Tuesday was the second day of qualifying for the championship fleet at the 2012 Flying Scot North American Championship. Sitting in 27th we needed a good race to stay in the top 30 and make the championship fleet. The wind started out around 15 as we were heading out and by the time we had started dropped to 12 and continued to drop from there. We were seeing pretty big swings in the wind and knew picking the shifts right would be key.
We had a ok start about a 1/3 of the way down from the boat and worked our way out to the left where we had seen more pressure. We rode a nice shift back to the right and continued to pick our way through the shifts and the slow boats from the fleet ahead of us. At the top mark we rounded in 1st! Downwind we stayed just ahead of Kelly and Heidi Gough and went high riding a puff around over half of the fleet that started 6 minutes ahead of us. At the gate mark, a clump of boats was rounding the favored gate just ahead of us so we bailed to the other gate and had a clean rounding in cleaner air. Upwind we continued to pick the shifts and wound up getting passed by two of the boats in our fleet. We held our position downwind to take a 3rd and put ourselves solidly into the championship fleet.
Since we got off the water well before noon I thought it would be fun to spend the afternoon playing tourist in St. Louis.
I got a tour of the Anheuser-Busch brewery.
Visited Forest Park and the St. Louis Art Museum.
Had a nice dinner and went up the Gateway Arch.
