakland Yacht Club Sunday Brunch Series.

The OYC Sunday Brunch series is a five race series run on the first and third Sundays of January and February, and the first Sunday of March. Sadly Gonzo was still not ready for the first race as the mast was still down from when I dropped it on my foot in November. This, as discussed previously, had left me with a ruptured Achilles Tendon and so out of action for a while.

So, after doing what I should have done to start with, which was pay Glen Hansen of Hansen Rigging to fix the rig, we did make it out for the last four races. We did have Glen make one major change and that was to put the roller furler back on the boat. The OYC gives us a three second credit for using the furler, which I figure we get back in the ease of use that the furler gives us. That and the old J-24 headsail that we were using was such a piece of junk that I don't think we gained anything from it. We had also gotten an additional 3 second credit from the local PHRF committee over the winter, which meant that we had gone from rating 186 to 192.

The new and improved Gonzo.

I drove the first race, sailing with Jeff, Sid, and RT and it was obvious right out the start that whatever Glen had done to the rig had made a huge difference. The boat felt great and we actually sailed away from most of our fleet upwind. When the wind came up I could actually use the backstay to de-power things, something that had never really happened before. Anyway we kept in touch with the leading 30 footer for most of the race, eventually passing him when he had a bad drop at the final rounding and ended up hitting the day marker. So we won the first race boat for boat as the slowest rated boat.

The second race I drove again as my foot/ankle was still really not up for me doing anything else. This race was on Super Bowl Sunday and I don't remember a lot of the details about this one. It may have just been Jeff, Sid and I and I know that once again we were the first boat to finish and easily won our division.

and this is the good ankle...

The third race Jeff drove, Sid showed up late and very hungover, and RT sailed with a separated shoulder. I did bow and the ankle felt fine and once again we sailed to victory and a four point lead going into the last race of the series. I seem to remember diving the boat before the race and it being very, very cold.

So, going into the last race we had to finish less than four places behind Zeehund and we would win no matter what. Jennifer joined Jeff, RT, Sid, and I and it was Sid's turn to drive. The wind was from the south for the first time in the series but they sent us on the same course direction as usual. This meant a downwind start and a spinnaker run out of the Estuary. Sid, with Jeff on the bow, and with us using a real watch for the first time ever, got us a good start with the kite up and pulling right before the gun went off, sadly what this did was put us directly in front of a fleet of 6 or 7 masthead 30 footers that created a wind shadow across the Estuary behind us. We soon where overhauled by the fleet and where actually in last place with Zeehund sailing away from us at the front of the fleet.

After a few harsh words, and an ill considered gybe that took us even further off the course we made it to the top mark around the corner at Jack London Square. Apparently there was some confusion in our fleet as to whether the course was to be sailed in reverse or not? The course, as I said was pretty much the same course that we usually sail, only the wind direction was backwards. This led to some of the boats approaching the mark the wrong way. This was the break we had been looking for. We managed to get around the mark cleanly, our boat handling always allows us much faster rounding's than our competitors, and sailed off up the course in second place.

Second in the last race gave us three firsts and a second for the series, easily enough for the series win. We were also the lowest scoring boat in any of the divisions giving us the overall trophy (if one existed). Needless to say, there was much rejoicing.

Broken, but getting better...

2011-02-24T08:46:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the long time of no posts, couple of reasons for this, but truth be told I just haven't been doing enough to write about. The main reason for this is that I ruptured my Achilles Tendon in November. The how and the why are really not that important. Something about middle age and miscommunication, let's just leave it at that. I was thinking that I could write about the trials and tribulations of recovering from this, but it has already been done by someone else here. The only difference is that I elected not to have surgery and thus spent seven or so weeks in a series of casts before going to the boot and then into Physical Therapy. At this point I am still using a cane to get around, but I am back at the Doyle Loft and starting next week I am down to once a week Therapy sessions.

Still life did go on during my down time, Although I missed about two and half months away from work I did get up to some things. Dina and I did a holiday road trip down the coast with stops in Pismo Beach, Santa Barbara, and San Diego which included a pretty good new years with our friends Todd and Virginia on their boat down in San Diego. We have also made it to a few concerts along the way, including my new favorite band Gogol Bordello, as well as Social Distortion, and just this last Monday Prince at the Oakland Coliseum.

I have even managed to get a little sailing in here and there, although for the most part it has me playing the part of passenger rather than active participant. Having said that the day before I buggered my ankle I did the Regatta PRO mid-winters out on the bay with Jeff Thorpe and a couple of others on the J-105 Roxanne, this was the first J-105 racing I have done since the boats where brand new and I have to say it was a lot of fun. Going out and winning both races didn't hurt, but it was very enjoyable day of light air mid-winter one-design racing.

I also managed to do two of the Golden Gate mid-winters, one on the Ocelot, and one with Steve on the Cal 40 Shaman. On Shaman I was planning on just sitting on the back and shooting some video, but they decided to make me the tactician instead, something I have never really done before. Let's just say that as a tactician I got a few things right, and few things wrong and leave it at that.

The big sailing news is that we have Gonzo back on the water as a racing sailboat again. I had originally ruptured my Achilles when we were dropping the mast to replace the standing rigging. As a result the mast was down for a couple of months before we finally got the boat over to Glen Hansen at Hansen Rigging. Glen got the standing rigging replaced, the rig back up and more importantly got the rig set up in such a way as that Gonzo has never been faster. We have been doing the Oakland Yacht Club Sunday Brunch series and with one race to go we lead our division by four or five points, not bad especially considering that we missed the first race.

I have an appointment with my Physical Therapist so I will add a few pictures later, also I hope to do some changes to the blog layout soon, as well as a full write up of the Sunday Brunch Series...

2010 Big Boat Series

2010-09-22T21:30:00.000-07:00

Last week I hit a couple of big milestones as far as sailing goes, I hit 25 years as a sailmaker, and did my fourteenth Big Boat Series here on the bay.

I always have mixed feelings about the Big Boat Series, it can be a cool event, but it can also be a nightmare if you do it on the wrong boat, or with the wrong crew. I have long passed the point where I "have" to do the Big Boat Series, partly because as a sailmaker the buildup to the Series can be such a shit fight that by the time the racing starts you can be so shattered that you just don't care anymore.

This year I did the series on the J-125 Double Trouble, which interestingly enough was the same J-125 that I did the series on in 2000, only then it was called Javelin. My buddy Patrick had asked me if I wanted to sail and knowing the level that he and the boat usually sail at it was a no brainer to accept.

The J-125 Double Trouble

Having said that a little bit of doubt began to creep in when our first "practice" consisted of just four of us going out on the boat to look at some sails and to check over the new hardware that had just been installed, this was followed by our second practice being canceled, with me then being unable to make the third practice because of my usual Wednesday night Estuary race. Another issue turned out to be the division that we ended up in. The division had been advertised as a "Lightweight IRC Sportboat" division consisting only of lightweight production boats that usually do not do well under the IRC rule. However included in this division was a newer custom built IRC race boat that had been specifically built with the IRC rule in mind. By putting this boat, Wasabi, in our division the race committee basically guaranteed that they would win every race.

As it turned my concerns about the lack of practice turned out to be unfounded. Patrick and Andy, the owner, had put together an awesome team that I have to say came together right from the very start. In fact I have to say it was a fun and cohesive a group that I have sailed with in a long time. I would sail with Andy C, Patrick, Bubba, Simon, Andy G, Mark, Tom, Gilles, Jodi, and Gina anytime. My concerns about Wasabi being in our division however were well founded as they did in fact go on to win every race of the series. That is however something that you can read about here...

Andy C and Bubba

The racing itself was a lot of fun. I ended up doing pit on the boat, which was something new for me. On the 125 the checkstays go to the cabin top winches so in addition to all of the usual halyard raising and lowering stuff we pit people, Gina and I, also had to deal with the runners as well as the pole and tack line stuff. The top mark rounding where a lot of fun as I would come off the rail, ease off the runner, then pull out the pole, when the pole was made Gina would pull out the tack line, then I would tail the spinnaker halyard on the hoist as Gina dropped the jib halyard, then we let off the outhaul and cunningham lines, flake the kite halyard and then I would turn around and grind downwind while Gina would tail the stays'l halyard.

My Chuck Taylors, still the best sailing shoes

At the bottom mark Gina would drop the stays'l halyard and I would try to remember to tighten up the outhaul and cunningham before tailing the jib halyard to the pre-set mark, Gina would then go down below to help gather the spinnaker. On the drop I would let the tack line off, watch Gilles and Tom on the bow gather the foot of the sail, once the foot was under control it was blow the spin halyard, making sure not to drop it too fast or too slow, and while doing this let the pole outhaul off and use the off side tack line to pull the pole in. Once this was done it was find the runner tail and get that on to the winch and grind that on as we rounded the mark. Then once we got going upwind try to find the right time to flake the jib halyard while sitting on the rail.

Patrick with his thinking cap on

We had one other J-125 to race against in our division. A boat called August Ice that had come down from Lake Tahoe. Due to some very minor differences between the boats they actually owed us a little bit of time on handicap, but for all intensive purpose's we were racing them boat for boat. What this led to was situation where August Ice would actually cross the line ahead of us, but sometimes we would beat them on corrected time. In the end I think they beat us boat for boat in five of the seven races, but we corrected out on them just enough to beat them in most of those races. What this did was lead to a last race showdown that had us in second with a two and a half point lead. Unfortunately for us however we hit the last bottom mark of race with a trailing spinnaker sheet and due to some confusion as to our options about taking a penalty we ended up dropping out of the race handing August Ice a very well deserved second place and dropping our selves into third.

Truth be told however August Ice beat us fair and square even before we dropped out of the last race. As I said they beat us boat for boat in more races and that was what really counts. Those guys sailed the boat really well, especially the last two days of the series when the winds got lighter. Their tactician, Seadon, did a nice job of always having them in the right place and I never saw them make a boat handling mistake the whole regatta. They deserved to win our division, and with Wasabi had been in its' correct division instead of ours they would have .

Let's try this again...

2010-08-23T20:52:00.000-07:00

It would be crazy to say that this is the first time that I have had to sit down and blog in a while, but it is almost true. In the last month I have been to Santa Barbara twice, once to do the Santa Barbara-King Harbor race, and once to see Billy Idol! And in between those two trips we have been to Chicago for the Lollapalooza concerts and a little site seeing.

Racing City Lights in the Santa Barbara-King Harbor race

We have also this summer moved off the boat, after spending a bunch of time and money cleaning it up and have moved it to Richard Boland Yachts where we hope it sells in some kind of reasonable time frame. You can check out the listing here...

Hey! Where did the Lobster Telephone go?

I also have quit working for Glacier Bay and have gone back to work at the Doyle loft. The move back to the Doyle loft has been kind of bittersweet. While I love making sails, and am pretty good at it at this point, in some ways it is a backwards step, especially financially. If I could figure a way out to make money making sails I would probably do it for the rest of my life, as it is, I really do need to start making some real money one day.

Ajax helping me with some spinnaker graphics

Throw in the usual Wednesday and Friday night races, plus some other random sailing, the second season opener on Twisted, a Richmond yacht club fun race on Raven, where does the time go?

Speaking of the Wednesday and Friday nights it just hasn't come together like it did last year. Losing Cameron really hurt us, both in our level of sailing, but even more so in the fun factor. Jeff of course is great to sail with, but both of us miss having that third person around to push us over the edge. Two years ago it was Steve, last year it was Cameron, this year... Let's just say that we are still looking.

Cameron, we miss you buddy.

Another thing that has been going on lately is death. Within the span of a month I lost both my grandfather (mothers side) and my Grandmother (fathers side). I had seen them both on my last trip back to England in March and while both where in their late eighties/early nineties and had begun to show real signs of slowing down, it was a little shocking to lose them both so suddenly. I will miss them both a great deal. My grandmother for being the great character that she was who did it her way and dammed what you thought about it, and my grandfather who as one of my cousins said, was the best man he knew.

James Ashley R.I.P.

On the plus side we are still living in this magnificent house that Jeff described as a "mini Hearst Castle" and that is working out really well for us. Last night and tonight have been really warm out and I have been taking advantage of it by basically living outside on the back patio the whole time. Even Ajax and Frida just hang out outside the weather has been so nice.

Not a mini Hearst Castle

Anyway, not much of a post, but I promise I will be writing more here soon.

Into the new...

2010-05-29T08:41:00.000-07:00

So, this will be the first post from the new digs, we are officially off the boat and into the new place. I am actually sitting in my bathrobe in the back yard overlooking the Bay, big mug of coffee in hand, Ajax frolicking in the garden, and playing around on the laptop. All in all you could say that I am transitioning to the life of a landlubber just fine.

Ajax basking on the hot tub.

We moved up here last weekend, but because of work I really haven't had a chance to sit down and relax much up here yet. We had a lot on last week at the loft with the Spinnaker Cup on Thursday, and the three day weekend after that. It all added up to the probably the most hours I have worked in a single week since my America's Cup days almost a decade ago (holy shit, was it that long ago?)

Still we did manage to squeeze in a Wednesday night race on the Gonzo, which saw us return to form, if not in the standings, we got third, but at least with our on the water attitude and interactions with our competitors. We also had a ring side seat to the very hard grounding of the One-Design 35 Dark n' Stormy inside the restricted zone off of Coast Guard Island. Luckily no one was hurt, but it sure was scary to watch.

Other than that not a lot going on, Ajax is adjusting nicely to the new place and enjoys going to the loft with me a couple of days a week. His schedule with his trainers got changed around a little so now he is walking with a whole new pack of dogs and seems to be doing well with it. Frida is struggling with the move a little, but no doubt she will adjust as cats do.

This weekend we will get the last of our stuff off of the Lobster T, maybe have a couple of folks over for a Bar-B-Q tomorrow, and maybe a short sale on Gonzo on Monday. Should be a nice relaxing three day weekend.

Ride down the coast pictorial.

2010-05-18T19:46:00.000-07:00

If a picture is worth thousand words, then I am about to save myself a lot of typing. Here are some of the pictures I took of our delivery of the Santa Cruz 52 City lights from Alameda to Santa Barbara last weekend.

Leaving the dock at Marina Village.

Passing under the Golden Gate Bridge.

Bob and Bones keeping the bean bag chairs from blowing away.

Tom on the wheel.

At the dock in Monterey, the barricades are to keep the seal lions off the dock.

The restaurant we spent the night under, note all the Sea Lions on the dock.

There was a lot of blood on the docks in Monterey, fish I assume.

Sailing by the numbers at night.

David bundled up from the early morning chill.

Letting the auto-pilot do it's thing.

Lot's of oil seeping into the water in the Santa Barbara channel

The sun finally comes out, virtually in sight of the harbor.

Bones, Dominic, David, David, Bob, Hawk, and Tom. Joined by Archie on our safe arrival in Santa Barbara.

For the drive back we got an un-marked police car.

The drive back up 101.

Not dead yet...

2010-05-08T09:17:00.000-07:00

Well, it's what May 8th and I am able to sit down for practically the first time since February 16th and maybe try to bring this thing back to life. So, where have I been, what's my excuse? How come so long between posts? Simple really, I have a real job (kind of, more on that later) and that is taking up a lot of my time. Plus, as we shall see, there is a lot of other stuff going on these days.

Last night I returned from Deltaville, Virginia. Not was only this the 2nd time I have been out there in the last month, it was the second time I had flown across country in the last week. So far this year I have done about 25 flights. I have flown across country four times, to Europe once, and to Asia once. The near future may involve trips to Wisconsin, Malaysia, and Australia. Also there is definitely a trip to Chicago in the works.

Having said that, not all of these trips have been work related. The trip to Europe was to see family and attend my grandfathers 90th birthday celebration, a trip to Florida was a straight up vacation down the Florida keys, and the trip to Michigan earlier this week was to see Dina's sister in-law graduate from the University of Michigan and to see President Obama do the commencement speech.

As to the important stuff we won the Oakland Yacht Club Sunday brunch series on Gonzo with three firsts, a second, and a third. Also we are now fully into the spring beer can season on the Estuary. We are entered in the Oakland Wednesday night series, and the Encinal and Island yacht club Friday night series'. Actually Dina has been taking Gonzo out with her girlfriends for the Encinal series and has actually had the best results of any of us so far with a second and third.

Sadly though we have lost Cameron from the Gonzo crew as he has moved back east to a new job. It's too bad really as he was a big part of the fun and success that we had last year. No doubt we will survive, but it just isn't quite the same without him.

Good luck Cameron, you will be missed

One big thing that is also happening is that we are moving off of the Lobster Telephone. The fact that I got three plus years out of Dina on this boat is frankly the best I could have hoped for. But, the lure of things like closet space and a real kitchen have been calling her like a Siren for a while now, so alas we will be moving off of and putting the LT up for sale here in the near future. I wonder if this means that I should change the name of this blog?

House for sale

As for me and work I have kind of relegated myself to a part time position at Glacier Bay, basically working on call from home for them, and have returned to the sail loft to work as much as I can within the confines of the Glacier Bay job. It's a little cumbersome at the moment, but it will work itself out as we move forward I'm sure.

Ajax above the Carquinez Straits

As for you Ajax fans you will be happy to hear that he has grown up quite a lot and seems to have mellowed out considerably. He is still only two and not a lot smarter, but has lost a lot of that puppy craziness and energy. Also on the plus side he hasn't eaten a remote or a pair of sunglasses in a few months now.

Lot's of stuff happening in the near future, sailing and otherwise, and I will update as I can.

Oakland YC Sunday brunch

2010-02-16T21:24:00.000-08:00

So, we have done three of the five OYC sunday brunch series races. The first one was a pretty light reach fest in which we got our usual stellar start only to just get run down by the larger boats in our division. Cameron drove the race and did a good job with the down wind start and holding off the bad guys for a pretty long time. We finished an honorable third in a race that was very much not our conditions.

One thing that has changed this year is that we have RT sailing with Jeff, Cameron, and I. RT may not be a long time sailor like us, but he is learning the ropes and has the right attitude in regards to beer and disdain for our competitors. RT will drive a race before the end of the season whether he is ready or not.

I missed the second race of the series as I was just flying in from Malaysia at about the start gun. Steve flew up from L.A. to sail with Jeff, RT and Cameron and apparently acquitted himself well as they led the race from start to finish for team Gonzo's first win of the year. The highlight was starting from out of the fairway of the marina for the the reverse start while the rest of the fleet bunched up at the pin. from what I was told it was pretty much over from that point on.

The third race was the kind of race that I always claimed that we should win if we ever had to sail in those conditions. A light air westerly that made it so you had to tack and gybe in the Estuary. Not the usual reaches that we have been having for a while now. Throw in the fact that the OYC selected a course that had three laps in it, so boat handling became important as well. It seemed that we should be able to sail the kind of race that we had always claimed we she win for once.

As it was we caught a bad shift right at the start and ended up being pretty late crossing the line. Add in the fact that we got fouled by the guy who looks like Spock and where forced to tack and things didn't look to good at first. For most of the first beat we tended to get ping ponged around by the other boats in our start and never really got in phase. Jeff, who was driving, did a good job though and once we finally got by a couple of boats and got into phase with the shifts at the top of the beat it all started to come good.

With three sets and drops to do our boat handling really helped set us up against the bad guys. With RT working the pit, Cameron trimming, and me working the bow we easily put time on the bad guys at every mark rounding to eventually overtake all of them to take the gun.

So, we are now solidly in first place with three of the five races finished. Next week we will be racing with a new headsail which is actually a used J-24 genoa as I have finally gotten around to getting a wire headstay on the boat. This means that we are actually going to be racing with a real full sized headsail for the first time on Sunday. it should be interesting to see how we do with it.

I don't have lot of pictures but here is a link to the OYC racing pages that has a series of pictures of us in them. Plus you can see the results here.

I hate people...

2010-02-04T20:58:00.000-08:00

I was going to write about one of the trips that I have taken in the last couple of weeks. One to Malaysia for work, and another to the Florida Keys with Dina for a vacation. But instead I am going to write about some fucked up douche bag who has caused me great pain and anguish.

We got back from Florida late Tuesday evening and pretty much went to bed right away.

Wednesday morning I left the house as usual to head off to work. I have been leaving a cover on the Miata as the rear window leaks and as I got out to the car I noticed a small tear in the cover. While pretty disappointed in the fact that a cover we had got less than a month ago had a tear in it I figured in the great scheme of things it was no big deal. Besides A six inch tear in a cover is something that I can fix pretty easily.

Just a small tear

I drove to work as normal and settled back into the routine that is me at Glacier Bay. When I came out at lunch however I noticed that the right front fender of the Miata had been dented. AAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!

Dented fender

I guess some pencil dick must have hit my car while we were away on vacation. Worse than that I have a sneaking feeling that whoever hit it might not have even noticed that they did it. The crease is along the top of the fender, made by something much taller and bigger than the Miata. Covered up as it was by the cover they may not have even noticed that they hit it.

Die fucker die...

Either way Whoever hit it didn't leave a note or anything, so I have no way of knowing who did it. I may leave a note at the gatehouse at the top of the ramp, but I seriously doubt anybody will come forward. My best hope is that they see the note and become so overwhelmed by guilt that they take their own life in some particularly painful way...

Either way fuck em...

First race of 2010

2010-01-05T21:26:00.000-08:00

I was hoping to post a story about our first race of 2010, complete with tales of utter and complete domination over worthy, yet ultimately doomed, competition along with a bunch of video edited on my snazzy new laptop...

Sadly when I went to load up the camera on my way out the door it didn't want to work. Something about a "dew alert", no doubt caused by the damp conditions here on the Lobster T. This was kind of a bummer as the first part of the race might have actually been somewhat interesting to film.

Team Gonzo showing excellent early season form right out of the start.

RT joined Jeff, Cameron and I for the race which was a pretty light air affair. The race itself followed the usual pattern of us winning the start, but then getting rolled by the bigger boats as it turned into a light air reach. We ended up third after leading most of the first beat, and a lot of the run. The Race Committee shortened the race after one lap, which was probably the right call as the next boat behind us finished way way back.

