LLSC Keelboat Fleet

What a wonderful final two nights of the series! We had a comfortable breeze both nights that allowed for everyone to get their fair share of sailing in. We were very fortunate to have a steady (at least for the lake) breeze that gave us some great race courses to sort out the last places of the series. Big thanks to both RC teams for setting courses where we could chase the shift that would make our series! On Race 9 we had Jim Chambers and Chris Webster leading the Wind Spinner and Perpetual Motion crews. For Race 10, Tony Stanley and Karen Boettcher brought us a great finale with help from the Hermes and Slainte crews! We also need to thank Wheeler Sutton for some delicious grub for week 9 and the Branch House for hosting us yet again in week 10!

The past two weeks have brought us some wonderful fair weather sailing and some magnificent views with sunbeams breaking through the clouds over multi-colored spinnakers. Some of y'all have done some pretty amazing jobs of capturing this and sharing to the facebook group and it is much appreciated. But it never is the same in digital form. There's still just something magical about seeing 30+ sailboats slicing through the water on a mission with the sun glinting through the windows of the sails.

There's a jaw drop effect that just can't be perceived on a phone, a fancy camera, or even an old school polaroid. No matter which is your favorite technological method of capture, there's nothing that beats a memory. That's why old stories are so great, right? You can hear the jaw drop effect in a person's voice, you can see the glimmer of excitement in their voice.

So props to everyone who keeps making it out every wednesday to generate more jaw drop moments, more stories, and more excitement for the generations to come. Looking forward to hearing everyone's series one stories at the awards banquet tomorrow! Don't miss out, come find out where everyone finished; live and in-person!

What an awesome race! We got the best of lake sailing this past week. Well a touch more breeze would have been nice, but we had enough breeze to every fleet got to complete the full course! 

What really made this past week interesting was the shifts. There was a constant back and forth as you went up and down the race course, yet all of the shifts stayed centered around our windward-leeward course. One minute, you would be feeling really good about yourself sailing an inside lift and suddenly it would turn into a header and the whole race would be on its head. The whole fleet with tack together, you'd be feeling sorry for yourself, and then another shift would spin the whole race upside down again! 

This is why lake sailing is so magical. There's never really one answer to lifts vs pressure. It can be debated until the end of time. Learning to balance those is a difficult task, one that I think I will never master. 

There is one thing that I've learned from all of these debates though. I think everyone is right. Tacking on the shifts is the most important and connecting the dots is the most important. Well those two conflict don't they?

I have started to always view it as risk management. We often get caught up in being the fastest around the course, but what actually matters is being faster around the course. It's not always necessary to be in the best pressure on the lake, you just have to be in better pressure than your competition. You just have to be on at least the same lift as your competition. Staying a little bit closer to your competition makes this a little bit easier to understand how much risk you're taking and if your reward is actually real

Sorry y'all I've been forgetting to post these to FB. Please pardon me while I catch up

Series 1 Race 7

Rest in peace to those stranded just after rounding A. I'm sure it was exciting to have clawed your way back up to the mark, finding the last little remaining fingers of puffs as you ping ponged off the lulls. I would have been itching to get the spinnaker up and get to relax a little more as you start to at least drift to the mark. Unfortunately Lady Lanier was not so gracious as to allow you a slow drift. It was a proper parking lot in the shadow of X.

Sometimes that's what our wonderful hobby does to us. Reminds us that patience is critical. In today's world, we are often trying to move too fast and do too much all at once. Us sailboat racers fall into the same trap. However this might be one of the things that the true sailboat cruisers have us beat on. For our own sanity, it's often important to slow down and reflect. Take some time to realize all the cool things you've done while sprinting around packing boats up, driving through the night to an out of town regatta, and pounding coffee in the morning just to make it through the work day.

It's nights like these with a sputtering breeze where we should slow down and take it all in. I know I forgot to do this; and I wasn't doing it until team Highlander crossed our mercifully shortened finish line to spin around and hear Papa Doug say "Well at least we got a sweet sunset." For those like me, that have been in the boat for too long and missed the sunset, here's a few pics to help you find peace on your lunch break today.

Sorry I've been absent from the emails for a while. I've been a little too head in the boat at work these days with no RC to keep an eye on incoming storms for me. We've had a few of those storms roll through over the past few weeks and I want to shout out to all the Volunteers that kept their eye on the radar and kept us safe (and well fed!).

Race 4 - 5/6 - Stormed Out

RC: Gary Umberger, Mike Kirshner, the Uncle Uncle Crew, Greg Cash, and the Impetuous Crew

Food: Branch House Tavern! Sponsored us with a discount and kept the grill on for us!

Race 5 - 5/13

RC: Bo Scott, Sean

Well I'm not sure if this email should be shorter or longer. We had some pretty killer breeze on the way out to the line this week but it really didn't stick around did it? It seems y'all did make an effort to keep me quiet, but I think you're going to have to try a little harder... I'm not quite satisfied until Papa Doug is proper rail meat.

