2010 Midwest Districts at Medicine Lake by Minneapolis

It's cool to have a regatta close by even if it's not the biggest. We went up there on Friday crossing our fingers that we'd be able to sail. In Iowa we had thunderstorms nearly every day and the satellite imagery showed a similar heavy cloud coverage over Minneapolis. To our luck it seems that thunderstorms, especially lightning was more rare up north.

Claus sailed the single handed portion of the regatta on Saturday evening. It was cloudy and the wind was good. He enjoyed it quite a bit and didn't do to bad which is surprising since this was only the second time on the boat for this season. Three times though he screwed up the tacks some how so that we came out of them in an extreme heel that causes the rudder being out of the water enough that steering is impossible until the boat points back into the wind. I bet that's were we lost some major time.

The remainder of the regatta was a test for the rain gear. The test failed miserably. By the second race Claus and Melissa were chilled to the bone. We didn't had a strong down poor but a continuous drizzle that wouldn't allow anything to dry. Saturday was also plagued with another issue. The spinnaker wouldn't stay up. Finally we figured out that the spinnaker halyard was routed incorrectly so that the cleat would prevent it from going up but not from dropping down. We used the vang cleat until we could fix it at the end of the day, since nobody volunteered to climb up the mast to reroute the halyard while being on the water. The coolest part was when we beat our Wisconsin buddy boat 4113 on the second race. We ended up with a total score of 63 just like them although they are ahead of us due to a better race position. We got place 12 (or place 11 if you correct the tie breaker scoring) out of 18.

Thanks to the Medicine Lake Sailing Club for hosting this year's regatta. We'll be back for the Wood Duck Regatta in July. Oskar will probably join us for the first time for a race.