A random sunset shot taken from the Lobster T at the pump out.

Still it was good to be back racing on the on the Gonzo. We may enter the Island Yacht Club series as well even though we have already missed the first couple of races. Just getting out back out is a good enough reason for me.

Early morning fog here at Marina Village.

In other news we have had a few pretty cool mornings of dense fog here on the Estuary. One morning you couldn't see 50ft down here on the water, but as soon as you went a couple of hundred feet inland it was bright and sunny. It's good fun to walk the dog in that stuff, although I don't know why.

Tony, Krysia, and Jessica on the Farr 40 on Christmas eve.

Another cool thing going on down here in the marina these days is that we are getting a lot of either Seals or Sea Lions around. I first noticed a bunch of them on Christmas Eve when I went for a quick sail on the Farr 40 with Tony and his daughters. There was a group of about four out that day, which is a lot this far down the Estuary. Ever since then though there has been a rash of these sea critters here in the marine. They swim in between the boats and the docks here, presumably looking for whatever it is they eat. We actually saw one jump most of the way out of the water just off the stern of Gonzo the other day. That really got Ajax excited...

Where you been?

2009-12-29T13:33:00.000-08:00

Ok, a quick end of the year explanation and a promise to get back to this blog thing soon enough.

As I said in the previous post I have gotten a new job. This has taken pretty much all of my computer time away. Seeing as I sit in front of one, actually two, all day the last thing that I want to do when I get home is sit in font of the computer and write more stuff.

Throw in the fact that I haven't been sailing much since the last Estuary race and that all I have to write about is work, things in blog ville just kind of tapered off.

Still, the first Sunday Brunch race is next Sunday, I have a new laptop that will allow me to edit the video's that I will be taking, and that I feel the need to babble inanely on the Internet again. All adds up to getting this thing up and running again soon.

I promise

really.

Long time gone...

2009-11-22T19:42:00.000-08:00

Well, it's been a while, but damn a lot has been going on lately, hopefully I will be able to remember some of it.

I guess the big news is the new job... That's right after 25 years of being a sailmaker I have moved on to other things. I am working for an outfit called Glacier Bay Inc. out of Union City. I will try to explain what it is that I do there later, but the job involves some travel, with some of that being international. Indeed I have already done my first trip, to Fort Meyers, Florida for them.

What else has been going on? Firstly the new car, the Miata, is way fun. Sure it feels like a World War 1 Sopwith Camel sometimes, noisy, windy, with lots of rattling through the fabric type of stuff. When I first got the thing I was kind of surprised at how harsh the ride was. It turns out that the thing came with adjustable shocks that had been set to the firmest ride setting. A turn on the stiffness adjusting screw, down to five from nine, has smoothed things out considerably though.

The engine on the thing is great fun. I had heard of the phrase loves to rev before, but never really got it till I drove this thing. One thing that is funny though is that the car as fun as it is, is really not that fast. I come out of a series of turns or a freeway merge or something, having just run the thing through the gears and having a go at the twisty bits, but then you look in the rear view mirror and the lady talking on the cell phone in her SUV is staying right with you with out even trying. Still I am having more fun than she is, as well as paying more attention to my driving, so fuck her...

I have been sailing a couple of times recently. Once on the Farr 40 for the Great Pumpkin regatta. I did bow for three short races on the Berkeley Circle and even though it wasn't that windy I still got pretty beat up. I think we ended up fourth on the day, and I only managed to screw up one set out of the eight we did and even that one didn't hurt us that much. The other sail was taking out Gonzo with a couple of my new co-workers for a day sail out to the mouth of the Estuary and then back home. That was a pretty good day out, nice and mellow.

Ok, hopefully I will get back onto this blog thing on a more regular basis now. Next I think I might write about my trip to Fort Meyers. A great place if you want to feel young, like to drive slow, and eat in chain restaurants.

Out with the new, in with the old.

2009-10-19T07:54:00.000-07:00

When I get woken up by the sound of jets flying over the boat I know it either is raining, or is about to rain. So, yes this morning it is raining. Rain isn't that big of a deal to most folks, but living on a boat it can be a pain sometimes. The way our marina is laid out with a single entrance gate means that we are as far away from the gate at the end of C dock as you can get. This always means a long walk to the parking lot whatever the weather. Later on, once winter hits for real, we will have ice on the docks in the morning, something which is fun to look at, but not real fun.

Coming soon, Ice on the docks.

Another reason that rain has become more of an issue that usual is that I have gotten a new car. A 1992 Mazda Miata convertible. We picked it up on the cheap from a friend of Dina's who no longer needed it. Something about a baby... I have to say the thing is just plain fun to drive. It handles like a go kart, and the engine really likes to be pushed around. There are fewer things more satisfying than coming around a corner, dropping down a gear and nailing it. The thing goes like it's on rails and just takes off.

My New Wheels

It does need some work, most notably a new top, hence the issues with rain. I got the present top pretty well taped up with sail repair tape over the weekend, but a new top is in our future. New tops for Miata's seem to be relatively cheap and available on E-bay and the like, and seem pretty straightforward to replace. Hopefully I will get this done in the next couple of weeks. I also need to go through it and redo the shocks and some suspension pieces. Once again parts are cheap and it doesn't look that hard to do.

New Wheels

The car itself is tiny, just getting into it can be a pain sometimes. It's also a little daunting to be sitting at a light or stop sign and be looking up at a Toyota Prius and thinking Damn, that's a big car. On the freeway with a SUV following you the car feels really small really fast especially at night with the SUV's headlights at about your eye level. That part is going to take some adjustment.

Element at the dog park

Sadly this means that we are going to sell our Honda Element. I have to say that I am really going to miss the Element. Dina bought it new about six years ago and we have never had a problem with it ever. The thing drives really well and has been probably the most useful car I have ever driven. I will admit to having doubts about the Element at first, but it has won me over by just being a really good car.

I will miss this car

The hardest part about selling the Element is dealing with the people who answer the ad on Craigslist. Some of the stuff you get is just an outright scam, some are just rude, most are just clueless idiots. I think I answered about ten emails before I have dealt with a normal person. We shall see what happens, maybe I will do a post about dealing with "buyers" on Craiglist. Trust me there are some stories there.

Batten down the hatches

2009-10-13T07:58:00.000-07:00

It's the first big winter storm of the season right now, and weather, as Dina says, is so much more 3D when you are on a boat.

For one thing the boat moves around, a lot. Right now we have eight dock lines to keep us snug, but we still move quite a bit. Also since the boat is basically glass and fiberglass the rain can be a lot noisier than if you live in a house. To be honest for the most part these storms don't bother me, but Dina really struggles with them. The dog and the cat seem ambivalent as they do about most things. I find sleeping in the aft cabin to be the most comfortable, you almost find yourself being rocked to sleep back there. The forward cabin gets the most motion, but even up there it isn't that bad.

Sunday I spent a bunch of time going around the boat getting it ready for the storm. I fixed a bunch of snaps on the top, tied up the post that supports the top, cleaned and re-sealed the front hatch, and tried to re-seal the main cabin windows. So far most of what I did seems to be holding up. We still have a leak in the main cabin, but it is right into the sink, so I can live with that for now.

Actually Sunday saw a lot of folks down here in the marina getting there boats ready. It was good to see so many people take the threat of a bad storm seriously and get down here to get there boats ready. As always I am sure that a couple of boats will have problems, broken dock lines, or a furler that comes undone, but it shouldn't be to bad. Another thing is the staff here at the marina do a real good job of keeping an eye on things. I noticed that all of the dock boxes had been checked and wire ties put in the ones that didn't have locks to prevent them form flipping open.

The hard part of course is the fact that we live as far away from the parking lot as you can get. This means a long walk down the docks, with a dog that really doesn't understand rain. He wants to shake every time he gets a drop of water on him. This really doesn't work in these big southern storms that pack a lot of moisture, and as a result the walk always takes longer than it should. On the bright side it never really gets that cold during these storms.

This storm is supposed to be a big one, so we shall see tomorrow how we came out of it...

I still can't hear shit...

2009-10-07T08:08:00.000-07:00

Because Monday is usually the quietest night of the week I decided to mix things up a little and do something about that. In a kind of last minute call, I bought the tickets on Sunday, and as a result Sylvia and I went to see Motorhead on Monday night.

Not a bad line up for a Monday night

Motorhead has always been a guilty pleasure. Loud, crude, but never half-assed, just the way rock and roll is supposed to be. For years I have always wanted to see them, but never did. So, when a guy I run into at the dog park asked me if I was going, probably because he saw my Motorhead T-shirt, I knew it was time. I tried to get Dina to go, and she agreed just long enough for me to get her a ticket, but she wimped out in the end. Still Sylvia, of the big red boat, was game so off we went.

The opening act was Nashville Pussy, a band I admit I knew nothing about. They turned out to be a couple of good ole boy rednecks, and two pretty hot chicks. The singer reminded me of an old friend of mine, Tony. Short, round, long red hair, and pretty fucking funny. The chicks in the band played bass and lead guitar. With song titles like, Drinking and driving while angry and The land of hate and whiskey, this was strait up southern hard rock. Kind of like Molly Hatchet meets Heart only better! I liked them...

Nashville Pussy

Next up was The Reverend Horton Heat, a Texas rockabilly trio. Once again I knew very little going in but these guys impressed. They did some roots rock inspired stuff that reminded me of Mike Ness', of Social Distortion, solo stuff, but they also did some psycho-billy stuff that was pretty cool. They played a solid set with a stand up bass, an electric-acoustic guitar, and drums. Good stuff.

The Reverend Horton Heat

Motorhead came on right at ten pm, Lemmy and the band walked out on stage, Lemmy says "We are Motorhead, We play rock and roll" and they did. At a very LOUD volume for the next two hours. I don't know all of Motorhead's songs, but they played most of the ones I did. It was great to watch a gig played by a group who obviously enjoyed playing and doing what they are doing. I think the three of them have been playing together for something like 25 years and the rapport on stage they had with each other it was obvious. Just in the way that Lemmy and guitarist Phil Campbell talked to the crowed and to each other you could tell. I especially liked the part when Lemmy told the crowd that this was the best crowd that Motorhead had ever had in Northern California.

Sylvia and I managed to scam a couple of great spots to watch the show right on the edge of the walkway down to the stage and thus had a great view of the whole stage. As we were also on the first rise above the floor, we also got a great view of the mosh pit in front of the stage. We saw some big guys, get pretty roughed up, but we also saw some girls in the pit holding their own. This was a great gig for people watching thats for sure.

Motorhead goes acoustic

I have to say that with the exception of the volume it was probably one of the best shows that I have ever seen. Mikee D the drummer, just back from a stint on the Swedish version of "Get me out of here I'm a celebrity" is just plain awesome. With long blonde hair, this guy looks, and plays, like a rock and roll drummer should.

Mikee D Drum solo

Motorhead though is of course all about Lemmy, the bass player, and vocalist. Lemmy does have a presence on stage which is hard to explain. Tall, dressed in black, and with an iron cross necklace Lemmy projects rock and roll in way that is hard to explain. Sure his voice is not what you would call great, but hey the guy is 64 and is up there doing it better than most.

Lemmy

All in all one of the best shows I have been to. Only complaint is that I didn't have earplugs, my ears are still ringing now 48 hours after the show... Not good.

Thank you, Good night

Puppy update

2009-10-05T07:56:00.000-07:00

I haven't talked much about Ajax lately so here is a short post updating his status.

Ajax in one of the cute poses he always seems to find himself in on the boat

Ajax, the cute puppy that we got from the Oakland pound about a year ago has turned into a dog. Not a bad dog, but a dog never the less. He is still kind of cute with his oversize feet, and long legs. But he has lost most of his puppy edge. He seems to have topped out at about 64 pounds, which when we got him he was about 55 and they told us he would gain about ten more. So score one for the pound staff.

Ajax seems to be a pretty lazy dog, especially for one as young as he is, about 18 months we figure. He seems happy to sleep 18/20 hours a day although that is broken up into many many naps. He is however up for anything when it is time to go. He does pretty well on his walks, which usually involve lots of peeing, sniffing, and hunting for Squirrels.

Ajax dreaming of Squirrels?

Ajax does have a kind of weekly routine. I usually take him out for his first morning walk around 8am. Then on Monday and Wednesday mornings he goes out with a walker and a pack of 11 other dogs up into the Oakland hills . He seems to really enjoy these walks, plus the training he gets from the dog walker. The walker, Raul, always gives us a write up of his walk and once in a while we even get a video clip of his antics.

Ajax and Frida sharing a rare moment of tranquility

On Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday I usually take Ajax to work with me. At first we would leave him on the boat all day with me coming home at lunch time to take him out for a while. However I started feeling bad for him being caged up all day so I started taking him to the loft. At first I would just let him stay at the loft till he became a pain and started barking, but he seems to have settled down there and now he pretty much hangs out all day. On most of those days I take him to the dog park at lunch time for a run and to hang out with his doggie friends.

Ajax helping me repair a Spinnaker at the loft

The weekends he just pretty much hangs out and does whatever it is we do.

Ajax keeping an eye on us through the front hatch

It's kind of funny the way Ajax has pretty much become my dog. I guess because I spend more time with him he tends to look to me as his boss. This is kind of ironic as Dina is the one who really had to have a dog and I was kind of ambivalent about the whole thing. Still it is not all bad I guess.

Last weekend

2009-10-01T21:44:00.000-07:00

Even though it is Thursday evening I am going to write about the three days of sailing we did last weekend.

Me, fat and happy on the bow of City Lights

Friday night was the last of the summer Estuary races. This was an Encinal Yacht Club race and it was always going to be a short one. I think sunset was at 720pm and we were the 4th start at 645 or 650pm. I drove and even though we got fouled (again) by the blue Tarten 30 we got off the line in a nice spot. It was pretty light, which meant that Cameron and Jeff didn't bother hiking out at all. It went well though in that as we got off the line with the Tarten on our hip we kept getting knocked. This meant though that the we could always keep clean air even with the bigger boat above us. Eventually I guess he quit trying to roll us as Jeff said he had dropped back a lot. I think this might have been the first time this season that we had peeled this guy off.

Gonzo out racing on the Estuary

We rounded in first, actually having passed a couple of the boats that had started five minutes ahead of us. Our usual good set helped us extend and in the light air Gonzo really held her own against the bigger, heavier boats. A smooth bottom rounding led us on a one tack beat to the finish. We got rolled on the way to the finish by a Peterson 34 that was racing non-spinnaker in another division. What this meant was that as he finished just ahead of us to take the gun the EYC race committee didn't have time to reload to give us our first gun of the season. They did however yell BANG! though, so that was cool.

As a result of our win in the last race we ended up third for the series, one point out of second. This of course called for some celebrating at the yacht club with my Dina and Ajax, my brother, Joe, his girlfriend Dinah and their dog Woody, and some of the Red boat folks joining us on the deck of the Encinal for our post race party. Good fun.

Saturday started a little rough, but with great plans of a day of boat canvas work. However for some reason I had to fuck with the hot water heater which had the slowest of slow leaks first. Needless to say I broke the connector on the hot water outlet on the tank and ended up spending half the day dealing with that. Because the hot and cold water on the boat are all pressurized by the same pump, a broken hot water connector meant no water pressure till it was fixed.

While I was doing this however Dina got the 525 put back into cruising mode, which meant cleaning out the mess that we racers had made, then putting the cushions, a stereo, and the outboard back on. This led to the decision to take Gonzo out for an evening sail with the Big Red Boat folks. Tom. Sylvia, and Rich had told me that they would buy me a nice meal as a graduation present. So the plan became taking the boat out for sail up the Estuary, stopping at Jack London Square on the way back, and getting something to eat at one of the places there.

Me, Tom, Sylvia, and Dina in cruising mode

I have to say that this was one of the better nights we have had with the 525. Definitely the best non racing night. The sail out was perfect, I don't think we ever tacked as we headed out of the Estuary into about five knots of breeze. Sylvia drove the whole time and the rest of us listened to music, and enjoyed the ride. We got pretty far up the Estuary and then turned back with the kite up and the sunset behind us.

Another Estuary sunset

Our stop at Jack London Square was perfect. We tied up the boat in front of Scott's, and then went to eat at Miss Pearls Jam House. We ate outside on the square and I had some of the better ribs that I have had in a while.

Scott's at Jack London Square

After dinner we hit the bar for a night cap and we ended up getting a glass of the very rare Royal Navy Imperial Rum. At $80 a pop this stuff is about as much as you can spend on rum by the glass. Is it worth it? Probably not, but it is a very, very tasty rum...

Very good Rum

The sail home from Jack London to our slip is about 3/4 of a mile. We set the kite as we pulled out, turned up the stereo, and sailed home in shorts and t-shirts. The sail took us about 45 minutes and we ended up getting back to our slip about midnight. It was one of the most pleasant evenings that I have had in years. Thanks again to the Big Red Boat crew for the night out.

Sunday was another great day of sailing. This time we took, again, the Santa Cruz 52 City Lights out for another day sail. The original plan was to take some of Dina's co-workers out on Gonzo, but as more and more people showed an interest we swapped the the 525 for the 52. As it turned out most of Dina's group bailed and we ended up only taking one guy, John, out.

Cameron and Amanda

However we did have Cameron and Amanda, Jeff and Anne, and Kirsten out for the day. We didn't get a lot of breeze and we stayed in the south bay for most of the day, but it was still a great day out. Jeff took a bunch of pictures, which are the ones you see here.

Amanda, Dina, Anne, and Kirsten

After the sail it was back to the Lobster T for a couple more drinks as Dina made dinner for us all. We had Pheasant and Duck sausages as well as assorted salads and other veggies. A perfect end to a very cool weekend.

Friday post about a couple of nice sails.

2009-09-25T07:57:00.000-07:00

Why does it seem that I had more time for blogging when I went to school than now, when I have all this extra free time?

It has been a busy week at work which explains some of it. After a slower than normal summer we are now backed up through the end of November, which might be the biggest backlog that we have had this year. That is kind of ironic in some ways as I figured that once the Big Boat Series was over things would drop off and I could start looking for a "real" job. Something which I have started to do.

Speaking of Big Boat Series here is a link to a video that Norcalsailing.com made of the the Cal 40 class and then posted on their website.

We had a couple of good sails last weekend. First it was the final Island Yacht Club Friday night race of the season. I am beginning to like the Island races more and more as they are usually a little longer and they keep us down the Estuary further. Maybe it's just the change of pace from the sameness of the Encinal and the Oakland races. But, I am starting to enjoy them more and more.

We watched the starts of the previous fleets with some amusement as the Island race committee sets a pretty short line. The first start was the non-spinnaker boats, but apparently the Farr 40 Twisted didn't get the memo. So we got to watch Twisted storm in and make a mess of things before figuring it out and getting clear. This however was just a warm up for the big show, which was the A-fleet start. Between the Farr 40, the J-124, a Jenneau 35, plus about 5 other boats it was just chaotic. The Farr came in fast and way too early, ran out of room against the shoreline and had to tack over to port right in front of the starting boats on starboard. Somehow there was no contact, but there was certainly a lot of yelling going on. This start even got it's own thread on sailing anarchy.

Our own start, driven by Jeff was relatively sedate by comparison. We crossed tacks with an Olson 25 and even the Moore 24 for a while, before getting into our own breeze and sailing our own race. We rounded the top mark with the Tarten 30 and watched them pull away from us like they always do. We had some fun with a Santana 22 at the bottom mark, pulling away from them after a pretty sweet weather douse that they could not match. We probably still ended up deep, but it was great night for sailing that we made better by taking a stereo along with us and cranking it up for most of the race.

Sunday we went for a very pleasant day sail on City Lights. This time we were joined by Tom and Barbara who sailed on their boat for the first time in what may have been a couple of years. We did the usual Bay tour around Angel Island, up to Sausalito , followed by a nice run down the Central Bay. We then put the spinnaker up for the run across the city front and into the Estuary. It was actually a very nice day out. Cameron and his girlfriend Amanda joined us as well as a few of the City Lights regulars, two of the Dave's and their various entourage's. Here is a link to our course track just for the fun of it.

Sweet 16 series wrap up.

2009-09-17T07:57:00.000-07:00

Well, that's it for the Wednesday night races. Kind of sad really as they are probably my favorite beer can races on the Estuary. A nice way to break up the week in a low key, yet fun kind of way.

It all ended up on a good note last night though. Bill joined Cameron, Jeff, and I on the Moore for the final race. Cameron drove, Jeff ran the middle of the boat, and I did bow. Usually Bill likes to just come along for the ride, but this time we actually put him to work pulling lines from the pit and doing a little jib grinding for Jeff. Also he was our beer hander-outer, a very important role on any boat.

The race committee had promised us something special for the last race, but instead they just ran a single lap to the far upwind mark at Jack London Square. Cameron got us a good start in the middle of the line avoiding both the pile up at the pin and the gaggle of port tackers on the shore. We tacked right away easily crossing the Islander and then looked back to see Vince and the blue boat get into a shoving match. All I saw was the blue boat sail straight into Vince and Vince reach out and shove them out of the way.

From then on it was just a matter of covering the Islander up the course. Jeff and Cameron finally got the main on the Moore looking somewhat decent by wailing on both the cunningham and backstay to levels that you would usually see in 25kts of breeze, not the 8 to 10kts that we had last night. It was good to finally sail our own race from the front of the fleet. Not getting sucked too high into the Alameda side up at the houseboats, not having to sail in the dirty air of the bigger boats in our class, stuff like that.

We had a decent rounding and set off for the bottom mark. We had some issues getting by one of the 5.5s that had started 5 minutes ahead of us, but we managed to finally get over the top of them and then squeeze them off at the mark. I almost felt bad for Keith and Kathy on the 5.5. They had about a two boat lead over a pack of three boats about 3/4 of the way down the run only to get run down and end up coming out of the mark in third, to then get rolled by Vince to lose more time.

