Van Isle – Day 1: Great start to the biggest wind hole eva’

We woke up to an amazing warm day in Nanaimo, offloaded all of our extra gear, and headed out to the outside start to the harbor (Div 0 & 1 boats started inside).  The start was heavily boat-favored, and we opted to start a little further down in clear air and timed it well. The first hour of the race went well in about 5-8 knots, and we started to think about positioning for the tide change and also to be where the fickle wind was.  Our thought was to be more offshore – worried a bit about shore lee effects and thinking that favorable current made sense.  And for the first hour of the race Shearwater was leading the entire fleet towards Comox, and we had the good sense to snap a screen shot of the tracker as proof.

The deciding moment of the leg was whether you were on the Vancouver Island shore or not.  We were not, therefore it was decided that we would bob around for 3 hours.  We tried the Code 0, we tried our A2, and we tried the #1 – all of them were equally irritating as they shook, drooped, and fell limp in the vacuum.  The best part was that we watched as three of our division’s boats, Serendipity, Mojo, and Zulu, escaped from the doldrums along the shore.

We finally managed to get to the invisible wind on the shoreline and clawed our way back into the race.  The breeze that was actually forecast for the day finally showed up around 4pm – from the northwest and with a little more oomph.  We finished in ~16 knots after 4 hours of beautiful, albeit lonely sailing.

Overall, a great day of sailing in beautiful waters and despite the huge time gaps to the front of our fleet we still ended up 4^th in our division.

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