Through to the semis at San Diego
Interesting race course in San Diego …. here we are racing against thea clock
Emirates Team New Zealand tactician Ray Davies blogs on Day 1 of the America’s Cup World Series at San Diego.
Today’s plan was simple enough. Be consistent and make sure we were in the top three at the end of today’s fleet racing to ensure we went straight through to the match racing semi-finals.
We succeeded as it turned out, but not without some unplanned difficulty brought about by the failure of the gennaker halyard locking system.
It happened in the first race. And with the speed they turn these races around there was no time to fix it between races.
Consequently we had the halyard on a winch for the entire day. That sounds simple enough but it meant I had my head down trying to get tension on the halyard and not keeping an eye on lay lines and helping out with tactics.
Hoists and dropping the zero were really interesting…. but we battled through and finishing one point off the lead overall was a good result.
Today we had three fleet races, scoring a second and a third in the first and second races and a come-from-behind fifth in the third. We had a really bad start in race 3, when Oracle 4 failed to keep clear.
Oracle 4 copped a penalty but we were last off the line and had to fight all the way for a respectable result.
So no racing for us tomorrow. We’ll be out on the water as usual. There’s still A lot of racing in this regatta.
