At least the sailors escaped Black Friday, and no one was trampled to death. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the wind never made an appearance in the North Bay for the five boats that showed up on the Tiburon YC start line for Friday’s Wild Turkey Race. Switching back to good news: the gloomy overcast did lift to let in some nice rays. Sorry, bad news again: not only was there no wind, but the ebb kicked into high gear not long after the very civilized start time of 1310. As a result, not one boat was able to make it to the first mark at the entrance to the Larkspur ferry channel.

Race Chair Gary Proctor ran the very casual race while racing on his C&C 30 Meritime, delaying the start by five minutes until everyone was ready, announcing a course on the VHF (the shortest one, 2.5 miles, sailed in reverse), and sounding his horn for time signals. Four boats checked in non-spinnaker; to test out the time penalty, Past Commodore Ian Matthew on the fifth boat, the C&C 29 Siento el Viento, declared a spinnaker. He did get to ‘fly’ the chute, but it didn’t really help.

Jon on Wind Dance commented that he had never seen the waters of the Bay so flat. Another crew pointed out the well-defined inversion layer that has given us such lovely weather this weekend.

Less than two hours after the start, at 1500, Gary figured everyone had had enough Vitamin D and sandwiches - and the drifting about was beginning to get tedious - and abandoned the race. With no entry fees and no forms to fill out, you really couldn’t lose.

Many thanks to Wind Dance for doing double-duty as photoboat. The Tiburon YC race pages have just been updated for 2009. Their midwinter series begins in January, and does not conflict with the hugely popular Corinthian Midwinters further down the Tiburon Peninsula. More on all that later!