At the bottom mark we executed a pretty good weather drop and then proceeded to camp on the Islander all the way to the finish. The finish was a little bit anti-climatic though, as we shot the line fully expecting to hear a gun, all we heard was silence. The Islander which finished a minute behind us though did get a gun. WTF? We were all a little miffed by this and I actually called the race committee to ask them what happened. We got some b.s. excuse about a "miscommunication" and was told that we did in fact win. Whatever... This was the third time this season that we had been not finished by the race committee for whatever reason.

So in sailing the Moore to a second and two firsts in the final three races. This was enough to put us in fourth place overall in our division. I have to say that this has been a fun series despite the results. Jeff and Cameron have been a lot of fun to sail with and I don't think anybody who has heard us out there doubts that we are having a good time. Also thanks to Dina, Jessie, Dan (Sid), Bill, John, Jill, Joe, Roxanne, Jeff's friend (Ben maybe?) and anybody I may have forgotten for coming out with us. Also thanks to Tony and Mike for letting us take the Moore and salvaging some respect for ourselves on Wednesday nights.

2009 Big Boat Series.

2009-09-14T22:43:00.000-07:00

Over the last few days I have been sailing in the Big Boat Series. This is something like my 13th or 14th series and I have to say it might have been one of the least painful ones that I have done. Usually the Monday after Big Boats I am a mess. I am usually tired, bruised, hungover, and just done with sailing for while. This time however I am actually in pretty good shape, no visible bruising, I got plenty of sleep, and I am looking forward to going sailing on Wednesday night on the Moore again.

Speaking of the Moore we did the Oakland Wednesday night race on it again the evening before the series. Things didn't start to well as we lost the main halyard up the bottom of the mast and I had to go up to the top of the mast on a borrowed harness to get things sorted out. Steve had driven up from L.A. to do the series with us and he drove the Moore on Wednesday, joining Cameron, Jeff, and I. The race committee decided to change things up and started us downwind on a reverse course from usual. We got a great start and pretty much led the entire way around only getting passed on the final run to the finish by a Wabbit that owed us a ton of time. We easily took the win for the first time this season.

Thursday the series itself started and it was off to San Francisco for the first of four days of racing. My ride this year was the Cal 40 Shamen. I have raced on Shamen in the last couple of Golden Gate mid-winters and enjoyed it enough that when they invited me to do Big Boats with them I had no hesitation saying yes. Our division only had six boats, the minimum required to get a one-design start but it figured to be pretty competitive as all of the boats are equally slow. I guess the resemble the Colombia 5.5s in that respect. We had done a couple of local races as practice and even though we had finished second out of the three Cal 40's in those races I felt we would be competitive in the series itself.

What we didn't count on though was that one of the Cal 40's that had not been racing in the practice races, Gone With the Wind, had a pretty stacked crew and had obviously been prepared by someone who knew what they where doing. I saw my old boss from North Sails as well as an Olympic sailor onboard. The boat was also seemed immaculately prepared with a very good bottom, deck hardware, and sails. I kind of figured as soon as I saw that we would be racing for second.

Interestingly enough GWtW didn't win the first race, a boat named Henry Hannah won that, followed by GWtW . We ended up third. The race itself was pretty funny in that the race committee sent us on the shortest course that they had. Windward, downwind finish. This kind of set the tone for our races with us getting very easy courses, which suited me just fine. The 2009 series will I think go down as one of the lighter series' in the events history. While I think the wind did get above 20kts one day, for the most part we had really nice breeze in about the mid-teens. This combined with a relatively weak flood tide made for a pretty mellow series conditions wise.

The second race of the first day we got caught out on the wrong side of a tug and barge that was cruising across the race track. We were probably in second place when we got to the tug and as we watched the rest of our fleet sail behind it we got caught out on the outside and by the time we got behind them we were in last place by a lot. We did get one boat back by the end to finish 5th but it was a pretty sad turn of events. So after the first day we had eight points and were tied for third. Two boats had seven points, and GWtW had 3 points. Not the beginning we had hoped for.

Fridays first race was probably the wettest, and coldest of the series. I think it was on the edge of which sail to use, the one or the three. We chose the one and it seemed to be the right call. although by the top of the course it was obvious that we would be switching to the three. It just happened that we also tore the one at the last tack of the beat so we couldn't use it the rest of the day anyway. As it turned out this kind of turned out to be a blessing in disguise as the wind kind of died down at the bottom of the course and a couple of the boats kept their ones up. not having that option we stuck with the three and expected to get hurt in the lighter breeze, however when the breeze came back up again the boats carrying the ones now began to suffer.We ended up second in the first race and actually managed to win the second race of the day. This was nice as the the race committee likes to finish the last race of the day in front of the club, so everybody got to see us take the win.

Saturday we awoke to the sound of thunder and rain, something we don't get very often here in the Bay Area. Also I had to go to the loft early to fix a couple of sails before heading over to the city. At this point we had closed the gap to first place to 5 points, a big gap, but with three races still to go hopefully we could build on our success of the previous day and still take it. Sadly it was not to be. We ended up third in the first race with GWtW taking another win. Now we also had the problem of the third place boat only being a point behind us. At this point we had to basically concede first just to make sure we didn't drop back into third. The second race on Saturday turned out to be one of our better ones as we led most of the way around the track, only giving up the lead about 100 yards from the last mark before the short run down to the finish. I think we worried about the tide too much and just did to many tacks into the beach to stay out of the incoming flood tide and it cost us the lead right at the finish.

The last day turned out to be a little anti-climatic. Gone With the Wind had already sewn up first place and didn't even need to sail but did the honourable thing and came out anyway. The wind really never filled in and the race committee waited for about an hour before they decided there was enough pressure to start the races. We where actually lucky in that on the other course, they run two separate starting areas, they only started on class and then abandoned racing for the day. The one race they did start was eventually abandoned also.

For us the race was all about covering the third place boat Azure. We had a three point cushion on them and would have had to screw up pretty badly to lose second, but stranger things have happened. We traded first with GWtW up the first beat and they just got ahead of us at the first mark. We were just about to round in second when Far Far which had been over early at the start came screaming in from nowhere having taken a huge flyer to the other side of the race course and stormed around inside of us at the mark. We also let Henry Hannah get by us on the next leg, but we still had Azure behind us so all was still ok. After rounding and setting the kite in front of the yacht club's we headed down to the bottom mark off of Treasure Island. We played what I thought was a pretty high risk strategy of staying in close to the city front while the other boats all went out closer to Alcatraz. Ultimately though our strategy payed off and we passed the second and third place boats and gained a lot on the first place GWtW. By this time though the wind had dropped to almost nothing and the committee had decided to end the race at the bottom mark. Even though we got to within about a boat length of GWtW we couldn't catch them. They took the win and we got second, which is where we both finished for the series.

Sorry about the lack of pictures, I just didn't have time to really get any of anything interesting.

1 Moore Wednesday

2009-09-09T08:05:00.000-07:00

As Dina likes to say, there is just to much life in my life. The last week has been like the last month, just to much stuff going on.

Last Wednesday Jeff, Cameron, and I took out a borrowed (thanks again Tony and Mike) Moore 24 to do the OYC race. I never felt that we had sailed the Santana that badly and that our results where more based on the lack of a decent headsail and a harsh rating than our sailing ability. So, in order to prove this to both ourselves and to our competitors we borrowed the Moore which has better sails, and a much fairer rating.

The Moore 24

The Moore was called Kangaroo Court, but we entered it as Gonzo "B" in order to avoid paying a second entry fee. This Moore actually has quite a history having been sailed to Hawaii double handed at one point. I also did the Moore 24 nationals on it sometime in the 90's out of the Tiburon Yacht Club with some friends out of Santa Cruz. It was then bought by a lady who thought it would be a good boat to learn how to sail on, and thus be able to sail with her husband on his larger boat more. Joan then sold it to Tony and Mike a few years back, and they in fact have sold it to a guy up in Oregon who will take delivery of it at the end of this month.

Cameron and Jeff doing the post race breakdown

It was very very light for the race and sadly our rivals on the Islander pulled a no show. Still Dave was out there on his new to him Moore and Vince was out on his Kiwi 30. Plus the usual other suspects of fleet Charlie. We got badly fouled in the pre-start by the Tarten 30 which ended up with us having to tack to avoid him and then protesting by waving the red end of the Tecate beer 12 pack holder. After some discussion he did his penalty circles and we ended up getting a pretty decent start.

We did ok on the first beat while still trying to figure the boat out. We planted a perfect lee-bow on Dave on the other Moore about half way up and put him away pretty nicely. We also got fouled again, this time by a Merit 25 which once again bought out our Tecate red protest flag. The Merit also did his penalty circles. We rounded in first, but in the light, streaky, breeze we found it hard to stay in a consistent lane, that and the fact that we had too heavy of a kite up allowed Vince to get by us at the bottom mark.

Tecate, beer and equally useful as a protest flag

We actually gybed inside of Vince at the bottom mark, but really couldn't hold the kite on the angle to the offset mark. With Vince underneath us we dropped the kite but lost about three boat lengths to him. From the offset mark it was a short beat to the finish, but not long enough for us to do anything to get Vince back. We ended up in second, which we thought was fair as Vince had sailed a little smarter getting his kite down ahead off the bottom mark rounding.

Eat our wake bad guys...

Hopefully we will get the Moore out again tonight in a little more breeze and see if we can build on our success. However we are a little bit behind at work so it is going to be touch and go as to whether we will make it out.

Columbia 5.5 "nationals". Day two...

2009-09-02T07:47:00.000-07:00

Long overdue, but here goes.

Campbell, Bill, and I went into the Sunday of the nationals feeling pretty good about things. We had won the last race on Saturday and figured as long as the breeze stayed stable we would be ok. Even though liem had a three point lead we knew that we were faster both upwind and down and just needed to concentrate a little more on the big picture and sail our own boat a little better.

Saturday night a large part of the fleet had blown off a planned dinner at the Encinal Yacht Club and instead had gone up to Bill and Karen's place up in the Oakland hills for a Bar-B-Q. This was a lot of fun with crews from at least five of the eight boats enjoying the hospitality, good food, and usual shit talking that takes place at these kind of events.

When we did get out to the race course it took a while for the wind to fill in, but after a delay of about an hour or so the race committee eventually set a start line in between a large ship and a barge that had anchored in the race area overnight. A little unusual, but it was were the most breeze was so I guess it worked.

The first race went pretty well for us, we knew we wanted the right side and after a pretty good start tacked over and went that way. A good layline call followed by a good set got us around in first only to then be slowed by the outgoing ebb tide. This allowed the fleet to compress downwind a little and cut into our lead a bit. Also we now had to decide which side of the barge we wanted to go on as we headed to the bottom mark. Of course our two biggest competitors, Liem, and Adam both split behind us leaving us with the decision of which one to cover. We decided to cover Adam going above the barge, so of course Liem made some huge gains going under it. I think we rounded second at the bottom mark but another smart upwind leg got us back into first and this time we held that until the finish.

Now we won two in a row and things were really starting to come together. I was amazed by how quite this race had been on board compared to the first days racing. We did however have a bit of a breakage as the the starboard clam cleat was not holding the guy downwind, this meant that my job downwind was now to be a human cleat as well as keeping an eye back on the competition.

The race committee got right into sequence for the second race which caught us out a little bit as we needed to run the spinnaker to the other side. This took a little longer than it should have as we had to have a debate about whether to gybe set or not at the top mark. This left us a little out of sorts for the start. We got to the pin a little early with Liem underneath us, after the usual exchange of pleasantries that often happens in this case we bailed out and gybed away from the line just as the gun went off, we then took off on port taking the transom's of pretty much the whole fleet and headed off to the right hand side again.

This turned out to be not a bad call as we once again got to the favored right hand side which may have allowed us to get to the weather mark in first (my memory isn't what it used to be). From there we sailed in control of the fleet and on to our third win in row. That plus the fact that Liem had hit the pin at the start as well as the bottom mark twice allowed us to go into the last race with a nice run of firsts and a comfortable lead on the score sheet.

What did confuse things however was the fact that there was throw out allowed if the regatta went six races. Usually I am not a fan of throw outs at "national" championships, figuring that if you win you should have no excuses or bad races. That the most consistent boat should win not the boat that got DSQed in one race but did well in all the others. What this meant for us though is that we had a one point lead over both Adam and Liem and that if we finished second then we would win no matter what.

We didn't have great start and things got a little loud on our boat as Bill and Campbell started to grumble to each other. I then pointed out that we were in fact in front of both of the boats that we had to be ahead of so we should just relax and let out speed and smarts do their thing. This seemed to calm things down a little and we worked our way into first place by the weather mark. So this meant of course that even though we were leading on the downwind run that when Adam split and used the barge as a pick and we had to decide who to cover, Bill and Campbell both almost had a nervous breakdowns.

Adam did round the bottom mark ahead of us, but we were easily far ahead of the rest of the fleet that we could attack Adam a little while still covering Liem. We never did catch Adam, but we got the second we needed to claim the title of "National" champions in the Columbia 5.5 metre class. This was my second championship having had won it with Adam many years ago, it was also Campbell's 2nd and Bill's 3rd.

Far behind

2009-08-30T21:42:00.000-07:00

I realize that I have been slacking on this blogging stuff lately, shit I still need to do day two of the Columbia 5.5 Nationals and that was two weeks ago. However as Dina often says, there is just to much life in my life. Throw in the fact that we are gearing up for the Big Boat Series at work and I just don't have a lot of spare time these days.

Ajax, seen here trying to sneak away, was working at Doyle last week

Last week started with Dina and I heading up to Sacramento to see Greenday for the second time in less than a week. Dina had won tickets through the Greenday fan club, The Idiot Club, so we got our friend Dave to take Ajax out for his evening stroll and headed east for the show. Dina has expressed a desire to write the review of the concert so I will let her do that at her leisure. I will say however that the Sacramento show was way better than the San Jose show. Although the late night drive back was pretty brutal.

Greenday in Sacramento

Tuesday was another late night as we had a couple of fellow liveaboards, David and Catie, here in the marina over for dinner. This was good in that we got into the 12 year old scotch and played liars dice till late. That combined with the excellent dinner that Dina prepared made for a pretty fun night in.

Wednesday night was the usual OYC Estuary race with my friend John joining Jeff, Cameron, and I this time around. I hate to say this but the OYC race's are starting to bum me out a little. It was very light, and the OYC race committee sent us on the longest course that they had. Then they made us go twice around. When we got to the club afterwards they scored us DNC (did not compete) for the second week in a row. We got them to change it later, to 6th out of 6, but they were a little whiney about it, also when I asked them about last weeks DNC they didn't even make an attempt to do anything about it. Still for next Wednesday night we have been offered the use of a Moore 24 and we will probably be sailing that for the remainder of the series. Hopefully sailing a different boat with a fairer rating and real sails we will be able to finish out the summer series with some good results.

Thursday night was actually pretty mellow. I think both Dina and I were so happy to have a night off with nothing planned that we just hit Dragon Rouge up for dinner and then had a nice night in.

Friday night was the Island race and we had Dina and Bill join us for what was probably the nicest sailing night of the year so far. As far as the result was concerned I have no idea how we did. It was warm, not that windy, and with the exception of the lack of a toilet for Dina, one of the best sails we have ever had on the Gonzo.

Staying out after the racing on Gonzo

Saturday I went out for a ride on the TP-52 Flash. My friend Campbell is taking care of the boat and invited me out for a day of rig tuning and sail testing. Having never been out on a TP-52 before I figured it should be a interesting day out. All of the stuff they wanted to get done we got through pretty quickly so we headed out the Gate to set the kite and have a fast run back in. Flash felt like it was on rails as blasted back in cruising at high teens, low twenties with total control. We did a bunch of gybes on which I got to grind on the pedestals which is bloody hard work, especially for some one like me. Towards the end of the run I was even grinding the sheet by myself. Hard work, but good fun.

Flash blasting downwind

We got down to the circle pretty quickly blowing by the 505's that had just finished their world championships and were heading back to the city front. The call was made to douse the kite and I jumped down the hatch to help pull the kite down. While down below it seemed to me that we where having a bunch of problems with the drop and at one point Campbell came running down the steps to the aft of the boat for some reason. The kite started to come down but the boat seemed to be all over the place. Eventually the kite came down, but I could hear someone yelling "no steerage' at another boat. It turns out that our rudder cable had come off at the wheel.

Next thing I know is someone yells "hold on" and then I feel us bounce off another boat. The hit didn't seem to bad as I didn't get thrown down or anything, but when I popped my head out of the hatch I just caught our boom dragging along the power boat that was the committee boat for the 505 worlds. We took out all the flags, broke a window, and caused some other damage to the committee boat. We then hooked a backstay on something on the other boat and that had to cut before we finally got free.

Campbell heading towards the hatch to fix the steering

Campbell got the steering sorted pretty quick and we could soon steer the boat off of one of the two wheels. The damage to Flash wasn't too bad. A couple of bent stanchions, a pretty big gouge on the end of the boom, and the cut runner tail. There was also some damage to the mainsail. I actually ended up fixing a couple of batten pockets and a tear on the foot on the main at the Quantum loft in Pt. Richmond as much as a favour to Jeff and Campbell for taking me out as for the money.

It's all on...

2009-08-23T21:52:00.000-07:00

Trying to explain the last couple of weeks around here would take up a lot of time, lets just say things have been a little hectic and leave it at that. However just for kicks here is a brief re-cap.

Two weeks ago Dina and I went up to my folks house to redo the couches down in the dinette. Surprisingly it went pretty well and we got the seats re-covered and back into the boat without that many issues. I think part of the reason it went as well as it did was because I was so hung over from sailing Friday night that it was easier just to keep my head down and get on with the work than it was to complain about it.

Ajax sitting on my lap on the ride to the hills

I think I was hung over from the Friday night race because we had once again sailed pretty well yet ended up pretty deep. We actually started five minutes ahead of one of our main competitors who had missed the class flags, yet he still corrected out on us by a minute. That one was hard to stomach.

We have also in the last two weeks taken City Lights out for a day sail. We took a bunch of friends of Dina's out who where in town for a birthday. We also took a couple of the City Lights regulars to help us sail the boat. It was another pretty good sail in almost perfect conditions for cruising around the bay. The only downer on the day was when we got a little to close to a ferry boat and a guy that my friend Dave had bought started yelling and screaming at the ferry. It just pissed me off that this uninvited guest on board the boat was such an asshole about the whole thing. It definitely put a damper on the day for me.

Like the wind coming down, waiting for the story of day 2 of the Columbia 5.5 nationals will be worth the wait

Last weekend was the Columbia 5.5 nationals which I have talked about the first day, and will write about the second day soon, I promise.

Last week the fun never ended as we went to see Greenday down in San Jose on Tuesday, I will write more about that soon as we are going to go see them again tomorrow night.

Greenday in concert in San Jose

We then did our usual Wednesday night race on Gonzo. A race where we may have hit a new low for how bad things are getting for our 2009 summer campaign. This time we didn't even get scored as finishing as the Oakland Yacht Club just missed us at the finish. We finished right in between a couple of other boats, yet we got no horn, or finish time from the committee. Thursday we went to see Pulp Fiction on the big screen at the Alameda Theatre. First we had dinner with some friends and then off to the movies. I had forgotten how long a movie Pulp Fiction is, something like three hours long. It ended up being a long night, but still a lot of fun.

Friday night was the Encinal Friday night race, and my birthday. Sadly, Cameron could not join us so Jeff and I sailed with "Sid" once again. Sid drove the race and did a pretty good job. It got pretty light a couple of times and we are definitely a lot more competitive in the light. Still we ended up third, finishing with the running lights on for the first time this season. Dina and Tom joined us at the Encinal afterwards for cocktails and other fun, culminating in Jeff and I having a few glasses of 12 year old Glenlivet scotch back here on the boat.

Yesterday, Saturday, I sailed on the Cal 40 Shaman in a city front YRA race. We are using this race and another one next Sunday as our practice for the upcoming Big Boat Series. One thing I will say is that it is a good thing that we are practicing. We ended up second to another Cal 40 that we should have beat pretty easily. I will say though that we sailed short handed, and without our real tactician, so hopefully we will get better as we go on.

Last night we went up to some friends house for a bar-b-q that had probably the best ribs that I have had in a long time. They were so good in fact that Dina and I had the left overs for breakfast this morning.

Today Dina and I spent the day catching up on cleaning up the boat. This is something that has been long overdue, and the difference it makes to how the boat looks makes it all worth while.

Ajax helping with the boat cleaning

One thing that happened while we were doing this was that we got to watch one of our neighbors hit another boat while trying to dock in the windy conditions that we had today. It didn't really do much damage, but it was sure interesting to watch.

2009 Columbia 5.5 "Nationals" Day one

2009-08-17T19:24:00.000-07:00

This is one version of the 2009 Columbia 5.5 "Nationals". I put nationals in quotes because this year it was even less lightly attended by the out of towners than usual. We had a grand total of eight boats which included one boat coming down from Stockton. Although it must be said that one of the local boats was in fact sailed by another crew from Stockton.

This year for the nationals I sailed with Bill Colombo and Campbell on Maverik. Bill and Maverik have won the nationals a couple of times in the past and indeed was leading last years nationals when his rig came down. In fact the rig was only put back up a couple of weeks ago with the boat sitting idle since last year. The time though hadn't been completely wasted as quite a few improvements had been made to both the rig and the boat while they had been sitting.

The new and improved Maverik

As usual the races where run out on the South Bay just off the end of the old Alameda Naval Air Station by the Encinal Yacht Club. Also as usual we got a tow out of the Estuary by the EYC race committee.

Bill paddling us out to the tow boat

This is always a lot of fun as the boats do look good gliding through the water all in a line, and there is usually a lot of talk back and forth amongst the crews on the way out.