Now Dana did call me out last week. She said her crew would be reading my email along with their daily religious readings and that my verbose nature might make it a little harder to lead the pack. WELL, she was right. Dana swooped in with a come from behind win last week as the GOAT and Highlander Teams got tumbled around in the midst of some big boat leeward roundings. Props to Dana and crew for being the first out of the crummy air and therefore the first to the new pressure on the left side of the last leg. Sometimes simple is best - a clean bow is a fast bow.

But the leeward mark isn't the only place one needs to focus on clean air. The start is 100 percent the most important time for clean air and the most effective time to establish a lead and control a race. I'm sure many of you say 'let's just get off the line clean' each and every week. Is that old adage or something you determined after a start left you looking for an extra pair of shorts? I'd venture to say it's something you heard before and then started to do after you had one too many buff and polishing days on Thursday. But have you been interpreting the meaning incorrectly? Getting of the line clean is important. Hitting a boat leads to turns, bad air, and a lot of ground to make up. But not getting on the line also leads to two of the three - bad air, and ground to make up.

So this week I challenge you to stop giving up boat lengths above the boat and exchange them for beam widths on the line. Good luck but be nice and don't crash. Those of you that like to barge at the boat... Here's your warning. There's gonna be someone in your fleet that nails the layline this week. And now they know you don't get room at the boat.

Big thanks to RC this week! Mike Ivone, the Strega crew, and Stefan Schulze and his Hitchhiker crew got us another good Wednesday race

Well I hope you paid attention last week! Yep it really felt like some deja vu out there. Same direction, same dying breeze, but this week managed to stay a little steadier and have much larger connected lines than the localized puffs of last week. This made it a little easier to stay in the breeze, and that was definitely goal #1 on the upwind. Stay in the dark water and don't get too close to the edge. Leaving more wind above you kept the boat winding up and rolling, but going too far meant you lost lanes trying to power up in the lull to get back to the dark water.

Downwind had similar strategy but manipulation of the apparent breeze became more important as the breeze died off. If you could start to generate your own breeze, you could pull away as others struggled to keep moving. This requires a lot of communication back and forth between trimmer and skippers. It's important to not begin to collapse the spinnaker. It's much easier to keep flow when it still exists than regenerate flow from nothing.

Every boat has a different set of communication protocols but what's important is you keep talking. The driver should be vocalizing every turn before it happens and the trimmer should be vocalizing every pressure change as it happens. Both of them have to keep talking as the boat turns to keep the sails turning at the same rate as the boat. All of this while managing the wind vane. Keep it high enough to get the speed fast enough so that the wind vane clocks forward and then drive it down until it clocks backward or the pressure dies. The smoother you can do this, the longer your downs will be and the shorter your ups will be.

Sorry for the long email but the lack of breeze may have driven me to babbling insanity. If you'd like shorter emails, please increase your donations to the wind gods this week.

Big thanks to our RC this week! Bill Jestel and the Crush Crew for getting a solid race in with not so solid conditions!

Looking forward to seeing everyone next week! Let us know if there is any corrections!

https://llsc.com/regatta/ufT4PJYvJa/results?list_view=true

Welcome back Sailors!

I'm sure everyone was just as eager as I was to get back on the water and it was a great night for it! Although it's probably safe to say that the best sailing was had in warm ups for the race... but I'm sure that there's plenty of relieved souls that were able to shake the rust off in a little bit lighter racing conditions. As the breeze died, it became a game of finding the miracle puff that would scoot you across the finish like further ahead than behind. And no, I don't really have any good advice on that front.... It really felt like a game of luck as you went back and forth with your fleet on any given puff. Yes, it was a bummer that the breeze died off as the night went on, but we still got a race in, had another classic Wednesday night sunset, and a wonderful dinner to top it all off!

Big thanks to the Breakaway and She-Devil crews for running RC this week and the Lamorak team for cooking up some delicious burgers and dogs! Next week, we will have the food truck option from Home Spice available.

Friendly reminder that there's only one drop per series this year. However, if you're interested in cooking a future dinner, sign up with Will Brown and you will get a scoring average for volunteering!

I'd also like to thank Jonathan for covering for me while traveling to Race Week and knocking out the scores for last week! We've moved the scoring to club-spot for this year so they're available at this link:
https://llsc.com/regatta/ufT4PJYvJa/results?list_view=true
If you have troubles accessing, let me know!

Swim break! Unfortunately, we didn't get to race this week, but we were still treated to a phenomenal sunset (check out this photo from Linda Hoopes) and good times with fellow sailors.

If you looked at the forecast and decided to skip on hanging out with us, you missed out on a perfect night for some swimming! If you're thinking, well I'm only here to compete and flinking (yup, floating and drinking at the same time) isn't for me... Well you're missing out on some of the best parts of sailing. But if you're that competitive, then you also know that a clean boat is a fast boat.

