We launched in light winds and sailed round to the race area with a little over an hour before the start. We used that time to track the wind shifts and to make sure we'd put everything back together properly. Of course, there's a limit in how useful the wind-tracking can be when we knew full well that the sea breeze would build between the time we arrived and the time we started, but it's good to feel that you are doing all you can to be as prepared as possible. Sure enough, the sea breeze filled in about a quarter of an hour before the start, and at that point the wind went further to the right than it had been during our preparations.
In an effort to combat the bunching we'd seen in earlier races, taking so many attempts to get a clean start, the race committee set the line with five degrees of bias to the pin end. This was a good theory but unfortunately the wind was still swinging to the right a little so by the time of the start there was actually a bias at the boat end instead. As in last week's starts, we decided to go with the better end of the line even if it meant not being quite in the front row. We got away with reasonable speed and were able to find a lane to tack over onto port and get clear air not long after the start. After a good steady beat, keeping in the middle and taking as much advantage of the wind shifts as we could, we were mid-fleet and felt that things were going well. The first run was particularly fun, with the waves just big enough to catch and surf with a little (legal) pumping the sails to help. We found ourselves able to run down to the gate marks at the bottom without gybing at all. In many modern boats it's faster sailing downwind to sail at an angle to the wind to generate some apparent wind, but the Flying Fifteen seems to do best when you sail it as deep as possible, at least when there is a decent breeze. So we rode the wind and waves to the bottom marks, picking up a few places on the way.
During the second beat we discovered that we were up with several of the modern New Zealand boats who would normally be well ahead of us, so we thought we must be doing pretty well. The two reaches both went quite well, with no mishaps at the wing mark this time. By this stage the waves were starting to build up, and we thought we might suffer upwind, but the third beat still went quite well and we kept the boat dry enough to be sailing fast. The third run was much faster than the first - it was very easy to catch the waves and surf them, though no doubt the more expert crews would hold them for longer and stretch out their lead on us.
By the final beat to the finish though we were starting to struggle with the waves. Things started badly when the tie at the bottom of the jib came undone so I had to slide up over the foredeck to retie it. That didn't seem like a particularly good thing to be doing during a race, but I stayed aboard and got it tied quite quickly, so we didn't end up losing all that much time. However, from then on we just couldn't quite keep the boat sitting with its bow high enough to clear the waves, and we steadily took in more and more water. We were still very close to four of the modern boats who we knew should be in the top half of the fleet, so we thought we couldn't be doing too badly, but as we got fuller we got slower and, despite having crossed in front of one of them on the bottom part of that final beat we just couldn't hold onto that lead. Still, we felt that we had done well to be that close, and must have a good position. Rounding the finish boat we looked back, expecting to see plenty of boats behind us, but we were startled to see only nine! Of course, in this race there were only 80 starters rather than 106 in last week's races, but even so we thought we had gone backwards rather than forwards. It wasn't till we got home and read the results that we discovered that in fact there were seven more boats who didn't finish, plus one of the boats just in front of us retired after finishing (having broken a rule, presumably - we didn't find out why). So our final finishing position in Race 1 was 63rd - a solid start to the series, but we will hope to do better. And we will certainly hope to avoid having meetings of so many of the New Zealand boats down in the bottom half of the fleet!
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