The 5.5 fleet being towed out of the Estuary

Dina even managed to get a quick video of us heading out. We are a colorful bunch it must be said.

After a short postponement the committee got us off on a quick one lap race into a 5 or 6 knot breeze.

Waiting for the wind to fill in before the first race

Bill got us a great start at the pin and away we went. In the lighter breeze I sit down low and trim the jib upwind. After the start I am looking ahead and all I can hear is Bill and Campbell swearing, cursing, grumbling, and arguing about how to sail the boat and what is happening with the other boats. After about five minutes I sneak a peak back and see that we are leading the fleet by a good five or six boat lengths. I still have no idea what those two were bitching about. We round the mark first, but don't have the best set as the spinnaker gets hung up on the spreader, and then head downwind. We are still leading, but going downwind into the current we don't really pull away like we did upwind, and some of the boats behind us gybe away for the right hand side. With the fleet splitting and the bottom mark set in a light air hole it meant that we arrived in second with a big clump of boats all in a pack. By the time all was said and done we turned this second into a 5th before passing a boat on the short beat to the finish to end up fourth. Kevin on Seabiscuit won, with Jim Coddington and the Stockton guys on Top Gun second, and Liem on Alert getting third, beating us by about a foot.

The second race was similar to the first in that we had plenty of upwind speed, but had bad sets and got squeezed out at the bottom mark roundings. On the second bottom rounding Bill asked me where I thought the better wind was and after a quick glance I called the left side. We did a quick tack to head that way only to realize that we could have laid the finish without tacking so we had to tack back to make the line. Liem won the race, Adam was second, Coddington was third and we where once again fourth. As we where heading to the finish I got to see Seabiscuit harden up with their spinnaker up to try to cross Naked Lady that was coming up wind and drag their kite right across Naked Lady's rig. Kevin now had a first in the first race and a last in the second race. So much for consistency.

By the time the third race started the wind had started to get up to 12kts or so. The start was interesting in that immediately after the gun I felt us get hit pretty hard from behind a couple of times. I looked back to see the bow of Adam's boat had run up onto our boat and had Bill pinned down against the deck. I started to head back to try to push Adam's bow away, but it cleared itself before I got there. Bill seemed un-phased by the whole thing and off we sailed. In the stronger breeze we really found our legs and with a good layline call on the first beat followed by a good rounding turned the race into a wire to wire win for us. As this race was a three lapper it was good to feel that we were finally sailing the way that we knew we should be sailing. We had made an adjustment to how we set the kite to behind the shrouds from in front of them and our top roundings got better with every set. Liem finished second, and Adam finished third.

Alert following us home

So at the end of the first day it was Liem leading comfortably with six points, us in second with nine, and Adam in third with eleven. Jim Coddington on Top Gun though was only one point behind Adam with twelve. We had to give credit to Liem, Greg, and "Scuba" Steve on Alert. They had sailed their boat well, avoided the big mistakes, and deserved to be the overnight leaders.

More on the "action packed" second day soon.

Columbia 5.5 "nationals".

2009-08-15T08:16:00.000-07:00

Columbia 5.5 nationals start today. Follow the "action" here via the twitter account.

http://twitter.com/Ajaxracing

Game time.

2009-08-10T08:32:00.000-07:00

Sailing does not cut into my free time, or affect my relationships with loved ones in any way.

Gone to the dogs

2009-08-06T07:28:00.000-07:00

It's kind of funny, ever since I have finished school it seems that I don't have as much free time as I used to. How can not having to drive to Vallejo, do watches, and homework result in not spending as much time at home as when I was at school? Obviously the weeknight beer cans take up some time, a couple of nights a week. But what do I do when I don't sail?

One thing is I take the dog out for walks when I get home. I have been taking him to work a couple of days a week as I feel bad for him sitting in a cage on the boat during the day.

Ajax in his cage

Usually he lasts till mid day before he gets bored and starts barking and I have to bring him home. Last week though he made it through the day a couple of times and even went to the city a couple of times with me to help me drop of sails. I think he likes riding in the Doyle van as he can sit up high and check stuff out. He really seemed to enjoy going across the Bay Bridge and checking that view out.

Ajax in the Doyle van

Usually Ajax and I go for a walk around the marina here after work, but sometimes we go to the dog park. Sometimes I get lucky at the dog park and Ajax hooks up with another dog and they wrestle and run the whole time we are there and it tires him out. Sometimes though he just kind of follows me around as I kick tennis balls for him to ignore.

Ajax at the dog park

The dog park is a strange place for me. It is an empty dirt lot with one or two trees that stinks of dog piss, yet there is always a group of people hanging out on benches or on chairs that people have left there. People hang out and bring their kids to hang out with them. Once in a while, especially in the small dog section, you will even see people having cookouts and gatherings with other dog people. I can not a imagine a worse smelling place to have a cookout.

Last weekend though was pretty good for doing nothing. Actually Sunday was really good for it. Dina was off with some friends so other than a couple of quick outings with the dog I literally hung out at home and did nothing. Maybe a little paperwork and some light house cleaning, but for the most part I sat around and watched TV, something I very rarely do these days.

I have managed to get a couple of races in though. Last Friday I went out on the Farr 40 for the Island YC race. We missed a mark and had to sail a lot of extra distance but still finished ahead of the other boats. I don't think we saved our time on any of them, but it was still pretty fun. After the race I ended up getting called into work to help Cameron fix a main that had blown up during Friday's ocean race. Not a big deal and it probably helped keep me out of the YC bar afterwards.

Dan and Cameron in total control of the start

Last nights Oakland YC race followed the usual pattern. Good start, followed by the gradual dropping back through the fleet to eventually finish fifth. Then it was back to the OYC bar to grumble about our rating. At least Vince beat the Islander last night so that was good, although it was funny to hear the Islander guys complain about Vince's finish time and rating.

"Sid", sporting a look as only he can

Last night was also fun in that we along with Sid, Cameron, Jeff, and I we also had a non-sailing friend of Jeff's, Dan, come out and join us. I know we had a good time because once again we had people from other boats telling us that they can hear us laughing all over the Estuary.

Artsy Spinnaker shot of the 5.5s

Into the weekend.

2009-07-31T07:10:00.000-07:00

It is a good morning here on the Lobster Telephone, the automatic coffee machine did it's thing, the cat is tearing up the carpet, and the boat is still and quiet in the early morning fog. Dina and Ajax are cuddled up in the aft cabin having a bit of a lie in and I am up earlier than usual after a good nights sleep. It is amazing how much better rested one is if you they don't drink the night before.

Dina and Ajax snuggling up together

One of the reasons I am up early is to follow one of the coolest things in sailing that has happened in a long time. Right now there are two Maxi-trimarans virtually match racing across the Atlantic attempting to set the trans-Atlantic record.

Groupama 3

I tend to concentrate on the Groupama site a little more than the Banqeupopulaire one, mostly because some of the Groupama one is in English. The numbers these two boats are putting up are just insane. Groupama is averaging just over 34 knots, and BP-5 might be going even faster! The high speed that these boats are reaching must be over 40 knots. Very, very cool.

Banquepopulaire 5

In other news we did do the Estuary Wednesday night race out of the Oakland Yacht Club. Dina and Dan, who we call Sid, from the loft both joined Cameron, Jeff, and I for this one. Jeff drove and nailed the start perfectly getting us about three quarters of the way up the first beat before the much bigger Islander 36 finally got by us. A great gybe-set coupled with a bad wrap on the Islander allowed us to keep in touch with them about half way down the run until they finally got their wrap sorted out by dropping and re-hoisting. We also got passed by Vince on Morning Dew just at the bottom mark, but it was a very solid first lap, easily one of the best we have done in a while.

Bad guys behind us for once.

Of course once the two bigger boats got into clear air ahead of us it was all over and even though we had better sets and douses than everyone on the second lap we still ended up fourth on the evening. I had a chat with the race committee guy in the OYC afterwards about the class breaks, and while he was sympathetic the nature of the estuary course and the boats he has to work with mean that we are probably always going to be finishing in order of length no matter what. A little frustrating to be sure, but we are still having a lot of fun out there Gonzo sailing.

Another interesting thing is that I am finally filling out the forms necessary to apply for American citizenship. Mostly because a lot of the jobs that seem interesting to me require it. Most of these jobs are civilian positions with either the Coast Guard or Homeland Security and involve port security or ship inspection type stuff. Right now they seem to be one of the only groups hiring, add in the fact that they are well payed and mostly based out of Government Island here on the Estuary and the whole citizenship thing starts to make sense. I can still keep my British citizenship which is important so why not?

One of the requirements of applying for citizenship is that you have to list the details of every trip you have taken abroad since you became a permanent resident. Not sure how that is going to work since I became a permanent resident in 1974 and have left the U.S. maybe 50 times since then. Not even sure I can remember every trip that I took, much less everywhere I went on those trips. A daunting task indeed.

Not a bad weekend.

2009-07-27T08:13:00.000-07:00

This is one of those summer weekends that Dina has told me to write about so when it all turns to crap in the winter she remembers why we do in fact live on a boat.

It's all sunshine and Rainbow's aboard the good ship LT.

Friday started off with the first Encinal race of the summer series. It was a little windier than usual so Jeff, Cameron, and I decided to go with the small jib. For whatever reasons we seemed to be a little more competitive than usual and turned a good start into a close race. As usual we ended up mid-fleet, 3rd I think, but we where a lot closer to the boats in front of us than usual. It is still a little discouraging to finish behind boats that we owe time to, but we are getting closer.

A rare picture of Gonzo ahead of someone on the race course

Saturday morning we were woken up early as Steve who had driven up from L.A. arrived at about 130am. Our trusty guard dog Ajax went through the motions of growling at him, but Steve walked right on by him and into the forward cabin. Ajax seemed ok with this and came back aft to fall back asleep with us.

Vicious guard dog being guarded by the cat.

Saturday, Steve and I sailed in the 2nd season opener on the Farr 40 with Tony, Mike and co. It was actually not a bad day out. Warm enough to not really need foulies even as we went out the gate. We played it pretty smart heading out after being held out to the right a little more than we would have liked after the start. We had some good crosses with the Santa Cruz 37 heading under the bridge before finally getting away from them while short tacking up the Marin side of the GG channel. We rounded the Point Bonita mark as the first place mono-hull and then extended all the way back home on the long run down to the Estuary for a nice first to finish. The SC-37 and the Melges-32 both corrected out on us, as they should have in a race with a long downwind run like this, but we got a very well deserved 3rd place.

Saturday night was a nice Bar-B-Q on the boat catching up with Steve while eating grass fed New York strip steaks, yummy.

Steve snuck off early Sunday morning giving Dina and I a chance to lie in, then after having breakfast at home. We then did some chores around the house such as cleaning out shower sumps and doing the laundry, etc... We then spent yesterday afternoon looking at few open homes here in Alameda. Nothing too serious yet, just as Dina says data gathering. We then did a short bike ride, followed by a couple of drinks at the Encinal Yacht Club.

Dinner last night was an excellent Pork Roast with Corn on the cob followed by a pleasant stroll around the marina to empty out Ajax.

As I said earlier, not a bad weekend.

Quick Friday post

2009-07-24T07:13:00.000-07:00

I got this link sent to me a while ago and kept meaning to post it here. This was sent to the loft by one of our customers whose sail I had built. It's nice to see stuff like this every now and again.

On another note we did go out for a sail on Wednesday night. The Oakland Yacht club had decided to run some practice starts with a very short upwind leg. I guess so they could fill the gap between the spring and summer series'. Jeff, Cameron, and I went out, but sadly no other boats showed up. We did one start and then ended up just cruising up to the turning basin and setting the spinnaker for a nice sail home.

A random picture of Ajax eating peanut butter.

The weekend brings an Encinal race this evening followed by the second season opener tomorrow. Should be a good one.

Summer fun on the good ship Lobster Telephone

2009-07-22T07:22:00.000-07:00

Having been relegated, once again, to the forward cabin for snoring I figure this is a good a time as any to to catch up with my blogging.

We are finally pretty solidly into the summer weather pattern here on the Estuary. Morning fog and low clouds, warm afternoon sun, then cooler evening and nights. We did have a bit of a warm spell last week, but that is just a memory now.

It also seems that the summer social scene has ramped up to full speed also as it doesn't feel as though we have stopped moving since the last time I sat down to write some stuff down. Last Thursday we had Kirsten over for a glass of Wine as her and Dina got caught up on stuff. That was fun as we just hung out on the aft deck till after ten enjoying the warmth and the company of the evening.

Friday night we actually got to race in the Island Yacht Club race here on the Estuary. Dina joined Jeff, Cameron, and I for what was actually a pretty fun race.

The love of my life smiling and having fun on the Estuary

The Island YC race's are interesting in that there are more small boats and they usually have the longest courses of any of the Estuary race's. I have no idea how we ended up as they don't have the results online yet, but I suspect our usual mid-fleet finish.

Gonzo charging(?) downwind at 5.37 kts!

We did however have our first major breakage on the Gonzo as our traveler car shit itself on one of the tacks, spreading little Delrin balls all over the cockpit. Jeff did a good job lashing the thing down and we lived to sail another day. The replacement car and track have been mounted and I just need to finish bolting them down before we sail next.

Lashed on mainsheet block

Saturday I did the Lightship race on the Farr 40 Twisted. Not a bad race for us as we were the second boat to finish behind an Andrew's 56. This was good enough for first place on corrected in our division, as well as an overall win for the entire race. The big move was to head South after going out of the Gate instead of following the conventional wisdom of going along the Marin side. It just seemed that the wind was better to the South so that's what we went with. The boats that went North really got hurt by the light winds on that side. You can see our course track here. The interesting thing you see from the track is that we sailed virtually the same track both out to the Lightship, which is actually a buoy not a ship, and back.

Twisted at the start of the Lightship race.

We had a couple of very smart people making the calls on Twisted on Saturday which was fun. it's always fun to sail with good people. What this did however was upset the guy who considers himself the regular tactician on the boat. What this resulted in was the regular guy getting all testy, or butt hurt as Dina says, and yelling at people on the boat. Once again this kind of puts a damper on my enjoyment of sailing on the Twisted. I will do the 2nd season opener with them this upcoming weekend, but that may be my last race with them for a while.

The rest of the weekend was taken up by a couple of very fun Bar-B-Qs. One at my bosses place in the Oakland hills, and the other at Barbara and Tom's place.

Dina, Karen, and Ajax taking a break from Karaoke.

Saturday nights consisted of lot's of Karaoke singing by Dina and Karen, whereas Sunday's was a slightly mellower affair, consisting of catching up with Tom and Barbara while sitting around a fire pit sipping 25 year old Rum.

Time flies when your having fun...

2009-07-13T21:11:00.000-07:00

What happened last week? Hard to remember all of it, but it never did seem to slow down. So much for having nothing to do because there are no Wednesday and Friday night races, sheesh.

Having said that I did in fact go racing on Wednesday night, just not on the Estuary. I sailed on my buddy's GP-26 Salt Peanuts. This is a boat that Brooks Dees built here in the Bay Area to the ORC 26ft rule. We sailed in the Richmond Yacht Club Wednesday night race which the last time I did a RYC Wednesday night was on a friends 1928 12 Meter Anitra maybe 15 years ago. The race itself was pretty fun, a very painful light air start which saw us stuck in front of a pack of boats in no wind in the Richmond channel, followed by some pretty smart sailing which got us out into the breeze and around the only mark in third. Then a nice run to the finish for a well earned second place.

Salt Peanuts

You can see a couple of pictures here at Norcalsailing.com. That is our spinnaker in the opening shot and it gives you a good idea of what it was like at the start of the race, and if you scroll down you can see Simon driving the boat.

Friday I went out on the Farr 40 Twisted for what turned out to be a very nice evening sail. We sailed out of the Estuary without tacking. Then cruised around the bay bridge for a while before setting a fractional code zero kind of sail and heading back down the Estuary. At one point we actually flew the code zero wing on wing in an attempt to make the entrance of the Estuary. It may have looked kind of strange, but it seemed to work out ok.

Wing on wing on the Farr 40

Work was kind of fun last week also. It may seem less than manly to get excited over a new sewing machine but the new one we finally got installed last week is pretty fucking cool. Our new machine (our machine is actually the next size up from the one in the video) made by Cordes in Australia required us to jackhammer out a bigger pit, rewire the loft for 220, and then borrow a forklift to install. But man was it worth it. The new machine makes it a lot easier on us floor guys, and it allows us to be able to work on much bigger sails of which we have had to turn away in the past.

Installing the new sewing machine at work

Saturday was pretty mellow, but the highlight of the day had to be the late afternoon rain shower that led to a very vivid double rainbow.

Really cool Rainbow

I had just finished doing some work on the 525 when we first noticed the rainbow. We had to call Rich on the Big Red Boat to make him come and look. It was definitely one of the better rainbows I have seen in a long time. It must have been cool, because people at work were talking about it on Monday, two days later.

Sunday was fun in that we took Ajax for his first sail. Ajax is not a real good water dog, in fact he seems to have no interest in it at all. But we put him on the 525 and figured we would take it very easy on him at first. We motored out which went ok, although he wasn't to happy about the noisy engine. After motoring about two/thirds of the way out of the Estuary we turned around and rolled out the headsail for a nice leisurely sail back home.

Ajax staying close to Mom

Ajax never really did settle down and always stayed very close to Dina, but he came through it ok. I don't see him becoming a regular sailing dog on the 525 as it is a little to tippy, but he might just be ok for motoring or downwind cruises.

Ajax pretending to be bored of the whole sailing thing

Finally here is a picture of a bunch of ducks that showed up here in the marina this morning. They are very cute and hopefully we will be seeing more of them as the days go by.

Mama and Her Ducklings

A lazy 4th of July weekend

2009-07-07T08:01:00.000-07:00

It seems weird to me that there is no Estuary racing in July. July usually has the warmest nights, the best winds, and the longest days. Why then no beer can racing for the whole month? All three clubs that run races on the Estuary, Oakland, Island, and Encinal do this, quit racing for the month. The official line is something about that July is the time for taking family vacations and attendance is down anyway, but I don't really see it. All I know is that a bunch of us are sitting around Wednesday and Friday nights wishing we could go sailing.

City Lights sits idle on one of the nicest evenings of the year

So, what have I been doing to pass the time? Last Wednesday I went for a quick sail on my friend Dave's new to him Moore 24, Pixie. Just a quick jaunt up the Estuary until we got turned back by multiple dredges, tugs, ferries, and a very large barge that all seemed to be in the same place as us as we tried to short tack our way out of the channel. I did however get to play sailing rock star as Dave swooped into the dock and picked me up on the way out and then did a fly by drop off on the way back.

Pixie coming to pick me up off of the dock.

The three day weekend was good. Friday Dina had to work so I tried to get as much done around the boat as possible. Cleaning out the heads and the bilges ain't always fun, but it does need to happen to keep the boat smelling fresh. I also helped put a cover on a boat in San Leandro for my PTS, my parents company up in the mountains. This involved climbing over a twelve foot high gate at the San Leandro Marina, but was kind of fun.

Friday night I met up with a friend in Oakland at my new favorite Belgian beer bar that is on the other side of the tube in Oakland, The Trappist. Not a bad spot with many, many beers to choose from and drink. Also a good crowd of young Oakland hipsters and beer drinkers to check out.

The fourth itself was a non-stop kind of day. First it was off to Dina's work to drop some food off for the folks who had to work on the holiday. Then after breakfast at Jim's it was off to the always amusing Alameda 4th of July parade where we got to watch Ajax try to figure out just exactly what a horse was.

"No Ajax, it's not a dog"

From there it was over to Kirsten and RT's place in Oakland for bar-b-q and drinks before taking the bus down to the Berkeley Marina to watch the fireworks on a friends boat.

Sunday we took City Lights out for a day sail with a bunch of friends. This was another great day on the bay as we reached around the bay at ten knots, pushing buttons to make the sails work, and giving everybody a chance to drive.

Rich, Jeff, and Jim out on City Lights

We also hooked up with some friends sailing there Schumacher 54 Cinnabar for a little informal drag racing across the slot. Needless to say we took it way more seriously than they did (they where sailing with a reef in) and we soon put them behind.

Eat our wake Cinnabar

Summer is here...

2009-06-29T07:58:00.000-07:00

I was out of town yet again this last weekend, but I think that that is it for a few weeks now. Back to being a homebody and settling down for a while.

We did the final spring Encinal Yacht Club Friday night race on Gonzo before heading out though. This one was a little different in that we had a couple of new folks on board as well as Jeff, Cameron, and I. We had Karen drive down from Stockton, as well as Dave who sails on City Lights out with us. This was good as it allowed me just to go ahead and shoot video the whole time without actually being involved with the actual sailing of the boat. Hopefully I can get some of the video up soon.

After the race we stopped by for a visit on the bot that has been our neighbor for the last three weeks. The boat is called Festina Lente and is on it's second circumnavigation of the world. The owner comes form not very far away from where I used to live in England and has a very interesting story to tell. Hopefully we didn't make to much of a pain of an ass of our selves, but it was a very fun night.

The weekend itself was spent up in the mountains again at my folks place. I needed to get some more of the canvas work that I had sold finished up, and Dina just needed a couple of days off. This being summer up in the foothills though it really bought out the heat for the first time in a while. It hit 99 on Saturday and 102 yesterday. Not really weather conducive to canvas work sadly.

Too hot for dogs

We did try one new thing Saturday night and that was to camp outdoors on the property that my folks have. We erected this really cool six person, three room, open top tent that they have.

The Tent from the house

Then blew up a couple of air mattresses, and tried to make the best of roughing it outdoors. Of course we had to set the tent up about thirty feet away from the house in case Dina had to go to the bathroom, and god knows I didn't want to get out of wifi range from the house (Just kidding).

It ended up being a little bit of a bust as Ajax really couldn't settle down enough to let us sleep. Dina ended up moving back into the house with him, but I toughed it out. The only problem for me was the fact that I had to keep re-inflating my air mattress with the battery powered inflater as it had a slow leak in it. Still I considered it a success as I got to sleep under the stars, which were in full view through the open roof.

