MD Governor's Cup 2011

The Governor's Cup was the 5th to the 6th of August. Hard to believe it's been two weeks already.

This was my first overnight race and we couldn't have had better wind! It was blowing 15-20 knots almost the entire time, including the few hours of sleep I tried to get between 2:30 and 5am. The wind only dropped as we were approaching St. Mary's of course, right in front of the finish line.

The whole time we were just pounding through the waves. If you get sea-sick, this definitely wasn't the trip for you. We had some seasoned sailors onboard, but even this chop was enough to a make a few of them green in the face. Personally, I had a blast! It was exciting, although a bit cold since, as foredeck guy and railmeat position #1, I kept getting the most of every wave that splashed over the bow.

Sailing at night was cool new experience. We had to make sure we weren't going to hit any of the other hundred and fifty odd sail boats that were racing with us as well as any of the big shipping vessels making their way up to Baltimore. There were a couple boats that seemingly came out of nowhere (low powered running lights) and at about 2am, we had caught up the bulk of the boats that started at 3pm (we started at 6pm since we were in a faster class). It was pretty hectic. We dodged about 30 boats within an hour. It probably wouldn't have been so many but we were just getting to the smaller part of the Chesapeake.

The race to the finish was pretty lackluster since our wind started dying and boats were already coming back at us from finished but we pushed through and finished pretty decently. 14th out of 16th in our division but 46th out of 155 boats in the fleet with corrected time.

Thanks to Photoboat.com for most of these pictures!

 Race Committee had some pretty sweet boats

 Foredeck View

 If you'll notice, the RC boat here is a pirate ship

 Wave for the camera!

 Apparently someone forgot to clean the bottom...