Leg 2 Finish
May 20, 2014
Hello Friends-
We finished Leg 2 of the Atlantic Cup from NYC to Newport Sunday night at sunset. It was an exciting afternoon of generally very fast sailing up the coast of Long Island and then through Block Island Sound and into Narragansett Bay and in to the finish line off Fort Adams in Newport. Except for the finishing part, which was a total flashback to our finish in New York.
As we sailed past Castle Hill, the wind just died completely and we floated around, only .9 miles from the finish line. Billy Black again came out on his photo boat to keep us company, which was very kind, and luckily the tide turned from outgoing to incoming, which was a godsend. So we basically waited till the tide got rolling at about 1.6 knots and rode it across the bay. Kinda like déjà vu all over again compared to New York except that this time the tide was with us instead of against us at 4 knots!
So, we arrived in third place- behind MacFarlane and Dragon and in front of Pleiad and Flatline- so not quite the big victory of Leg 1- but good enough to have us tied for first place with Dragon at 16 points each going into the inshore series this week-end (see Results: http://www.atlanticcup.org/past-results/2014-results ). We made one big mistake by not staying in close to the Jersey shore to pick up the Westerly wind when it shifted and Dragon and MacFarlane did and had their own private breeze for a couple of hours and put about 4 miles on us, which we were never able to claw back. My bad- as I knew that where we needed to be, we just got there early and flailed around in no wind and tacked back offshore too soon.
So as we look ahead, it should be very close racing this coming week-end and we will have to be on our game and make no mistakes in order to win the title. So that’s what we intend to do.
Enjoy your week and I will put out a pre-race preview on Friday and the race commentary over the week-end.
Cheers
Joe