Roughing it with the battery powered air bed inflater

We are now back in Alameda and ready for a short week of work. There is no Wednesday night racing going on for a few weeks which kind of sucks, but Dave has challenged us to a match race on Wednesday night on his new to him Moore 24. I figure with I use my big headsail and he uses his small one it should be about right upwind. Not to sure about what we are going to do about the downwind though.

Final spring race

2009-06-25T07:37:00.000-07:00

Enough of this ocean racing stuff, last night it was back to the Estuary for the final Wednesday night Oakland Yacht Club race of the spring. We now have three or four weeks off till the summer series starts. What we will do with our time, I have no idea.

Dina and the boys took Gonzo out last Friday for a rare visit down to the lower end of the Estuary and the Island Yacht Club for their race. It sounds like they had a good time. Sid from the loft drove with Jeff, Cameron, and Dina pulling the strings. They claimed to have done well, but all I know is when I got to the boat on Tuesday I found Dina's bra wrapped around the mast compression post down below. They all claim it had something to do with holding a Wine bottle in place for the race...

Yep, that looks like a drink holder to me

Last nights race was one of the windier ones this spring so we started with the small jib. The small jib is such a better sail than the bigger sail as it allows us to point higher and I find it easier to drive to. It was just Jeff, Cameron and I figured it was my turn to drive. The wind was a little more North than usual which meant not just tacking up, but gybing down the Estuary.

Check out the newly installed drink holder...

I was a little early for the start but Vince on Morning Dew let me off the hook and didn't push me over as he could have. But this meant that we got compressed against the Alameda side right after the start and after a couple of tacks and a small duck we once again found ourselves slogging upwind in bad air from the bigger boats in our fleet. It usually takes me about half a leg to get dialed in driving, although we could go out early and practice I suppose, and this was no exception. We did however manage to keep in touch with some boats this time, actually trading tacks with a Moore 24 most of the way up.

Jeff and Cameron doing that thing they do

Jeff and Cameron got us a good set and we had a pretty good run, making a few small gains on the bigger boats. Our gybe at the offset mark was particularly well executed as we had to harden up right afterwards to clear the start/finish line. Not everybody made it, with Vince having to drop his kite and come back to clear himself. Jeff also made a perfect lay line call on the start/finish buoy as we completed our first lap.

Following the fleet

The second lap was when the fun really began. We were coming up to the weather mark just off of Jack London when the spinnaker fell of the boat and began dragging behind. It was a bitch getting it back on board as both it and the bag where completely full of water. Jeff was a little down on himself for not clipping the bag on, but it really didn't hurt us in the end. On the plus side the sail did look really cool all shiny and wet in the evening sun.

Our shiny wet spinnaker on port gybe!

The highlight though was probably our perfectly executed "Mexican" spinnaker takedown at the bottom mark. Jeff was driving and Cameron and I absolutely nailed it. It was a nice complement to our Mexican beer we all thought and we definitely impressed the hell out of the Colgate 28 that rounded at the same time as us.

So that ends our Spring 2009 Oakland Yacht Club series. We may have ended up 4th in the PHRF greater than 100 fleet, which considering that we are the second smallest boat in the fleet is ok. I think our boat handling is maybe the best in the fleet, and I know for sure that we are laughing and having more fun than the rest of the fleet.

For the summer series we hope to have some work done on the boat and hopefully in the light we will be a little more competitive. Watch this space...

The End

Coastal Cup recap

2009-06-22T22:07:00.000-07:00

Well the whole idea of doing an online running commentary through twitter turned out to be a bit of a bust. I was just to busy, and then we got to far off shore. So anyway here is my story of the 2009 Coastal Cup.

I have to say I was a little surprised to arrive at Ocelot on Thursday morning to find that our new bowsprit was only just then being bolted into place. Stuff like that really gets you wondering about the readiness of the program. What else has been left to the last minute and may or not be ready to go during the race? As it turned out everything worked out fine, but it was an interesting first impression.

Greg and Catherine testing the new bowsprit on the morning of the race

Our start was pretty interesting with us getting fouled pretty badly by the Andrews 70 Alchemy. Alchemy came down on us while setting up for the start and forced us to bear away to avoid them hitting us. In their defense I don't think that they even saw us till we started yelling at them, and the driver certainly reacted fast enough once he saw us. We protested them but Kevin lost the flag as he tried to show it to them so we eventually flew a red oven mitt off the backstay for the race.

We started with the #3 but changed down to the #1 shortly after crossing under the bridge in 5th place out of the 13 in our division. We carried the #1 for a while and then as the wind went aft we changed to the jib-top. This was maybe 90 minutes into the race and we had already done two headsail changes. The wind soon had come up and we were sailing with the jib-top at ten knots down the coast. Soon though, much sooner than usual in these ocean races the wind had continued to build and swing aft so we decided to put up the A5 fractional kite. Soon we were blasting along the coast with a pretty big swell that had come up.

Some not so big swell and our protest oven mitt

The wind and seas continued to come up and we soon changed to the masthead A4 kite and then the fun really started. Pretty soon we were doing steady high teens with regular bursts into the twenties. I did not see it but the other watch claimed a high speed of 24.7 kts at one point. Ocelot seemed to just love these conditions. Just smashing along with long sustained runs at 18kts plus. The boat seemed in plenty of control, albeit very wet with water rolling back into the cockpit every time we would stuff the bow into the wave in front of us. The waves were actually a little to close together as we would regularly have our speed runs halted by running into the backs of them.

It was so wet that I actually had my inflatable life jacket go off at one point, so did a couple of others on the crew at various times also. We also managed to set off the on deck EPIRB as well as it got under water sitting in aft sheet bag. It only beeped a couple of times before we shut it down but we still called in to tell the EPIRB people that we were in fact ok and that it was a false alarm.

Ocelot crew hard at work

We also had at this point one of the best wipeouts I have ever done on a boat. Chris was driving and we got a little crossed up by the waves. I was sitting on the low side grinding and as we went across the the wave I looked down at what must have been a 20+ft drop sideways down the face of wave. The boat seemed like it just fell sideways into the trough of the wave with a pretty good crash, I think any doubts about the structural integrity of the boat might have left me at this point as Ocelot just seemed to shake it off, turn back down wind and then take off on another howling surf as if nothing had happened. I was impressed.

A little while later we had another spinout in which the A4 decided that enough was enough and split into several pieces. We had seen a hole in the sail earlier, and had talked about changing down as the winds were picking up, but had not made the move. Blowing the kite up made that call for us. One of the funnier things of this whole exercise was that I didn't have spike to trip the tack off of the pole and was using a screwdriver instead. This meant that once I tripped the tack and then ran back to help gather the kite I had to try and stuff this screwdriver somewhere in order to not tear up the spinnaker more.

After putting the A5 back up we got into our 3 on, 3 off, watch schedule and settled in for the evening. We had several more roundups as we went into the evening, but the boat seemed to come out of them ok. I had the 10pm to 1am watch and tried to get some sleep, but it was never going to happen. The noise and the motion of the boat, the fact that somebody was either coming on or going off watch every hour made it impossible to sleep. That and the facts that I was soaking wet and had been since about the third hour of the race, and that I knew I would have to go on watch soon enough made sleep impossible to come by.

Daniel driving with a big mess in the cockpit

It was late in my watch that after another small roundup we noticed that the spinnaker sheet had gotten over the boom and was sawing away at the leech of the main. In order to deal with this we would grind the main in and then try to flick the sheet under the boom. Of course on one of these we got a big puff while the main was sheeted in and rounded the boat up again. In the ensuing carnage we tore the A5 and then proceeded to lose the whole sail and the spinnaker sheets over the side. This pretty much ended our big night of high speed sailing as we no longer had any of our heavy weather spinnakers left. We put up the Jib-Top and settled into a slightly slower, we were still hitting 18kts regularly, but way more controlled ride south.

I came back on watch at 4am and even though it was still blowing in the high twenties we decided to put up our A2 full size runner. This actually worked out ok because as the sun came up the wind dropped a little bit and although at the top of the A2's range we could handle it for the most part. Eventually we even got bored enough to put up a spinnaker staysail inside the A2 for a little more power.

Nice clean high speed wake

Shortly after dawn we also crossed paths with the Andrews 56 Cipango as they were heading back out to sea as we were heading in just past Pt. Conception. We knew we had lost a bunch of time due to not having our heavy kites up for about four hours during the night, but we also figured that everybody else would also have had some problems of there own. As to where we stood in the fleet we had no idea so to be able to see the bigger Cipango head out behind us was a big morale booster for us.

We tried to find the right line between staying off shore with the breeze and inshore heading for Catalina the best we could and did several gybes as tried to thread the needle down the coast. At one point we got about 50 miles offshore before heading back in towards the finish. We also crossed Cipango again, and this time decided that we should start to cover them a little bit as they gave us a good benchmark and something to concentrate on. After a couple of covering gybes we finally got the ideal conditions for us to drag race Cipango in, and despite having picked up some kelp on our keel we sailed through them in nice marginal planing conditions that suited our lighter weight perfectly.

As night fell the wind also began to drop and shift about quite a bit. This led to some pretty funny conversations between Bill and Greg as to what to do. Bill got pissed that Greg kept waking him up on his off watch and Greg was upset that Bill didn't want to gybe away from the mark in order to cover Cipango. We did get them to agree to change down to the A1 though as by now the wind was getting a lot lighter as it got darker. Soon after dark however we could no longer put it off and we put the A1 away and put the #1 jib up. Now the wind shifted and died and tried to find the favored tack into Catalina which was about 45 miles dead upwind.

Kevin driving on the second day

In the moonless night and with not terribly reliable instruments and navigational data it became a bit of a struggle to keep the boat pointed in the right direction. At one point it came down to me sitting in the companionway watching the GPS and telling Bill, your to high, your to low, or this is a good course. Non of the three course readouts could give us accurate data, and our actual compass was not lighted for whatever reason.

Greg though finally came on watch and got us a number on a display that worked well enough to point us in the right direction and I finally chose to drive for a while as I seemed to have a knack for driving purely off the instruments well enough. Of course this was driving while close reaching in four knots of breeze, but hey, I had fun.

I went down off watch at 1 am only to be woken up at 2 and told to go lie on the low side as the the wind had died down to nothing. Then at 3 am I was woken up again and told that we needed to get the code zero up. The code zero was a sail that we had just built for this race, and it was why we had put on the bowprit. Of course we had not practiced with the thing or for that matter even bothered to unflake it from when it was delivered from the loft. So Kevin and I got the whole thing set up and hoisted. The results were pretty impressive right from the get go and once we got the thing dialed in a little we were doing between 6 and 7 kts upwind in 3 and 4 kts of breeze.

With the code zero up and pulling we made it to the finish line at 450 am on Saturday morning. We then had to motor another 2 and 1/2 hours to Avalon and our mooring after finishing. As we pulled into Avalon we noticed Cipango already moored which was a bit of bummer as we had lost track of them during the night, but as it turned out they hadn't been there long.

Ocelot On the mooring in Avalon

In the end we finished 2nd in division A and 5th overall. Not a bad result all things considered. Congratulations to the division A winners, the Andrews 45 Locomotion, which beat us by 5 hours boat for boat. Locomotion sailed a hell of a race, finishing less than ten minutes behind Alchemy and beating the TP-52 Flash boat for boat!

2009 Coastal Cup tomorrow

2009-06-17T15:23:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the lack of posts here lately, things have been a little to crazy the last few weeks. I have been out of town for the last four weekends, and will be again for the next three. Gotta love the summer.

Last weekend I was back up at my folks place to do a little more work for them at their canvas business. Just for a couple of days this time though.

My Mom working on a canvas job

This week however will be a short week for me at work, actually it is already done. But if you count the days at my folks place I did work ten straight days. So, leaving early and taking a couple of days off is ok, right?

Tomorrow I am off to do the Coastal Cup from here on San Francisco Bay down to the Island of Catalina off of Long Beach. My ride for this one will be the very modified Wylie 44 Ocelot. Ocelot started life off as a cat rigged boat, but has been since converted to a regular sloop rig, but with a lot more sail area with big masthead spinnakers. There are six of us doing the race and you can follow the track here from the Encinal Yacht Club website.

Ocelot racing on the Bay

Another thing I am going to try is to provide updates via Twitter, which if it works as I think it should will allow me to send in text message updates as we go down the coast. Of course how well this works will depends on a lot of factors, some of which are cell signal, battery life and recharging issues, how much spare time I will have, how much the rest of the crew will put up with me fucking around on the phone, etc... Anyway it should be a fun way to follow the race down.

Hopefully if the wind holds and we sail the boat well enough we should get into Catalina Saturday sometime. The plan is to fly back Sunday night so hopefully we will have at least one night to play in Avalon.

Spring Beer Can Racing

2009-06-14T09:04:00.000-07:00

Once again I am up in the mountains at my folks place.

I drove up here last night to once again to help out on some of the PTS stuff we are doing. I have to say it is a lot different driving up here at night, as opposed to in the daylight. At night you are just driving off of the little yellow dots in the middle of the road, or off of the dots on the trees and reflective signs on the side of the roads. It is kind of like the old Night Driver video game...

Up here in the mountains you get some really cool light early in the morning, and seeing that Ajax had me awake just after first light this morning, this was cool to see. Lots of long misty shadows coming through the trees. The air is also very clear up here, so it was also a great night for stargazing. Maybe tonight I will break out the big Telescope that they have up here and check out the stars

Morning light at my folks place

We did have a couple of very fun beer can races this week. There were four of us on Wednesday with Jessie again joining Jeff, Cameron, and I. Cameron drove and I got to do bow and take photos. This was an interesting race in that they sent us down into the hole. That is the course that takes us down and almost behind Government Island. This course is a little unusual in that it actually requires boats to gybe, something that doesn't happen a lot on the Estuary.

Some boats gybe better than others

We finished fourth in our fleet across the line, but for some reason they gave us a gun. Not sure what that was all about, but we got a good laugh out of it. We ended up fifth in the results with a Santana 22 that was just starting its second lap when we finished correcting out on us! Obviously this was not the race committee's finest hour. At this point though we don't even bother looking at the results or fighting with the committee.

The afterguard, Jessie, Cameron, and Jeff

We did finally get our spinnaker halyard issues sorted out. It did take one more trip up the mast right before we left the dock, but by installing a bigger halyard with a nicer taper it seems that we have got that problem licked once and for all. At least it has worked fine both times since then.

Liem crossing the fleet at the start

Friday night we raced in the Encinal series as the Farr 40 was not going out. They actually offered to let me take the Farr, but I figured that even the insurance deductable on that thing was out of my income range. Dina joined Cameron, Rich, and I for the race, which was a rare treat, as she has not been going out with us a lot this season.

With the wind up a little and with Dina on board we decided to use the smaller of our two headsails for the race. The smaller jib is the newer of the sails and was actually cut for the furler from new. So, low and behold we actually had better performance with the smaller jib. Despite me stuffing up the start we managed to hold our lane on the first beat for the first time in a while. Usually we have to tack a couple more times compared to everyone else, but this time we actually managed to squeeze another boat off while going to weather.

Winners of the Estuary Goblet Cup

I think we ended up second for the race, but I think if we get the rig tuned right, that is somebody other than me does it, we should start to see some better results here in the near future.

Couda Been a Contender.

2009-06-09T21:43:00.000-07:00

Ok, here is my somewhat overdue report on the Delta Ditch Run.

I have been putting this one off for a few days because I had to think about it a little bit before writing this. While in every respect this was a very good Ditch Run a couple of things happened that had me thinking about this one a little more than usual.

First however we had to do the Friday night race on the Farr 40. This was run out of the Island Yacht Club further down the Estuary than the usual Encinal and Oakland races. For whatever reason the Island YC race committee set a line that was way to short, maybe about a hundred feet long. Since there was a bunch of boats starting including us and another 4o fter. Things were bound to get a little squeezed. We got to the line a little early and in the yelling and swerving that happened we ended up shoving the J-124 over early. After that it was a quick tack into the fleet of starboard tackers that all tacked to get out of our way.

Tony, one of the owners of Twisted

I don't know it just seemed to me to be a little bit too much. Here we are on the biggest, fastest boat just throwing our weight around basically because we could. Of course, immediately after the start we are off in our own clean air and out of every body's way, but it kind of left me with a funny feeling.

Now on to the Ditch Run itself. Although the forecast had been for lighter breeze, it turned out to be one of the windier years we have had. We sailed with 9 people on board which actually turned out ok for us. I got to do bow, which despite more wind than usual turned out to be relatively easy this year. One of the big stories in the Ditch Run is the number of gybes you do. This year we did a relatively low 22 gybes. Which with the exception of one we nailed every one of them. The one we missed I managed to get the guy wrapped around the pole, but we recovered from it quickly enough so no harm done.

M did a great job in the pit all day

We were the second fleet to start behind the ultra-lights, and quickly started working our way into the lead group. We actually made it all the way across San Pablo Bay and almost to the Carquinez Straits before our first gybe. A huge difference from last year were we probably did a least a dozen gybes before the first set of bridges.

Looking back at the fleet in San Pablo Bay

We seemed to have some issues going through the Straits with the strong puffs constantly catching our spinnaker trimmers out. There is a whole bunch of pictures out there of us going through the Straits and in most of them our kite always seems out of sorts. To be sure we weren't the only ones but it definitely hurt us.

Working our way through the A fleet boats

Into Susuin Bay we were the third place mono-hull behind the Melges 32 and the Santa Cruz 37, Javelin. Soon however we ground down the Santa Cruz and were into second. It was just after this point that I actually saw the Santa Cruz hit the bottom hard enough for her transom to come about two feet out of the water. They just hit, did a nice pirouette around their keel, and then slid back on over to the deeper water. No real damage done, but they never got close enough to bother us again.

Catching Javelin and the Melges 32

After that it was just us and the Melges 32 in front of us. We went through the last bridge about four minutes behind them, which meant that we had been catching them as they started five minutes ahead of us, but we never seemed to really gain on them after that. Also once we got into the twisty part of the Delta proper and they got of our direct line of sight we seemed to ease up on trying to catch them.

In fact I thought we eased up to much for the rest of the ride up. Spinnaker trim always seemed to be a problem, and we always delayed setting right away or going to our various code zero sails, instead staying with the same old jib whenever we took the spinnaker down. I felt that had we pushed a little more we should have been able to catch the 32, or at the very least been able to have a better time than them. Sadly not everybody on the boat seemed to feel that way.

In the end we finished with an elapsed time of 7:02.02, about six and a half minutes behind the Melges which just missed the course record of 6:57. I was kind of bummed about the result because I felt we left a lot of time behind on the race course.

Twisted at the dock in Stockton

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the race, and the party afterwards, but it was kind of a bummer to have the fastest boat out there, and not have the fastest time, or get the course record. Both of which I believe were there for the taking, especially with some of the crew we had on board.

Ditch Run Stories...

2009-06-04T22:41:00.000-07:00

This has always been my favorite time of the year as far as sailing goes. A couple of weeks ago was the Spinnaker Cup down to Monterrey, usually a good ride, and next weekend is the Delta Ditch Run up to Stockton. Plus throw in all the Wednesday and Friday night races, it is just non stop good times.

Last nights race was the usual good time followed up by a poor result. I had gotten back into town from my moms early enough on Tuesday to dive Gonzo and go up the mast to clear the jammed up spinnaker halyard. My neighbor who has the dive hookah that I borrow to clean the bottom also has a thing called a top-climber for going up the rig. It is kind of a goofy apparatus, but after a little practice I could go up the mast no problem and after a bit of a struggle managed to clear the jammed halyard.

Me up the rig on Gonzo

The worst part of the whole thing was having Ajax who I had thought I had tied up wander off down the dock while I was up the mast. I kept yelling at him but he would just look around at dog eye level and not see me up the rig and just keep on going. Eventually one of the other liveaboards here in the marina bought him back and tied him off for me.

We sailed with four last night with Jessie from Dina's work joining us for the race. Jeff drove and we got an ok start, but to Leeward of everyone in our fleet. We got stuck in bad air for a while and even after a clearing tack we still had problems making the top mark. Eventually as is often the case we began to sag back after keeping in touch for a while and we ended up fourth. It's a little frustrating to watch one of our competitors round the mark with no jib up and carry on down the track for an extra half mile or so till they get themselves sorted on both bottom roundings and still correct out on us by five minutes.

This brings me to this upcoming weekend and the Delta Ditch Run. A 67 mile downwind race to Stockton. Usually this is a really fun race with a good party at the end. This will be something like my tenth Ditch Run and every one of them has been a little different. My first one was on the old Benetau 1 tonner Coyote. We did the race with five people and finished third behind the trimaran Defiance and a Santa Cruz 50. I think we finished just after dark that year.

The next year I did it on the Farr 2 tonner Bravura. I remember we had something like 12-14 people on board and the highlight being a screamingly tight heavy air spinnaker reach to get over the point at Benicia Marina. We were doing something like twelve-fourteen knots, pole on the headstay in flat water with all of us hanging off the aft edge of the rail trying to keep it flat enough to make the point. This on an IOR that was certainly not designed for this.

Bravura

The next one would have been on a 30 foot Nelson/Marek MORC boat called Insufferable. We had 12 on board and finished third overall by something like 3 minutes. I remember the party at the Stockton Sailing Club being particularly good that year.

Josh and Panda partying in Stockton

I think that the next one might have been on a Olson 30 with a couple that I knew from Stockton, my girlfriend of the time and one other person. There seemed to be a really big fleet of Olson 30s and we ended up second in the fleet to finish but corrected out to third for some reason, I think because we had bigger head sails or something. This was a good year because of the good tight fleet racing with six or seven of us being within a mile or so of each other at the finish.

