July 8, 2015

Pat Broderick, skipper of the doublehanded Wyliecat 30 Nancy, filed this report while norcalsailing.com was on vacation. Our apologies for the delay in posting.

The OYRA Ocean Racing Series is nine races, most of which leave San Francisco Bay, sail around one or more marks in the Gulf of the Farallones, then return to SF Bay for the finish. One exception is the annual OYRA One Way to Half Moon Bay Race, which finishes about 25 miles south at Pillar Point at the north end of Half Moon Bay. The Singlehanded Sailing Society also has a one-way race to HMB each year. I've sailed dozens of these races over the years and usually they're a run with the prevailing wind coming out of the northwest, pushing boats down the coast with colorful spinnakers blossoming. Every few years it's different; this year's OYRA race was one of those.

Ross Bliven and I started at the St. Francis YC at 10:00 Saturday morning. We had good wind and the beginning of the ebb current to help us get started. We passed under the Golden Gate Bridge about 15 minutes after the start and immediately tacked to the southwest in order to get into better current along the SF headlands near China Beach. We passed Mile Rock and sailed out into the Gulf of the Farallones on a beam reach with our competitors comfortably behind us — or so we thought.

The course took us to the SF Deep Draft Channel Marker #8, about 5 miles west of Land's End. Once we arrived at #8 and tacked south, the wind came almost directly out of the SSW — exactly from the direction we needed to sail in order to get down to Pillar Point! And so it began. Five hours of long tacks into the wind and into the wind waves pushed up by the mid-teen wind speed. Being a fairly flat-bottomed design, Nancy doesn't like short chop, so we thumped and bumped our way over the waves and often crashed down the backside with a loud bang — sort of like being inside a big bass drum! Sometimes the boat would almost stop before accelerating again.

The tacking angles were wide and our progress southward was not rapid, partly due to the lower boat speed caused by the thumping and bumping. We quickly lost track of most of the six boats in our division. One, a slightly faster 35-ft boat stayed with us, and we traded tacks with them for several hours. Under PHRF, that boat had to beat us by a few minutes overall in order to correct out ahead of us after the calculations. Only one boat in the division was slower than us, and we needed to beat it by about the same number of minutes. When boats are spread out over several miles of ocean it's difficult to recognize which is which — and by this time there were plenty of boats from other divisions we had passed mixed in. About two hours in we heard the singlehander on Wetsu — the Express 27 we're in tight competition with for the overall series — call in announcing he was retiring from the race, so now our concern was the Olson 911 Plus Sixteen, the boat we owed time to and which we had lost contact with early in the race.

When we cleared the Colorado Reef off of Montara and turned for the finish line about 23 miles into the race, the only boat we had to beat in order to win showed up! Damn! Where did Plus Sixteen come from? Now the race was on! We were within a quarter of mile of both the C&C 35 MkIII Mesmerize and Plus Sixteen. Both competitors tacked to the southwest, which most of the other boats had done, but we continued southeast toward the Pillar Point rocky shoreline, carefully watching the depthsounder. At 30 feet we tacked over to the southwest and noticed our competitors were continuing on the same tack. We initiated a series of short tacks in toward the rocks, then out until we passed the green Pillar Point #1 buoy and turned in toward the finish line at the Pillar Point #3 buoy. We had gained significantly on both of the other boats, which were much further offshore, but distances are deceiving and we weren't sure.

The final mile was a beat that turned into a close reach as we approached the green Pillar Point #3 buoy, the finish line. A committee boat was 100 yards south of the buoy, and we heard the horn at 4:36:48 p.m., which meant our race was over. We hung around until Plus Sixteen finished, about 10 minutes after us; enough time, we thought, to save our handicap and beat them. Mesmerize had finished a few minutes behind us, so we knew we'd beaten them. Now it was time to sail back home.

The 1D35 Kind of Blue, partially hidden by a big roller here, was among the many boats that did the 'turn and burn'. Finally, the crew got to set a spinnaker. ©2015 norcalsailing.com

We had decided prior to the race to 'turn and burn' — which means sailing back up to Sausalito rather than going in to Pillar Point Marina for an overnight and a return early Sunday morning as we usually do. The wind continued out of the SSE, making the northerly trip a run with the sail hanging out at 90º — a fast, but sometimes "rock and roll" sailing angle. Ross steered all the way home, and I even got an hour's nap — sweet!

At Mile Rock, the south entrance to the Golden Gate, we saw a humpback whale cruising by to starboard. It was far enough away to present no danger, but close enough so we could clearly see its blow and the flock of gulls enjoying the food the whale was stirring up. The darkening overcast provided a beautiful early sunset, but the Golden Gate Bridge sparkled in muted sunlight. We were back in the berth by 9:00 p.m. and I was on the road home shortly afterward. We had sailed almost 60 nautical miles and driven about 100 land miles!

When the results were published, we were pleased to see that we'd finished second in division behind the much faster J/105 J-Tripper that was a one-time entry and therefore didn't count in the OYRA nine-race series standings. This finish keeps us in first place for the 2015 OYRA series and gives us a 2-point advantage over Wetsu, which is now in second place. Every point counts in a nine-race series! Five more races are left, including a return to Half Moon Bay in September.

— Pat Broderick, Wyliecat 30 Nancy