2024 Race to Wolf Trap Light House
We had a small fleet for a summer race to Wolf Trap Light House and back. There were 6 spinnaker boats and the two boats in the PHRF-A fleet were us on the J99 Battle Rhythm and the J109 Afterthought.
We started in the Piankatank just off Gwynns Island and had winds in the low teens out of the SSE and mostly sunny. There was a bit of traffic at the start with all of the boats piling up at the starboard end of the line which happened to be the government mark. We had to dodge a few boats and once we got clear we hung with Afterthought upwind on the way out of the Piankatank.
Once we cleared the river we continued upwind south to Wolf Trap light. With the current going out of the bay it was advantageous to continue on starboard all the way out into the bay. We got to the layline a couple miles from the lighthouse and tacked onto Port. Afterthought had continued to inch further away from us and was about ½ mile ahead of us by the time we got to the light house. And the wind out here was around 6-8 knots.
At Wolf Trap we rounded and set the A2 spinnaker and headed downwind. We sailed this spinnaker for a bit hoping the wind would build into its range, but it didn’t come and we decided to do a spinnaker change to the A1. While Kevin, Len and Carrie got the old spinnaker down, I grabbed the tack and halyard and got it hooked to the new spinnaker and after Kevin wrestled the chute into the hatch and Len hooked up the sheet I jumped the halyard on the mast and we had the new spinnaker flying in just over a minute.
Another new trick for this race was having the chart and instruments on the iPad. We also set up some time graphs with one of them being VMG and so after we changed spinnaker we were able to see from the chart that we were getting at least a tenth more VMG.
We continued North to the Piankatank, saw a huge pod of dolphins and eventually rounded into the river where we went somewhat upwind to the finish off Gywnns Island. On corrected time we would be about 14 minutes behind Afterthought.
All in all it was a good day of racing. Learned a few more tricks on the boat and had fun racing with Kevin, April, Carrie, Todd, Len, and Ann.