Me, Kathey, Renee, and Chris on the Olson 30

Next was on the Azzura 310 with Jeff Thorpe, the Mativitch brothers, and the late Joakim Jonsson. Jeff absolutely nailed the start and we sailed in the top two or three boats most of the way. This might have been the best sailed race I have done as far as the level of racing that we did. We were second boat for boat behind the J-125 Javelin and were actually close enough behind them to see them run aground a few miles from the finish. They had to be towed out of the trees and ended up dropping out, but we eventually got passed by a Melges 24 to end up second to finish.

Javelin on the rocks from the Azzura

The next two times I did the race were both on Melges 24's. The first one was with four girls, all Europe dinghy sailors, who had borrowed the boat and basically needed someone to help with local knowledge and then to help them break the boat down once we finished. I did end up doing some of the trimming when the breeze picked up across San Pablo Bay. The name of the boat for that race was "Four chicks and Dominic'. The second time was on a boat called Smokin' were we dropped back early but clawed our way back to second before pushing it too far with and ended up tearing the kite during a crash. I think we ended up second to last in the 24 fleet that year. I remember it mostly for being the day that Ronald Reagan died for some reason.

Then it was time to get serious and do the ditch the right way. We took the Santa Cruz 52 City Lights up three years ago. Shoal draft keel, working refrigeration, and some pretty good people all added up to one of the better rides up to Stockton. The best part of this year was the nearly 45 mile long match race with the Santa Cruz 50 Surfer Girl. We were basically overlapped or within a couple of boat length's of them pretty much the first two thirds of the race. We eventually got away from them when we did a better change down to a Genoa for one stretch and got a couple of hundred yard lead on them from which they never recovered. We were first monohull to finish, but corrected out to 90th out of 92 finishers in the end.

A typical Ditch Run scene

Last year however it was time to go the other way as Steve, Jeff, and I raced Steve's Columbia 5.5 Seabiscuit. A slow boat with a great rating was our plan to overall success and we came pretty damn close finishing second overall in a fleet of 127. With it being light and the sport boats not being able to get up and plane it was the perfect year to take the long water lined 5.5. Being able to sail right down the middle of the track at hull speed the whole time while all of these light weight race boats sailed horrible angles across the course was the key. It still took us eleven hours to sail the course, but we had a faster elapsed time than a lot of theoretically faster boats. We actually had a faster time than one of the Melges 24s in the race! That should never had happened.

Jeff, Steve, and I arrive victorious in Stockton

Home away from home

2009-06-01T22:19:00.000-07:00

Been away from the Estuary for the last few days. Have to say, I miss my little floating home on the Bay.

However before leaving on Saturday morning I did manage to squeeze in a Friday night race on the Farr 40. Back when Tony and Mike had the Summer Moon our biggest problem was usually too many people. This time it was too few. We raced the Friday race with six people, and two of those were not real experienced.

You know what? It was just too hard work. A Farr 40 on the Estuary just gets to the marks too fast. Add in the fact that we are still getting used to the boat and every mark rounding was a fire drill. The kite wasn't packed on the first set, we didn't get the jib up soon enough and that led to problems getting the kite down on both bottom roundings. Worse yet, I didn't even have time to finish the beer I opened, just to darn busy. Still it was good night out and with a couple more people onboard who know what they are doing we are going to have a lot of fun on that boat.

On Saturday we drove up to my folks place up in the Sierra foothills. They live on something like forty acre's due east of Stockton, near a town called Mountain Ranch. Where they also are partners in a small store.

Moms little shop of Canvas and Compost

It is truly a great place to go if you want to get away from everything. The point of this whole thing was for Dina to get some time in my mothers shop and start the process of re-doing our cockpit cushions. It is also a chance for me to get some experience with the type of work that my folks do, something that I may be doing more of here in the future.

My folks have a custom canvas production business called Precision Technical Sewing (PTS). This is a little more than your typical marine canvas place. They do some pretty cool stuff up here. Some of the clients they have include NASA, Stanford University, as well as some local stuff. They run it out of a couple of the buildings here on the property and they seem to be doing well with it.

Plotter building

Sewing workshop

The last couple of days I have been working on some of the projects that they have going on. It has been fun working the plotter, and trying to figure out how to put together some of the fabric things they have going on.

The plotter in action

Another thing that they have up here is one of those endless pools, a smallish pool that has a motor that pushes a constant stream of water. This means that you can swim in place for exercise. It does take some getting used to, but it is kind of cool.

Endless pool boy

I have another day up here before heading back down to the Estuary. It has been a few good days of learning new things, and good healthy country living. nothing beats moms home cooking. But I am ready to get back to the water and do some sailing.

Stinking up the joint

2009-05-28T21:21:00.000-07:00

Last night was a Wednesday night race like we haven't had in a while.

For openers, there was little bit more breeze than typical and from a different direction than usual as well. Also for the first time this spring the race committee gave us a course other than course two. This meant the long course with an offset mark. As is becoming the norm for Wednesday night it was just Jeff, Cameron, and I. I keep inviting folks to come play, but nobody ever does.

We watched the first two starts, including a very interesting Columbia 5.5 start in which at least two boats were over early, but since the committee didn't call it only Kevin turned back while Adam kept going. As for our start, it was my turn to drive and boy did I stuff it up badly. We got a little too far down the line and I had to turn down to kill speed and as result kind of got us pinned up against the shore right after the gun. This resulted in a huge duck of a starboard tacker on the way back out.

Of course this allowed our main competition to get away from us. Usually we get a good start and hold these guys off for a while. Not this time though. We had an ok first beat and came into the top mark to do a rare, for the Estuary, bear away set. Unfortunately we had all kinds of problems on the set as the spin halyard jumped the shieve, and we tore the kite on the way up.

A no wake buoy is the weather mark!

So now we are sailing with a big hole in the kite and a long way back from our principle competition. It could have been worse I suppose, one of our competitors missed the wind shift, gybe-set, and then had to crash gybe right away to get away from the shore. I figured that the kite would hold up for the run, but had forgotten about the fact that we would have to head up quite a bit to clear the restricted start-finish line after the offset mark. We also had the issue of whether the kite would come down or not?

Jeff trimming the kite.

As it turns out we got one out of the two. The kite held, but the halyard didn't come down as we rounded and headed to a wingmark across the Estuary. With Jeff and I both pulling on the thing we got it down far enough to unclip the sail, but the halyard is still jammed in the shieve. I was feeling kind of bummed that the boat had not been set up right and told those guys that if they wanted to bail it was ok with me. Both of them said they were cool with carrying on as we had enough beer and good enough wind.

Cameron, beer and tiller in hand.

For the second upwind rounding we dropped the jib, untied the halyard that was on the roller furling swivel, and tied that to our back up kite. The back up kite is the original HONEYBEAR kite that came with the boat.

HONEYBEAR?

It's a very pridefull red, orange, yellow, and blue affair that was probably built during the last days of the Ford administration. Still it did what it was supposed to and got us around the course ok. In some ways we might sail better with the honeybear kite as we are all so busy not looking at other boats to hide our shame that we might concentrate more on our own sailing.

Two old tired sails.

After an early drop, untie of halyard, re-tie halyard to jib, hoist jib rounding we finally finished the race. Despite all of these and some other problems, such as a broken tiller extension, a slipping too small jib halyard, and some horrible rig tune issues. I don't think that Jeff, Cameron, and I ever stopped laughing the whole time. It was actually one of the more fun races I have done in a while. Mostly because of the attitudes of the two guys I was sailing with. We were just happy to be out there sailing, racing, drinking beer, and talking shit.

We ended up sixth for the race, by far our worst result of the year. It's funny to hear the guys on the Islander 36 who have been winning the races talk in the bar. They get horrible starts, their sails and boat handling are average at best, and they sail with a dirty bottom. Yet because they are by the far the biggest boat in our fleet they soon pass everyone and sail away to the win. But to hear them talk about it it is all because they are sailing better than everyone else. But, whatever, it will give us motivation to get the boat sorted out better and go out and beat them.

Spinnaker Cup

2009-05-25T22:01:00.000-07:00

Last Friday I did the Spinnaker Cup, a nice little 88 mile race from San Francisco down to Monterrey. This is one of the more fun downwind coastal races out of the bay. It is the earliest of the three coastal races, and as such it is usually the windiest. I actually wrote a blog post about the 2006 race as one of my all time favorite races.

My ride this year was the Farr 40 Twisted. This was our first real race for Twisted as the boat had only been splashed here in the bay a week before. While we all hoped to do well, I think that we all viewed the trip as more of a shakedown run, and a chance to get to know the boat better as much as anything. The forecast leading up to the race had been a bit of a mixed bag, some southerlies (bad), and generally lighter than hoped. As it turned out the forecast was mostly spot on. We started off in a southerly, but it slowly clocked around and we got the kite up about a quarter way down the track. It was however a little lighter than hoped.

As we were the second start we got to sit back and watch the fun that is the big boats starting. The line was very biased towards the committee boat end and as a result there was a huge pile up. Three of the class zero boats got squeezed out and had to restart, but the best part was watching our friends on the big red boat, Cinnabar, lead the fleet off the line.

Cinnabar leads the A fleet

Our start was also a little frantic with Mike driving and Patrick calling a pretty sweet start of our own. We did shove the Sydney 38 Low Speed Chase over the line, but it was there own fault as they got there a little early and had nowhere else to go. As is often the case in these situations some pleasantries were exchanged, but it was all in good fun and they have probably forgiven us by now.

We led the fleet out of the bay and then set off down the coast. As I said earlier the first part of the race was all upwind. We had the medium headsail up at the start and continued to use it as we headed down the coast. We had figured that we would be changing to the light as we got out the Gate, but the wind held as we began our uphill slog towards Monterrey. We managed to sail into the tail-enders of the A fleet before the wind began to slowly shift around enough to begin thinking about off wind sails.

At first we went to a code zero type headsail, but even as we were putting it up we knew that we were going to be putting up the spinnaker right away. Due to some confusion with the local rating people though we couldn't fly our masthead spinnakers, just the fractional ones. As a result the boat never really got going in the moderate breezes that we ended up sailing in. One thing that surprised me was how much a Farr 40 loads up. Even in windspeed in the low to mid-teens the boat felt loaded up and hard to get going. I would imagine Twisted is going to be a handful to manage in any kind of breeze in the ocean. The boat also fell into and out of trim very fast. It is a hard boat to keep going fast.

Christine, Anne, Paul, and Tony

They actually let me drive for a short period but I fired myself pretty quickly as we got caught and passed by another boat almost immediately. It was hard for me to get dialed in with the wind and the waves, and I found it hard to keep the boat on track. I thought that I got better as I went, but I was pretty relieved when Mike came back on deck and I could hand the helm off to someone else.

We did get pretty close to the Antrim 40 XL to get some good pictures at about this point, but they then gybed into the beach and we never saw them again after that. We also had to choose whether to go into the beach or stay offshore ourselves. Inshore usually pays on this race, but the winds had not been normal and after much discussion we decided to stay offshore in the breeze that we were in and hoped that it hadn't filled in more on the shore. We eventually ended up between twelve and fifteen miles View Larger Map" offshore, but it seemed to pay as we had wind the whole time.

The Antrim 40 XL

The coolest part for me was the ride across Monterrey Bay after the sun went down. It was moonless with a low cloud cover. So it was almost impossible to see the spinnaker luff in those conditions so trimming became a real issue. We drove almost completely by the numbers on the instruments. 145-150 true wind angle seemed to be the magic number. I had heard about people just driving off of the numbers at night before but this was the first time I had really seen it.

Patrick called us a really nice angle into Monterrey, which conveniently enough is where he is from and learned to sail, and we finished with the kite up at about midnight. We were first to finish in our division correcting out to third in our division of eleven, and tenth overall out of fifty-seven total in the fleet. So at least we did get a podium finish on our first ocean race. Hopefully the first of many.

Team Gonzo in mid-season form...

2009-05-21T07:52:00.000-07:00

Last night was one of the better Wednesday nights of the year so far. Just a good mellow boat race on the Estuary in what turned out to be really nice conditions.

Jeff, Cameron, and I represented team Gonzo as a threesome last night. I think four is probably the ideal number for Estuary races, but five doesn't hurt us. Three is tough as it is nice to have the extra hand for busy mark roundings, especially for spinnaker take-downs.

Going to be a crowd at the bottom mark

As we have no watch between the three of us I end up using my phone to get the countdown to the start. This works ok until the screen saver kicks in and we lose the countdown, usually at some critical moment. Seeing as I am the one who knows how to operate the phone best, and I then like to hit the tracker button right as we start it is usually easier to have someone else drive. Last night it was Cameron's turn.

Cameron and Jeff, the "A" team

Cameron got us a great start, crossing the fleet on port with speed just at the gun. One of our neighbors here on the dock even commented about it to us afterwards. Jeff has always been able to call good starts for others, he used to do it for Steve on the 5.5, and he and Cameron nailed this one together. One thing I like about the Oakland Yacht club race committee is that they do try to mix things up a little. Last night it was reversing the starting order so that the smaller boats go first with the bigger boats going last.

Watching the 5.5s start

Sometimes they will try reverse courses so we get downwind starts as well. Not everything they do works, but at least they try new things and I am all for that.

Being in front of the fleet on the first beat really allowed us to sail our own race for once. We did get rolled by an Islander 36, who you would think should be racing against the 37 fters in the A fleet, late in the beat but it was one of the better first legs we have had in a long time. A really sweet gybe-set at the top mark and we were off downwind maybe two boat lengths behind the Islander, who had a badly wrapped spin.

Still on a one-sided Estuary course like we had last night waterline is king and the Islander eventually began to sail away from us. We also got caught by a Moore 24 which my friend Dave has just bought into.

Dave's Moore not in mid-season form

Since it was only his second or third time racing on the boat, and since they owed us a ton of time and were behind us, I started giving him advice on how to set things up better. We had him adjust his pole and twing trim, and got them a little better situated in the boat. This turned out to be a mistake as they sailed away from us big time on the second run.

A good drop at the bottom with traffic all around us set us up for a relatively uneventful second lap, which was highlighted by what might have been the best gybe-set we have ever done on Gonzo. These roundings have led to some discussion on board as to whether we should replace the furling headstay or not. It has been so nice just to bang the jib away on the furler, or wait till the last second to unroll it at the bottom mark.

Jib on furler coming into bottom mark

But we do loose a little bit of sail area, and we are carrying the weight of the drum and the aluminum headstay. Making a really nice racing head sail and getting the rig tuned right are going to be priorities, but furler or no furler needs to be decided soon.

The final highlight of the race was a very fun drag race to the finish against a Cal 29 that rounded maybe five seconds behind us. Once again Cameron did a nice job driving and we held them off to cross the line maybe 2 or 3 seconds ahead. Our final result was third with the Islander and the Moore both saving their time on us.

Drag racing the Cal 29

As is almost a tradition for post Wednesday night racing we then headed over to Calafia Taqueria over on Webster street here in Alameda. Very Tasty soft taco's for $1.85 each. Three of those and a Pacifico is the best way to wind down after a mid-week Estuary race.

Calafia Taqueria

Warm Weekend Fun

2009-05-19T07:06:00.000-07:00

It has been a warm couple of days here down on the boat. At least being on the water gives us some cooling breeze and that helps a bit.

Friday night I got out on Tony and Mikes' new to them Farr 40 for it's maiden race. We did the Island Yacht club race which is probably the smaller of the various Estuary beer can races. This meant that we were by far the biggest boat out there, almost obnoxiously so. Since it was the first time that the boat, which will be called Twisted (follow the link from here), had been out things were taken a little conservatively for the most part. Also since it was the first time out for the boat we had about ten extra family and friends aboard, which made it more fun.

Twisted (ex-Victrix)

We flew the code zero instead of the spinnaker the first couple of times downwind, before finally putting up a kite for the last downwind run. I hooked up what I had been told was the masthead kite only for us to discover that in fact it was a fractional kite. This meant a quick bareheaded change as Farr 40's only have a single masthead halyard. Still it was a good night out and I think that we will have a lot of fun on this boat in the future. The joke is that my official job on the boat will be 'media officer", so hopefully I will be taking some video and pictures as we go along.

Saturday was spent up at Tom and Barbara's house in the Oakland hills. T+B have an awesome house and we have been kind of housesitting for them as they slowly transition to a new place. The view alone would make this house fantastic, but the house itself is also really nice. It's one of those places were everything is just done right. The layout, and the way space is used, things like that. It is kind of hard to explain, but once you spend some time there you begin to realize that the way everything works together has been very well thought out and executed.

The only bummer about our stay up there was the eating of Dina's Blackberry by Ajax.

Blackberries yum...

It already had a couple of teeth marks in it from a previous attempt, but he finished it off completely this time. However the pork loin that Dina prepared and that we ate on the outdoor patio almost made up for it.

Sunday was Dina's birthday and after a morning of running around getting Dina a new phone, and some light house(boat?) cleaning we had Kirsten and RT over for dinner and a couple of drinks. RT did a tri-tip on the bar-b-q which was excellent.

Bar-B-Q on the bow

Another thing that happened on Sunday was that Ajax has all of a sudden decided that it is ok to go up on the bow of the boat, something that he had never shown any interest in doing before.

Kirsten and Ajax on the bow

Sunday's party turned out to be a good one. Kirsten even got out on the kayak for a while, although getting into it proved a little problematic, and we had to give her a blanket to keep her warm and dry later. I think the final tally of empties yesterday morning was 1 twelve pack of Tecate, 3 bottles of wine, 1 bottle of Champagne, and a bottle of rum. the rum and the at least one of the bottles of wine had already been opened, so it might not be as bad as it sounds.

On a final note a strange thing happened to my bike over the weekend. It seems that somebody tried to steal the rear wheel off of it. They got the nuts off the rear axle, but couldn't get the screw off of the coaster break. they did however leave some of the nuts and washers lying around so I have about half of the parts back. Strange goings on indeed...

Who stole my nut's?

The Graduate

2009-05-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

I will spare you the details of last Wednesday's Estuary race, we got third and my fancy race tracker thing didn't work, and go back in time to graduation weekend and all that went down then.

I was a little nervous going into graduation weekend for a couple of reasons. One, I had a small doubt about whether I was going to pass one of my classes, and two, we had so many people in town for the event. We had Dina's mother and brother, my Dad and Pauline, of course my Mother, Josh, and Joe were going to be around, then throw in Pete, Deb, and Steve who all made trips out for the party.

DEB

I had been told that I was going to be receiving some kind of special award and that I should be at school three hours before graduation to receive this award. I figured the award was some kind of certificate for making the Deans list, so I really didn't think it was that big of a deal. As it turns out the award was for "students in the maritime community who excel in maritime education and have the potential to be future maritime leaders". Hmm, who knew? It also came with a $1000 check! Apparently the look on my face when they called my name was pretty good.

Thank you very much.

The rest of the day went really well. I think this might have been the first time in twenty something years that my mother and father had been in the same room at the same time, so it was fun to give them the tour of the campus and have them watch me graduate. Sadly the ship had been declared off limits, due to Swine Flu concerns, but the rest of the campus was open and all went well, and I ended up receiving my diploma without any drama.

The Graduate

Sunday was the day of the big party. We had some rain early in the morning and although the forecast said it was going to clear up later the decision was made to move the party over to gate eleven here at Marina Village. The gate eleven folks have a pretty sweet set up with a covered patio area, barb-b-q grills, and a fire pit all in place. This turned out to be a pretty

inspired move as everything went perfect once we got going.

Dina and I

It was great that so many people showed up. I figure that we had between 75 and a 100 people show up in the end. Lot's of old friends, lot's of sailing friends, lot's of family.

Jeff, Pete, Me, and Steve

We ended up staying out late, singing songs by the fire pit, which was actually a tub from a washing machine mounted on a steel frame.

I pretty much cleaned up on the booze front. We have since had to convert our onboard wine rack into a rum rack. The coolest gift however was a jacket that was worn by the Captain of the Titanic, in the movie Titanic, complete with a certificate of authenticity.

Tom and the Captains Jacket

It might be a prop jacket with fake buttons and no liner, but it was really fun gift that I got to wear off and on throughout the day, usually taking it off when it got too hot.

All in all a very good couple of days. It was great to see everyone, and it was great to finally graduate. All I need to do now is find a real job.

Good Morning!! woof, woof, Meow... grrr...

2009-05-11T06:38:00.000-07:00

It is way too early here on the Lobster T. It seems that the dog trying to eat the cat at 5am signals wake up time for all of us here in the aft cabin. It's 630 now and Dina has just gotten back from the gym, so as you can see things are moving along way to fast.

Cameron and I did the Encinal Friday night race on Gonzo double handed this time.

Some attempts were made to find more crew, but since the decision to sail was made late it was just the two of us. We seem to be settling into a pattern on these races. A good start, followed by a decent first beat, then we usually lose a boat at about the 1st mark rounding and then just kind of drop back. I wish I could figure out what it is about us that causes us to drop back as the race goes on.

Saturday was leaving day, Dina's mother and brother left on Amtrak early in the morning, then we took Pete to Oakland airport a couple of hours later. This meant that we were guestless for the first time in a couple of weeks. So Saturday became a day of catching up on laundry and general housecleaning. This meant a great purge of all of my school clothes and a lot more closet space. yay...

Saturday night was out to watch the fireworks on our friend Jacks' 73ft Viking motor yacht. I think we probably had 45 people on board, yet the boat didn't seem over crowded at all. I have to admit I really didn't pay that much attention to the fireworks, but they didn't seem to be as good as years past. Still it was great night out and fun was had by all.

I don't really have any more good photos to post so here is a shot of Jeff and I (and my belly) on Wednesday night.

Yesterday we went out on a day sail on City Lights, the Santa Cruz 52. It was actually a really good mellow day sail. No real excitement, other than a couple of rousing 10-11 knot jib reaches across the slot. We had the kite up for a while form about the Bay Bridge to about half way down the Estuary, but took it down when we encountered two large ships in the turning basin near Jack London Square and decided to let them have the right of way.

