So it’s May and we are about to leave for Tybee and I still have not posted the day 2 story from the Steeplechase. To be honest, I wanted to wait until right before the sailing season started to give everyone something to get pumped up over! Haha That’s my best excuse and I’m sticking with it!
Day two of the 2008 Steeplechase was almost identical to day two of the 2007 race (and I’m assuming many others) the start was a downwind run off the beach to the channel 5 bridge where it was became an upwind beat in 15-20 with some nice jib reaching towards the end. For all of you that haven’t done this race, day 2 is the most challenging part of the race, it’s a journey through the southern Everglades National Park. The leg consists of sailing through narrow channels, over sandbars, through tiny cuts and mangroves, in between all that there is some great flat water sailing but unless you’ve done the race a lot of times (we haven’t) there are still plenty of shallow spots to discover (we found out the hard way).
We sailed the leg pretty similar to last year. The main difference was that we had a new jib that wasn’t so blown out that we had to foot off 5-10 degrees below our competitors. This made a huge difference in keeping us ahead of the boats we got ahead of at the start and passed through other opportunities, usually when they run aground! However, when a boat ahead of you runs aground you usually take precautions not to do the same. As we ran aground 3 times we lost a couple boat including Team Davis Island who we had been battling with pretty much all weekend. They sailed by us as we attempted to navigate through a NARROW channel, ran aground, and backed the boat up almost taking out a channel marker piling in the process. Luckily all of the bottom we hit was soft sand and we didn’t do any damage!
The final few mangroves and bays saw the strongest wind of the weekend reaching almost 20 knots. Even cooler, the third to last bay was a very quick jib reach in which our self tacker track decided to explode (not the cool part). Brendon quickly hopped off the wire in an attempt to tame the flogging jib but it was impossible and the boat shook violently as we reached across the bay at around 23 knots towards the next mangrove. We were able to jury rig the jib in the mangrove and were set for the final few miles mostly upwind sailing but we did get to pop the spinnaker in one of them and gained a bit on the boats ahead. Spinnaker sailing in the mangroves is always a bit sketch as you can’t see the wind coming and you run out of ground FAST if you have to bear off. We later found out or buddy Jim Zelmer from Vermont capsized in one of the last mangroves while doing the same. They got stuck in the brush on the side for quite a while apparently… poor Jim.
We finished up 11th of 21 overall but very close in time to the 4 Nacra 20s ahead of us and we can account for that time in silly mistakes. We felt good about how we sailed and it got us very excited for Tybee!! Bring it!
It’s hard to chose which is more fun, a 50 mile spinnaker run down the ocean side of the keys on day 1 or an obstacle course inside the keys on day 2. Either way, this race is incredibly fun and totally worth all the effort of traveling 1,500 miles to get there. If you are on the fence… just do it… you won’t regret it. I’d say this is my favorite race of the year.
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