Papa Doug has always said that the mark of a good crew is someone who's always cleaning loose lines up. And he's right. It keeps the maneuvers quick. Less kinks in ropes mean easier douses and tacks, and when every rope is where it's supposed to be, you can keep your eyes on the course rather than in the boat trying to find the right rope.

However, this Wednesday was not a crew cleanup day, it was a skipper cleanup day. On a perfect night for swimming, it was time for the skipper to get in the water with a scrub brush or a sponge and knock off the slime! Time for them to stop barking orders and do some work for once am I right?

I did take the opportunity to give the 22 a scrub this week and found that it probably needed a full-blown wash. I was astonished at how much grime I found on the bottom of our dry-sailed boat. But I think that goes to show that we've been blessed with fantastic breeze all summer and great sailing! I haven't had a night in the water to scrub the bottom. So keep up your prayers for wind cause even though they didn't work this week, they have been working.

Thanks to the Race Committee team of Kurt Stadele and the Ole Sole Mio crew and Matt Perry, Dave Pritchard and the Fellowship crew for giving it the ol college try this week. (PS College football is back, GO JACKETS!).

Also Will Brown let me know that last week dinner was actually led by newcomers Kristen Trapp and Cameron Chandler! Idk about y'all but I'm still dreaming about that pudding, so please introduce yourself if you see them again and thank them for the dinner!

The competition is heating up in series 2! Race 6 is in the books! Oh also the sunsets have been gorgeous 😍

Writeup for Race 2-6:
Y'all I'm so mad!
I was determined to get a BUNCH of sick photos from RC this week and then my dang phone died after the 3rd fleet rounded the windward mark... (I've put some of my fav pics here but I'll post the full library to the Facebook group)
But let me tell you what.... I talked last week about making sure that you take a moment to enjoy the beauty of what we do every week. Look outside your boat and be cognizant of the sunset and spinnakers and smiling faces all around you. Y'all I was jealous because of the pictures but they don't do it justice.
I was fortunate enough to be on the mark boat for RC this week (if you didn't notice X is missing, so we had to make do). And after my phone died and a few more boats rounded the windward mark, the sunset poked through the clouds and lit up a rainbow of spinnakers running all the way down the lake. We motored around the edges of the course to go watch the leeward roundings and check in with the barge and to glide across the water and watch the spinnakers and sunset almost rotate around you is one of the most majestic scenes anyone could dream of.
So this week I would like to thank all of y'all for showing up and showing out with your beautiful kites. If you haven't done RC or if you haven't brought a safety boat with you for RC. Do it. It's amazing. Volunteering is totally worth it!
Speaking of volunteers, I need to thank Mike Harrington for organizing dinner last week! Yes, it can be as easy as ordering pizza to volunteer for dinner. If you're interested in helping out, reach out to the officers. We can always use more volunteers!
This week, our RC was Davis MacLeod, David Reddaway, Wheeler Sutton, Matthew Simpson, Tim DeWitt, and Team Highlander. We apologize for the difficulties with the radio (note to future RCs, the front radio on the barge apparently has a VERY limited range. use the one in the back of the boat). That being said, I'm proud of y'all for figuring it out the old school way.
As always let me know if there are any corrections!

Just some awesome photos taken by our awesome fleet members during the first 2 weeks of series 2!

A good night for boiled peanuts if you ask me! At least that's what we were consuming through the very drifty first half of the race on the J22. I heard stories of other boats choosing a much more liquid diet on the water though.

Unfortunately we did not have our usual stash of rum on the 22 due to Papa Doug being just a little under the weather. We had settled for beer to accompany our boiled peanuts. Turns out this was a critical mistake as we found ourselves entering a port/starboard situation with Ole Sole Mio. We had seen Ol' Bullit make a cross that we didn't think was going to be as feasible as it turned out to be. This gave us hopes for keeping our miniscule sail plan from getting stuck behind the giant Beneteau.

As we approached though, we heard the dreaded call "Starboard" and had to make what felt like a mile long duck to avoid the skyscraper floating through the water in front of us. As we passed by, we were informed that our unfortunate situation could have been remedied with transfer of the amber liquid nourishment we not so salty dogs refer to as rum.(we're lake sailors, do we get the old salts title? Let me know in the comments below.). 

It sounds as if the Ol' Bullit crew had offered such refreshment to the Sole Mio crew in exchange for a cross. So this week's piece of advice is that sportsmanship is always the best way to compete.Oh, and always bring RUM!

This week's RC was headed by Stefan Schulze and Mike Iuvone. It included members Paul Stoeffer, Julie Stuart, Emma Smith, and Peter Kowalski. Thank you for your service!

As always, let me know if there are any corrections. Next week is a dinner week, we'll see you there!