All in all a good few days, and last night I think I was in bed at 915, dog tired.

Back on the water

2009-05-07T07:30:00.000-07:00

So I did graduate last Saturday with much pomp and family fun, and I will write all about that as soon as I get some pictures sorted out. But just as importantly our first Wednesday night race of the season was last night and it was a good one.

Joining Dina and I on Gonzo this season will be Jeff and Cameron, with Pete making a guest appearance for this race. Sadly it was kind of a small turnout with maybe 30 boats out, it was also pretty light especially at the start. Although it did fill in enough for us to get in a good race.

As is usual with the Oakland Yacht Club things got changed up a little between us picking up the race instructions and the start of the race. They decided to start all the lower rated boats together instead of a separate start for the multihulls and the monohulls. This led to some confusion as we tried to explain to the J-124 that they needed to get out of our way, and them asking if we were sure as there competition sailed away.

Our start consisted of every boat with a phrf rating of 100 or greater that was not in a one design fleet. There was enough flood running so that being early wasn't a problem, so we did a kind of port tack approach, tacked in front of a bunch of boats that were all a running a little late, tacked back over to port at about ten seconds and led the fleet away pretty smartly if I do say so myself.

We rounded second behind an Islander 36 and despite a wrap on the set we still had a better hoist than them. Downwind we had pretty equal boatspeed with the Islander and the two of us extended on the rest of our fleet. After a good drop we had to sail across the Estuary to another mark which required us to tack to clear a pier, the Islander laid the mark without tacking, which was huge gain for them. Then on the long upwind to the weather mark we got a knock about half way up which another boat in our fleet didn't get and they got ended up getting us by the top mark.

We had some problems getting the spinnaker up the second time for some reason. It may have been the that the halyard had jumped off the sheave, but whatever it was we eventually got the kite up. This of course led to some worry as to whether we were going to be able to get the thing down at the bottom mark, and what we would have to do if in fact we couldn't get it down. However the crack foredeck team of Pete, Jeff, and Dina got it all worked out and the sail came down after a couple of mighty tugs.

In the end we ended up third which was probably a fair result all things considered. Still it was great to be back out on the water on Wednesday night and I am really looking forward to doing 15 more of these this summer.

I have this really cool application on my phone which tracks and records our races and then puts them on top of google earth. We didn't get the first lap, but here is the record of the second lap.

DOG FOR SALE... Cheap

2009-04-30T07:59:00.000-07:00

It seems that our little puppy Ajax has gone and turned into a dog, therefore it might be time to trade him in for something a little more manageable, like a toaster oven.

While undeniably cute he has several issues that any prospective buyers should be aware of. One such issue is his bewildering dietary needs. Sunglasses and remote controls seem to be favored, but shoes are also eaten. He likes to chase things like cats, squirrels, and ducks. which are all normal dog things to of course. Unless they happen at the wrong time, like from moving cars, or at three in the morning. He is a bit of a crotch sniffer, but I figure you could always use that as a basis for teaching him to "sic balls" on command.

He of course has all his shots, and has completed basic training one and two. I have the certificate of completion for basic 2, but he ate the one for basic 1. He also has been microchipped, and thus is ready for assimilation into the Borg.

Ajax, who also answers to "Stupid", is about a year old and thus is at about his maximum cuteness/intelligence ratio. He is kind of like the 19 year old pool boy that suburban housewives keep around, even if they don't have a pool.

One other issue, and the reason I am writing this today, is he also likes to bite the ears of people who are still in bed and that fucking hurts...

Game over

2009-04-28T20:44:00.000-07:00

Well folks it looks like I did it. Today I took my last final at the California Maritime Academy. All that's left is the graduation ceremony itself.

It has been a funny four years. In some ways it has just flown by, but some of it, living in Vallejo, the cruise, just seem like lifetimes ago. Maybe they are just bad memories that I have chosen to repress? Parts of CMA just plain sucked. The completely pointless watches, a couple of really bad teachers. But for the most part I think it was a good experience.

There is no way I would have survived that school at 18, indeed of my incoming freshman class of 380 or so there will be 160 of us graduating on Saturday, and many of these are transfers or five/six year plan students.

Still enough of this not so deep contemplative shit. It's time to party... Graduation itself is Saturday at 2pm in Vallejo. Come one come all. Speaking of come all we have a bunch of folks in town for the event. My Dad and Pauline will be here from England the day after tomorrow, Dina's Mom and Brother arrived yesterday, and a few others will be around as the weekend approaches also. The big post graduation party will on Sunday here at Marina Village out on the lawn.

Next week we should have both a Friday and a Wednesday night race, and I promise things will get back to normal then.

A quick sunset cruise

2009-04-20T22:26:00.000-07:00

Its too hot, Dina is out of town, I have to go back up to school tomorrow morning to work on a group project that is due Wednesday. So fuck it I went sailing and took a bunch of photos of the sunset.

We had gone up to Stockton over the weekend to meet up with my folks, and to get the outboard back for the Santana. Today I put the outboard back on and figured it was going to be great night for a sail. You can see how hot it was in this picture of Ajax on the 525.

Ajax isn't a big fan of the 525 it's a little tippy for him, but I got him on board and he hung out for a few minutes, It's going to be a while, if ever, before he goes for a sail though.

The night itself was perfect, just enough wind to keep the boat moving with the small roller furling jib.

The boat is a little funky to sail solo, things like winches and cleats are in the wrong place, and stuff gets snagged on tacks,

still Gonzo is a great little Estuary boat.

I think that in all the years I have been sailing on the Estuary this might be the first boat that I might be completely legal on while sailing at night with a motor.

All the lights work, its registered, has stickers, flares, bells, whistles, everything.

Tonight as an added bonus I had my ipod plugged into my Bose speaker unit. This allowed me to listen to music for the sail as well, the only thing that would have made it better is if Ajax hadn't eaten the remote for it. Although my neighbors probably didn't appreciate me cranking Ozzy's Diary of a madman as I sailed down the fairway.

About the only bad thing was being treated like some kind of child molester by the people at Round Table Pizza after the sail. It's been a while since I have gotten service that bad. They all but ran me out of the place and slammed the door on my back as I left. But I sent a nasty email to the store manager and that cheered me up a little.

Red Red Whine...

2009-04-19T18:49:00.000-07:00

After a day off from the whole sex, drugs, and rock and roll thing Dina and I got right back to it. Well maybe not the sex and drugs part, but the rock and roll part.

Friday night it was up to the Marin Veterans Hall to see UB-40 a British reggae/ska/rock band that had a few hits in the early eighties. When I worked at Prada we had a greatest hits cd that we would play every now and again and I always thought they were ok. We have been to a couple of other shows in Marin with a friend, Debbie, and figured we should invite her also. It turns out her husband John was up for it as well as it was Debbie's birthday, so we decided to make a night out of it.

A good dinner at a Tappas place in San Rafael with some good Sangria got the night off to a good start. It turns out that John and I have similar tastes in larger American cars of the late sixties, so we got to bore the girls with car talk for awhile. From dinner it was off to the Marin Civic Center for the show.

The show was supposed to start at eight but we figured there is no way these things ever start on time. Plus if there was an act getting there at quarter to nine or so would not be a problem. As it turns out there was no opening act, and they started right at eight. So right off the bat we had missed half the show. Having said that it didn't really matter. I guess we should have been warned by the fact that we drove up to the place to find an empty parking space just behind the front row...

Basically UB-40 sucked... Ten guys on stage going through the motions with an absolute minimum of effort. No lights, no crowd interaction, no passion, no nothing. To be fair having just come off of two nights of Greenday in very small venues, it did kind of put them at a disadvantage, but still. John and I once we got the seats figured out and sitting through a song or two decided to go get a beer and ended up talking about NASCAR of which he is a big fan. So, after one beer and getting back to our seats the band played one more song, and then it was 'thank you, good night". They did come back and play an encore, but I basically saw them play three songs, bugger.

The crowd scene however was interesting. Older Marin guys with trophy wives maybe twenty years younger. Lot's of obvious surgeries and hair plugs. A smattering of African/Americans who probably drove over the bridge from Richmond. Once again comparing them to the Greenday crowd may seem unfair, but it was unusual to see concert goers wearing something other than black. Even more unusual was the complete lack of smoke from the concert goers smoking weed, that really was disappointing for a reggae show. I was looking forward to the contact high..

However with the concert getting out as early as it did, before 10.00pm, we figured the night was still young. So we hit the Mayflower pub in San Rafael which was good fun. A couple of pints of Guinness and some top quality Marin County people watching with some good friends. Not a bad way to spend a Friday night.

...and just for the hell of it here is a picture of Ajax and Frida noisily interacting with each other VERY EARLY SATURDAY MORNING after we had gotten home kind of late Friday night.

ONE MORE TIME...

2009-04-16T21:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was rough, recovering from rock concerts isn't as easy at it used to be. After getting home from school I figured a nice relaxing walk with the dog to pick up my pay check was just the ticket. Ajax of course used the opportunity to chase a couple of cats, but the big thing was the call from Dina that said that Greenday was going to be playing another unanounced show in Oakland. This one at a bar called the Uptown, which as it happens was right across the road form the Fox Theatre. I agreed with Dina that while this was interesting news there was no way we were up for it.

Later that evening after a late-ish dinner at Dragon Rouge I said to Dina on the way home, maybe we should drive by the Uptown just to check it out. We got there to find no real line so Dina ran in to see if we could get tix. It turns out that we could so without really thinking about it we just did it. That is how we ended up seeing Greenday two nights in a row.

The Uptown holds maybe two hundred and fifty if you cram them all in. The stage is small enough that the six guys who make up the touring version of Greenday didn't really all fit on it. The show started off the same as the Fox show, with the band playing their new album the whole way through.

This time though it wasn't for the camera's as it had been the night before, but it seemed to be much for for the audience. The band seemed to be having a lot of fun and just be enjoying themselves. At one point the bassist even did a couple of stage dives into the crowd.

For the second part of the show they came out with no play list. They just did a combination of requests, covers, and whatever else they felt like doing. The did covers of the Buzzcocks, Ziggy Stardust, and even Cheap Trick. There was lots of crowd interaction and as I said it was basically Greenday having a good time in a very small club. We hung out towards the back of the place next to the sound board.

I think I enjoyed this show more than the one the night before. All in all a very fun, but late night.

As a final observation I thought it was very cool that within a one block radius in downtown Oakland last night you had Franz Ferdinand playing at the Fox, Leonard Cohen at the Paramount, and Greenday at the Uptown.

Oh, and sorry about the really bad picture quality. The iPhone isn't the best device for dark concert photography.

Rock and Roll

2009-04-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

We are going to hit a few familiar themes here for this post. The dog, the weather, school, and a concert review.

Ajax has been causing trouble lately, just as he seemed to be growing up a little we have had a couple of incidents that remind us that he is only a puppy after all. One was a day last week when I was driving to the dog park to let him do his thing. I usually let Ajax sit on the front seat and stick his head out the window. Who hasn't seen a dog, ears flapping in the breeze, with his head out the window, right? We stop at a light across form the park and just as I am pulling away Ajax leaps out of the window and goes tearing off after a squirrel. Oh shit! I quickly pulled over and got him and he was completely nonchalant about the whole incident, but damn he got out of that car fast. The best part was the look on the face of the guy in the car behind me..

Ajax has also managed to get himself banned from doggie day care for biting another dog during play time. Something that we haven't really got a complete explanation of from the kennel people yet, but the day care thing was a one time deal so no real harm done there.

Last weekend I attended the Safety at Sea Seminar here at Cal Maritime. This is a requirement for any skipper doing the Coastal Cup, Transpac, or Pacific Cup races around here. I got to attend the seminar for free in exchange for helping out with some of the stuff on campus. The funniest part I though was listening to Stan Honey's Hawaii race weather presentation where he talked about hooking into the leading edge of a hurricane as a viable routing option for racing to Hawaii. Stan was the first to admit that maybe that wasn't the best advice to give at a safety at sea seminar, but it was pretty funny. For my part, my major contribution was driving the boat for the flare demonstration.

After the seminar we got back to Alameda early enough to take Gonzo out for a nice sunset sail. We even got Dina to put in a useful stint on the tiller. She is actually getting a lot more confident while driving, giving her the mainsheet to hold on to seems to help a lot. I guess having the ability to flatten out the boat in her hand makes her a lot more comfortable.

Yesterday I spent the whole day on the boat finishing off a paper that I needed to get done. This was one of those papers that I had a whole semester to do, but waited to the last minute to do. But, as a wise man once said "If you wait till the last minute to do something, then it only takes a minute to do". Anyway, yesterday was very windy down on the boat. Probably the windiest day we have had on board. The new slip has always been a lot bouncier than the old one, but this was bad. After I had had lunch I was actually starting to get nauseous while working on the computer. Dina when she came home from work got nauseous almost immediately and basically took off with the dog to avoid the whole thing. I think that we are probably going to ask the harbor master if we can move again. While yesterday was particularly bad, the slip in general is pretty uncomfortable. It is getting to the point that the nicer view is just not worth it.

Last night Dina managed to score tickets to see Greenday at the Fox Theatre in Oakland.

This was a show that they announced the day before and was claimed to be Greenday's way of practicing there new album in front 0f a live audience. When we got there however the whole thing was set up for a video shoot. What we got was a very polished, practiced performance of the whole new album, played straight through. We had seen Greenday in San Francisco a few years ago and this show was much better. Smaller venue, less interaction with the crowed, and a band that was pretty obviously enjoying themselves.

They played a two and half hour set, with a lot of American Idiot played in the second set. They cranked the volume up for the second part of the set, and my ears are still ringing. Still other than the guy that stepped on my foot it was very enjoyable, albeit late, evening.

Long time coming

2009-04-08T11:39:00.000-07:00

It's been a funny old time around the Lobster T these last few days. Nothing really too exciting to write about, but no free time in which to do it. Does that make sense? We did get nice weekend weather though, which made Dina happy.

I have been finishing up a couple of end of school projects which has taken a lot of time up at CMA. I have a couple of presentations to do before this whole thing ends, one in a local Vallejo area school, that should be fun. However since it is a group project, and I am waiting for other members of my group to make final arrangements, I don't know yet when it will be. But, if and when it happens I will get some pictures, just for laughs.

The big thing over the weekend was getting a new foam mattress for the forward cabin. We got it at a place called Bob's Foam Factory down in Newark.

Bob's is a totally cool place and they did a great job taking care of us. I think we learned more about foam in that afternoon than I ever thought it was possible to know. Also, Bob has a grandson named Dominic, so you know it has to be a quality establishment.

I have got most of the projects done on Gonzo, and hopefully we will be race ready come the first beer can races towards the end of the month. I am still hoping to get a new Genoa for the boat, but we shall have to see how that shakes out. Getting the Genoa is easy, it is the pulling of the mast, and the replacement of the headstay that is problematic.

We did however take Gonzo out for a short sail on Sunday with our friend Kirsten. We actually made it out of the Estuary and reached around in the South Bay for a while before setting the kite for the ride back home. Kirsten drove us most of the way back and did a good job considering a lack of helm time with the spinnaker up. I was hoping she would post some pictures on her Facebook page (hint hint), that I could steal and put up here, but alas, no luck.

So, it is know only a few weeks from graduation and I just got this email from the school.

You will be receiving an award at the Award’s Ceremony on Commencement Day. The Award’s Ceremony is at 11 AM in Rizza Auditorium. I want to keep some sense of mystery so I don’t let you know what award or awards you will be given. These awards are a mixture of academic, industry, community, and leadership involvement. It is really important that you attend this ceremony. This ceremony is not oly for YOU but for your parents, spouse & loved ones who have supported you through your education at Cal Maritime. Out of 160 graduating seniors, you have been selected so you should be proud of your accomplishment!

I figure you can pretty much rule out the Industry, Community, and Leadership parts, so I figure I am in line for some kind of Academic award! Who would have ever seen that coming? Certainly, not me.

Yesterday, just for fun I figured it would be nice to bring Ajax to Vallejo with me. One of the good things about our brief ten month stay in Vallejo was the dog walk along the Carquinez Straits right out side of our place there.

After a quick wait in the car while I had class Ajax and I had a good ramble up and down this track. I guess I never really have gotten Ajax out in the open before, but one thing for sure, he isn't very coordinated. go, he is a clumsy beast. Still he really seemed to enjoy it and it was good to get him out there.

Smoke on the Water

2009-04-01T11:13:00.000-07:00

We had a biggish fire just down the Estuary from us over the weekend. An old Navy hospital that has been long abandoned was set on fire Saturday night.

The Alameda Fire Department decided just to let it burn itself out, which kind of makes sense. But we still had a couple of days of thick smoke all through the marina and now the boat is all covered with a sooty mess. Blech..

I got to be a bachelor all last weekend as Dina took off to Mexico for my Aunt's wedding. It sounds, and looks, like she had a really good time there, although the idea of Dina spending that much unsupervised time with my mother is a bit worrisome. I didn't really get up to a lot of hi jinks while left to my own devices, other than a kind of informal pub crawl of Park Street on Friday afternoon with Linda. We started at Speseikamer, then up and down Park including a stop off at a slot car racing place.

Then we stopped off for a final beer at McGee's. I made it home before dark and then had a couple of drinks at the Encinal Yacht Club before having Tom and Rich over to the boat for a night cap. Not really a wild and crazy night out, but a good time.

Saturday I spent changing out the water heater in the boat. We had noticed the water pump running quite a lot recently and knew that we had a leak somewhere. Once we figured that the water heater was the problem we acquired a replacement and Saturday was the big day for swapping it out. As far as working on boats goes the Lobster T is actually pretty good.

I could get to everything relatively easily and had no real problems doing the change. I did however have some issues getting the water hoses hooked up without leaking, and trying to figure out the wiring harness.

However with some help from Todd in San Diego we got it all sorted and now we have the simple pleasure of hot and cold running water again.

On a Ajax the dog related note, we have decided that today, April 1st, was a good day for Ajax's birthday to fall on. So happy 1st birthday to Ajax.

We don't really have any plans to do anything special for him, but he did get to chew up a pair of my sunglasses (the third pair of mine that he has got) over the weekend, so he will have to be happy with that.

Keeping up with the Jones'

2009-03-26T07:36:00.000-07:00

Been a busy week here on the Lobster T, surprisingly productive as well.

This last weekend I passed on doing the lightship race in order to get a bunch of spring cleaning done on the boat. With the warmer weather starting to assert itself it was time to get the aft deck more livable amongst other things. As a result Saturday was spent scrubbing and cleaning. The biggest problem is that we get some mould build up under the aft canopy and a couple of other places so that needs to be dealt with.

The fun part is taking everything off of the aft deck and placing it on the dock while I get the hose in there. By everything I am talking about cooler's, dog kennel's,

complete patio furniture set's, bicycle's, and god knows what else. It ends up making the dock look like a homeless encampment, but it really helps make it easy to clean and it did end up looking pretty good in the end.

That evening we celebrated by visiting with Tom and Sylvia over on the Big Red Boat and heard stories of the lightship race. All in all a good day.

Sunday was more of the same, only this time it was working on the 525. I re-led all the halyards and figured out the new deck layout. I also bought all of the parts that I think we are going to need to get things a little more user friendly on the Gonzo. Now it is just a matter of drilling some holes and mounting some hardware. I am also trying to get Bill at Doyle to get pricing on a new genoa, but as is often the case he is a little distracted.

Sunday night we went bowling with a lot of the old City Lights crew.

We actually got a pretty good turn out with 13 of us showing up. I am not going to claim that any of us are good bowlers, I think Parker got the high score at 143, but I think we all had a good time, despite our various levels of bowling aptitude,

and attire.

It was good to see Hawk and Martha again, as I hadn't really seen them since we stopped racing the City lights. Also Martha beat all the boys on her lane, so that was fun to watch. Although this is not Martha in the picture.

A couple of things that happened during the week, I didn't get the job I had applied for in San Diego, which I think I am ok with. I also got some information about my upcoming graduation from CMA. I guess we have the head of the CIA Leon Panetta doing our commencement speech. So that should be interesting. I guess the thing that I am happiest about though is that we don't have to wear our dress blues for the ceremony, just our salt and peppers.

Boy I bet most of you can't wait till the summer sailing season starts again, so I can start writing about sail boat racing more. I know I can't...

The unreal world...

2009-03-20T10:37:00.000-07:00

...of living aboard.

With the change in the weather in the last couple of weeks life on board the Lobster T has changed as well. The time changes means more time in the afternoon for boat projects on both the Lobster and Gonzo. It also makes it easier to check up on Gonzo to make sure she doesn't fill up full of water when the cockpit drains get plugged up.

I am hoping to have Gonzo a lot more user friendly and race ready for the spring and summer sweet sixteen series. Sadly Campbell has left for the east coast so some splicing on the sheets and halyards still hasn't been done, but hopefully we will get that sorted soon enough.

The big changes though are in the living conditions on board the Lobster. We have been able to leave the windows open during the day which really helps air things out. Also we have stopped using the noisy cabin heaters at night so sleep seems to be easier, at least for me, now. It is amazing how having the boat not sealed up all the time really makes such a huge difference for live aboards. Still it will mean a weekend of spring cleaning to get the aft deck livable. Mostly it is just cleaning up the windows and some other spots that need attention. Then it will be all Gin and Tonic's while watching the sunsets again.

One thing living on a boat does is make you so much more aware of the weather. As Dina says weather is so much more 3D when you are on a boat. A change in the wind direction can make a significant difference in the distance between the dock steps and the boat. Sometimes as much as a foot!

Usually we end up re-adjusting the dock lines a couple of times after a storm or whenever we take the boat out as getting them dialed in right takes a couple of try's. We are also very much aware of the ebb and flow of the tides. This can make a huge difference in the angle of the gangway at the marina gatehouse. Pushing a dock cart full of laundry up and down a steeply inclined gangway can sometimes be a pain. Especially if you have a dog in tow as is often the case.

As daylight increases so does the amount of Estuary traffic, and the amount of wakes we get. Some of these wakes can be pretty bouncy and if you are in the shower they can throw you around quite a bit. It always seems that a lot of these wakes are kicked up by one of the various law enforcement agencies that cruise up and down the Estuary. Especially the ones violating the speed limits late at night or early in the morning. There must be half a dozen agencies out patrolling at various times. Homeland Security, Coast Guard, Alameda Police, Oakland police, Alameda County Sheriff, and the Navy all operate vessels on the Estuary.

If you listen to the radio when one of these agencies blows down the Estuary kicking up big wakes, they usually get a couple of complaints from various boats in the marina's Usually

there is no reply, but when they do reply it usually a demand that the caller identify themselves. I hate to say it, but I don't really have a lot of respect for some of the feds on the Estuary.

Another sign that spring is here is the arrival of various ducks and other critters. I pretty much refer to all seabirds as ducks, but Dina seems to be able to figure out the difference between them.

I guess we have Buffleheads, Coots, and some kind of large black bird that sits on the top of the boats masts and makes a god-awful screeching noise. A couple of times I have walked Ajax late at night and let him run around off leash. He would go tearing off into packs of these birds, so I had to put an end to that. Still it was fun to watch.

Fill this Cup...

2009-03-17T07:08:00.000-07:00

So, I got this in my school mail box yesterday...

Mr. Marchal,

You have been randomly selected to report to the Health Center for a mandatory DOT drug test. This e-mail is your official notification.

You must complete your test at the Health Center no later than 1600, Thursday, March 19, 2009. It is your responsibility to contact the Health Center at (707)654-1170 or 1198 immediately to make arrangements for completing your random drug test.

Failure to complete your drug test by Thursday at 1600 will result in being placed on report for failure to carry out or unnecessary delay in carrying out orders (Article 7.I.1.B.2) and for a violation of the CMA drug testing policy (Article 1.3(B)). It is the policy of CMA to be in compliance with federal regulations regarding drug testing as prescribed by 46 CFR Parts 4, 5, and 16 and 49 CFR Part 40. You have refused to take a drug test if:

You fail to appear for any test within a reasonable amount of time after being directed to do so;

You fail to remain at the test site until the test process is complete;

You fail to provide a sufficient amount of urine for the collection;

You fail to cooperate with any part of the testing process.

If you have any questions ask.

The Office of the Commandant of Cadets

First off, if rumors are to be believed, there is nothing random about who gets tested. They target students who they think are the most likely to pass, for example older students, and then re-test those students multiple times. This allows CMA to claim a higher pass rate than they normally could. Also, students with a higher likelyhood of failing, the Basketball players for instance, tend not to be tested or provided with plenty of warning if they are likely to be tested.

The testing process is also kind of a joke. You are provided with a cup and then allowed to go into the bathroom by yourself. The first couple of times I went, this will be my fifth test, I was allowed to take my backpack with a thermos of coffee in with me. There are plenty of stories of students taking in clean urine and substituting that going around.

Another thing is I am not on any of the Coast Guard license track at school that requires any kind of drug testing. The deck and engine students who are on the license track are the ones who are required to be tested. They test all the students however just to make it fair, or whatever...

Lastly, I thought I was out of the Corp of Cadets as of the begining of March.

As graduating seniors we are supposed to be done with all of our Corp obligations. No more watch standing or formations three days a week. To be chased down across the quad by one of the Corp commanders was a bit of a downer and then to get the email above kind of bummed me out.

Back online...

2009-03-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

After two and a half weeks, five visits to the Apple store, a Southern California road trip, and a deathly illness it is time to get this thing up and running again. To be sure a lot has happened since the last posts and it will be impossible to get it all in, but we will try.

First things first... We ended up second in our division by one point in the Oakland Yacht Club Sunday brunch series. This despite a one-one-

two scoreline for the final three races. I think it is fair to say that the sixth and the seventh in the first two races is what ultimately doomed us. The worst part was that the Zeehond beat us for the division win.

Dina and I actually didn't make the last race, but Tom, Sylvia, Rich, and friends went out and represented team Gonzo well. There is actually a pretty good write up, and series of pictures on norcalsailing.com so be sure to check that out.

I also had what passes for spring break at Cal Maritime, that is a Thursday and Friday off of school. Dina and I used that as an excuse to head down to Santa Barbara for a couple of days to hang out with Tom and Barbara at their place, and what a place it is. Check out the view...

Once again we were taken very good care of and shown a very good time while in Santa Barbara. So, how did I repay Tom and Barbara for all of this hospitality?

I infected them with a nasty cold that I had picked up some place. I still feel really bad about that. Tom spent a couple of days in bed because of it. Sorry about that...

From Santa Barbara we continued south down to San Diego. I had a job interview with a company down there and we figured it would be a good excuse to go visit some friends while we were around. The job interview went ok, although I am still waiting to hear back from them. But the rest of our time in San Diego was a lot of fun. Dina got to spend some quality time with our friend Virginia during the day, and we had a couple of fun nights out with Todd and Virginia...

Good times.

One of the things I got to do while down in San Diego was to go and check out BMW-Oracle racing's new 90 ft trimaran. while I didn't get to see it out sailing I did get a pretty good look at it on the dock. All you can really say is wow!

The pictures really don't do it justice.

I am going to keep this first post back short as I will be doing write-ups on a couple of races, and some other stuff soon enough. Thanks for the patience.

Broken...

2009-03-02T16:16:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the long time between posts.. I am having computer issues and have been with out a laptop for the last week or so. Hopefully those nice folks at the Apple store have given me good advice and I will be back online soon enough. Lots has happened, and maybe some big changes to come..

Valentine's Day massacre...

2009-02-18T11:04:00.000-08:00

The weather around these parts has been how do you say... Crap, lately. One thing about living aboard a boat is that weather really hits home (ha, get it?) much more so than living on dry land.

Probably the biggest drawback of our new slip is the fact that we now have the longest walk of any boat in the marina. Which, at ten at night, after just getting home, then leaving the boat again to walk the dog, in the pissing down rain, gets old quick. Still it isn't that bad and the view from the new slip is almost worth it. The worst is when we get a big southerly storm like we had last weekend. Lot's of rain, and a gusty wind that pushes the boat away from the dock, and against the springiness of the dock lines. It got uncomfortable enough that Dina actually moved up to Tom's house for the night Sunday night. As for me, I don't even notice it that much anymore. I do seem to sleep better with a little motion though.

We did however get enough of a break on Saturday to get out for a while. We were sitting around the boat and Dina suddenly suggested that we should go to the zoo. For a spur of the moment call it sounded pretty good, so off we went to the Oakland Zoo.

It must have been almost thirty years since the last time I was at the Oakland Zoo. But, I must say that I enjoyed the day out. As far as Zoo's go Oakland is kind of small, but they have all the basic Zoo stuff. Plus due to the bad weather it wasn't crowded at all. The weather however probably didn't help keep the animals themselves that active.Some of the highlights of observing these animals in the dignified natural captivity of the Oakland Zoo, included the Giraffe's. Which are just cool looking animals, long necks, and a kind of mellow disposition, worked for me. The Elephants drinking from a stream of running water through their trunks was cool,
as was the Lion's roaring at each other. One thing that I noticed was that the list of sponsors for the Lion pen included Oakland Hells Angel's founder Sonny Barger and his wife.
Still the highlight for me was probably the Bat's. Big, evil looking things hanging upside down in a big room. They would scramble around the wire mesh ceiling on these hooked feet, and then spread out there wings, which are translucent and full of veins and stuff.

We also checked out the Chimps, Deer, and Meercats, all very cute but not nearly as cool as the Bat's. The petting Zoo had just closed so sadly we missed the chance to play with the Goats, and to take a picture of a Sheep for my friend Mike who likes it when I send him pictures of Sheep for some reason.

Old sailing story, with video...

2009-02-11T10:33:00.000-08:00

It doesn't seem like that long ago, but apparently this all happened in 2006.

The Friday before memorial day weekend is when the Spinnaker Cup is usually held. The Spinnaker Cup is a race from San Francisco bay down the coast to Monterrey. There are a couple of really nice things about the Spin Cup, one it is usually a downwind run all the way, and two it short enough that sometimes you can be in by dark. My ride this time was the Santa Cruz 52 City Lights with most of the usual suspects aboard. Well, kind of... We left the dock in Alameda and set out on our way to the start. About half way down the Estuary we realized that we had left Nick behind. Doh! A quick turn around and trip back to the dock got a surprisingly not upset Nick on board and off we went again.

I remember that we started with one head sail and changed to another as we went under the bridge. I remember getting slammed around really hard during the change and soon afterwards somebody noticed that one of the forward stanchions was badly bent. I guess I was so amped up during the change that I never realized how hard I had been washed down the bow at the time. Still despite being pretty wet everything was good. We then set off down the coast jib reaching with the number two, having no problems with hitting boat speed around ten knots.

As the wind went further aft we decided to put up the stays'l under the head sail. Somehow I managed to get the thing wrapped around the spinnaker pole as we set it and when they went to grind the luff tight we almost shattered the pole. I remember tripping the tack off, thinking that Hawk would be able to hold the sail down while I reset it. That didn't work and the stays'l immediately blew out to Leeward and after a bunch of yelling and curses we managed to get it down below and out of the way. I think that even to this day that counts as one of my more spectacular fuck ups in my sailing career.

Shortly after that we put the spinnaker up and settled in for a nice run down the coast. It was kind of grey, with occasional bursts of sunshine, but we where doing just fine going down the coast at a good rate of speed. We had a bunch of boats around us and seemed to be doing ok in relation to the rest of the fleet. Our closest competition the DK-46 Zephra gybed into the shore at one point and that seemed to take them out of the race as they had some problems when they came back out. At one point I looked back from the mast where I had been sitting and was surprised to see that a lot of the crew had gone down below to nap. I remember Tom driving and one or two others on deck and that was it.

A couple of hours of this got us most of the way to Davenport, just north of Santa Cruz. The wind had picked up a little so we had peeled up to the 1.5oz, which was the the very first time that I had ever done a peel while going to the end of the pole. I had coached people doing these kinds of peels for years, but this was the first time that I had ever done it myself.

An hour or so later we where just about to enter Monterrey Bay and as near as we could tell the wind ahead was going to get lighter. We peeled down to the .75oz, only this time Brian did the peel. Billy then called a nearly perfect gybe angle which would get us across Monterrey Bay and into the finish. Through all the crew rotations and switching off etc I found myself trimming the spinnaker out of the gybe and into the Bay. Only instead of the wind getting lighter it started to build.

For about the next hour or so it was some of the best sailing that I have ever done. Nick was driving and I was trimming and for whatever reason we just got really in sync with each other. By now the wind was really up and we where hauling across Monterrey Bay at power boat kind of speeds. Soon we were hitting twenty knots regularly and really just reveling in the conditions, relatively flat water and strong late afternoon breeze. We still had the .75oz up which was causing some worry, but as long as we kept everything under the kite I figured we would be ok. What was cool for me was the focus of everyone on the boat. Weight aft, someone calling puffs, Baxter grinding like a mad man.

After about an hour of that my hand started to cramp up from trimming. I handed off the sheet to Tom who did a great job and actually got us the high speed for the trip at 22+ knots. After chugging a couple of Gatorades to get my hands open again I pulled out my video camera and took the video that you see here. Shortly after I took this I had it posted by both sailinganarchy and the Santa Cruz Yachts websites.

As we got in close to Monterrey the wind died off and after a change to the number one headsail we finished just around sunset. We easily corrected out to first in our division after averaging almost exactly 10kts down the course. To this day this might still be the best day I have ever had on the water.

Workin it..

2009-02-08T20:48:00.000-08:00

It's been a good few days on the entertainment front here for the Lobster T clan. Maybe not so good for house cleaning, and homework but definitely good times.

Monday night Dina managed to score a couple of very good tickets to the Warriors-Spurs game. By very good I mean courtside club 5th row, $350 a piece tickets. Oh and VIP parking passes also. Despite being up front with the really well dressed rich people we had a really good time. Our seats where close enough behind the visitors bench that when members of the spurs stood up we couldn't see the game.The game itself was really good. The Warriors played the Spurs well the whole game, despite some very questionable calls by the refs. They were actually up by 12 in the fourth quarter but let the Spurs tie it up to send the game into overtime. The spurs scored the first couple of baskets in overtime, but then Tim Duncan fouled out and the warriors looked set to make a game of it. However it was not to be, once again it seemed the refs made a couple of questionable calls and that was the game.
Then last Friday night Dina, Jeff, and I went to see Social Distortion at the first show in 42 years at the newly reopened Fox Theatre in Oakland. Jeff has connections with Social Distortion through his brother so we got free tix, as well as backstage/after party passes.

First off, the new Fox Theatre is pretty cool. They did a really nice job of doing the place up. I read somewhere that the renovation cost something like $75 million and took quite a few years to do. At one point they had planned on calling the place the Babylon, or the Baghdad (I forget which), so there is a kind of Arabian theme to the place.The show itself I thought was very good. There was some sound issues, especially early in the set, but otherwise it was a really good set. We had seen Social D last year and this set was much different than that show. Last time they led off with a few roots rock, acoustic stuff, not this time. This time they came out rockin. They played four or five songs right off, and in general there wasn't as much banter between Mike Ness and the audience. The band seemed a lot more into it this time also. Maybe it was because this time the show might have been a one off gig as opposed to the second night of three nights in a 6 month tour or something. Anyway, they put on a good show.We never did make it to the backstage after party even though we had passes to it. Mainly because we couldn't find it. The people we asked didn't seem to know about where to find it either. Part of the downside of going to opening night at a new venue I guess. However here is a picture of the backstage area I took as we wandered around looking for the party.

Overbearing in Victory... Surly in Defeat...

2009-02-03T21:37:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I had written about a Sunday Brunch Race that we had done on the Estuary on our Santana 525 Gonzo. I had wrote about getting fouled pretty blatantly by some loser on a boat named Zeehond and about how I had said something to him in the yacht Club afterwards. Well this last Sunday was our first chance to meet him out on the water since then.

To be honest we have never really been thrilled with the performance of the Santana since we have gotten it. The boat has always felt sluggish and frankly not that fun. Don't get me wrong, I love the cockpit space and the comfort of Gonzo as a day sailor, but as a race boat Gonzo seemed to lack something. The place we put most of the blame has been on the rudder, which as it turns out was not bent after all. The tiller head at the top of the rudder shaft had, as Campbell pointed out when he sailed with us, a huge amount of slop in it. Thinking about this I tightened up the screws at he rudder post head and lifted the rudder itself up in the shaft. This resulted in the rudder post aligning itself back into the shaft. I then sprayed a ton of a marine lube into the thing and presto, a straight non-stiff rudder.

Next I got into Gonzo and pulled out as much extra weight as I could. This included taking out five bags of old sails, and all of the interior cushions, something allowed under one-design rules. I also removed a bunch of tools, and a lot of spare line, as well as the rest of the accumulated crap that has ended up in the boat over the years. Finally we took the engine off of the transom, figuring it is easy enough to get in and out of the slip without it. All in all I figure we took at least three hundred pounds off of the boat.

As mentioned in the last post I had also dove on the boat using a friends dive hookah setup. I had never used one before and I have to say it was a different experience. Being able to hang out at the bottom of the keel and rudder, and take my time to wipe the bottom off was really cool, I am glad that we can do that thanks to Steve.

The difference was noticeable even as we pushed the boat out of the slip. The boat felt really good in the very light air we had just getting out of the fairway and onto the Estuary. Once out on the Estuary we observed the first couple of starts and refined our plan for our race. Our plan basically came down to two things. One, in the very light breeze that we shouldn't get to far away from the start line, and two, seeing as we couldn't lay the start on starboard that we would have to do a port tack start.

Starting boats has never really been a strong point for me, I am too inconsistent in my starts, usually getting there a little late. Which is interesting, because when I am doing bow on a big boat I am usually pretty aggressive about getting a skipper up to the line, and am usually pretty good at it. This time however we seemed to get it about right. Not right on the line, but not far off, with good speed and accelerating. I promised myself that I was not going to think too much about Zeehond and what he was up to, but I did kind of smile to myself as I noticed that he had allowed himself to sail into a hole while trying to get to the line on starboard and as a result was pretty late.

The first beat went really well. Sylvia, trimming the jib kept me honest and we really just concentrated on getting to the new breeze that was coming down the Estuary first. Once we got into that we managed to lay the first mark without tacking, something that not all of our competitors managed. We rounded clear ahead by four or so boat lengths, got our spinnaker up and set off for the bottom mark. Even in the light downwind stuff we managed to stay ahead of the bigger boats in our fleet. Mostly this was because of Dina's trimming and Tom talking to me about driving and positioning. It certainly wasn't due to my downwind driving, which is average at best.

We dropped early ("No hero shit" I kept saying) and had a nice clean rounding for the beat across the Estuary to the offset mark. A good layline call got us set up for the second lap in good shape with a nice clear lead. The second lap was basically a duplicate of the first lap although we had a slower spinnaker set at the top mark. This allowed Zeehond to gain on us downwind, but their drop wasn't as clean as ours at the bottom mark so we got most of that back crossing over to the offset mark and then to the finish.

We got the gun despite being one of the slower rated boats in our fleet. As we crossed the line I must admit to a highly unsportsmanlike moment where I flipped off Zeehond. Although I did yell out to them later NICE RACE...

I have to admit it felt good to beat those guys straight up. It felt better though because it made us feel good about our little Santana and the work that we have done to it. The thing though is we still have a bunch of stuff to do to get more out of Gonzo. I got a new mainsheet, and spinnaker sheets today from Alan Prussia at Ropeline, and we will get the deck layout more dialed in and make the boat more user friendly every time we go out.

The biggest improvements though will come through our boat handling, our sets need to be little bit faster, and me getting more time on the tiller. My tacks especially need work. Both of these things will get better as we spend more time in the boat though. Hopefully Tom, Dina, and Sylvia will continue to sail with me as we seem to have good thing going here.

Stop this crazy thing...

2009-02-02T10:59:00.000-08:00

Well it was another one of those weekends where things never seemed to stop moving. It is almost a relief to get to school and get back into a slower rhythm for a while.

Having said that, knowing what the weekend had in store I was actually pretty mellow Friday night. Other than borrowing a friends dive hookah set up and diving the bottom of the Santana, which actually wasn't that bad, I took it pretty easy. Dina was out with a friend so I just decided to hang out at home and watch the Warriors game on TV. This ended up not being a bad plan as the Warriors played one of their better games of the year and beat a good team, The Hornets, on the road. After the game was over Rich dropped by with left over Pizza from an office party and we watched The Simpsons movie. Maybe not the most exciting Friday night, but not a bad one.

Saturday was one of those days where things never slowed down. First thing was a walk to the Deli with my brother, Dina, and the dog. Then it was a call from my dad over SKYPE, where Joe and I actually got a video camera hooked up and gave dad a tour of the boat and some footage of the dog. Then it was off to Ajax's final day of dog training at the Oakland SPCA. Ajax got another diploma, this time for Basic Obedience 2, which he celebrated by promptly chasing a squirrel across the yard. Then it was up to Kirsten and RT's to feed the cats and grab a bite to eat.

After coming home and doing a couple of quick chores it was off to the city to see Beach Blanket Babylon. I had never been to BBB before and I have to say I really enjoyed it. We had some good laughs and it didn't last to long. What could be better? The reason for heading to the city and seeing BBB was our friend Lora's birthday. There was a pretty good group of us, with a lot of the old City Lights crowd attending. After the show we all ate at the North beach restaurant Bacci, which was not bad at all. Then just to make sure that Lora had a really good time we headed back to The Forbidden Island Tiki bar in Alameda.

A quick note is in order here. For the last ten years or so I have Taken January off of drinking, with a couple of exceptions while in New Zealand for the America's Cup. This year was no exception. So to go from a period of sobriety into a night like this was a little harsh. In the last month I have probably lost ten pounds and saved a couple of hundred dollars. I have been sleeping really well and have been just a lot more functional than usual. It was kind of funny, on Saturday night I just stopped drinking kind of midway though the night at the Tiki bar and was actually pretty functional on Sunday. This was not the case for everyone who was out with us that night, but that is a story for next time...

Sorry for the lack of pictures, but I am doing this from school with a spotty internet connection. Maybe I will add some later.

Real Football

2009-02-01T21:16:00.000-08:00

It may seem odd to be posting about soccer on Super Bowl Sunday, but whatever.

Wednesday evening a friend, Tom, and I went to see Sweden play Mexico in an international "friendly" at the Oakland Coliseum. I think that it is fun to go and see international soccer matches whenever possible as they are usually a lot of fun. While I enjoy watching the soccer, the real fun at these events is the crowd scene. As you would imagine the crowd at the Oakland Coliseum was almost entirely pro-Mexico. Having said that there was a smattering of Swedish fans as well as a few like us who where just there for the scene.

The game was pretty close to a packed house. I think they announced the crowd at about 45,000 or so. The only sections of the Coliseum not full where the bleacher seats above Mount Davis, and a part of the upper deck. Also, we ended up parking across the freeway from the coliseum as the lot was full. We actually got some pretty good seats in one of the end zones though, just above the level of the goal in the lower section.

The game itself was pretty good. A kind of slow first half finished nill-nill, but the second half got good after Sweden scored early and then Mexico started a series of attacks that got the crowd fired up. The crowd was actually really fun to be around, really loud and into the game, but not assholes about it. There was a lot of good natured taunting of the Swede's, especially the Swedish girls at the game, but it was all in fun. One of the things that I found amusing was that quite a few of the Mexican fans where wearing Mexican Wrestler Masks.

We had planned on leaving the game early but as the pace got a little more frantic towards the end we decided to stick around. The final score was Sweden 1 Mexico 0, but everyone seemed ok with it.

So there you are international soccer, go check it out.