Home	Westpoint Regatta 6/22/24

Though both Luna Sea and Jonesque Jones signed up for the Westpoint Regata, only Luna Sea Sailed the race. Here is their report.


From Luna Sea:

Hi Guys--

We had a wonderful race to Redwood City. It had a lot of things going on.

We started in a three-knot flood, and there was a nice breeze up to Harding Rock. We started on port tack and made it all the way around with only one tack. But we did overlay the mark because we were totally afraid of that flood. We actually rounded Little Harding after getting lee bowed and taken up to the moon by a SC50 in a CYC race.

From Little Harding to the City Front it was an E ticket ride. The wind freshened up a bit and we hit 8.5 though the water and with the 3-knot flood we were zooming and keeping up with the faster boats. We raised the kite just past Alcatraz and things were going well to the Bay Bridge. It was here we saw an Islander on the wrong side of the Bridge for the other Islander regatta! I don't know if they were lost or just out sailing. The wind however was less than five knots as they had a reef in the main. And with the flood they appeared to be going backwards. Painful to look at. (Editor's note: That was Barnacle who was making her way to the east side of Yerba Buena for a postponed start at 12:30.)

We have seen this wind hole at the Bay Bridge before, and we wanted to be as far away from the west end of the bridge as possible. We stayed outside of everyone else, but everyone was having problems and some boats had just stopped except for the very helpful flood. We changed kites and dropped the 1.5 ounce and put up a half ounce. This helped. But we still did a pirouette before starting up again.

The wind to the San Mateo Bridge was all over the place and from north to westerly. We saw a lot of fours and fives but mostly 10-12 and one 20 knot blast right when we were gibing! We sailed along most of the way next to a Bennie 36.7 which was fun. After a little screw up with our jibe at the San Mateo Bridge the Bennie sailed away from us and we had a nice little run to the finish all by ourselves. We corrected out in the top ten of the 38 boats entered and finished before all the boats in our fleet and all the ones that started before us. Even the one with a 54 rating. So, we were happy with that. But a Catalina 30 and a Newport 30 corrected out in front of us in our section. Not so happy about that!

The facilities at the new Westpoint harbor are just terrific and they have a wonderful restaurant. They had put out two floating docks and had a band and seating area on one and dance area on the other. But it was a little shallow getting in and in the morning we were hard aground. As in the boat was in 2 feet of water! This reminded us of Benica but at least this Yacht Club didn't run out of coffee in the morning or beer in the afternoon.

Anyway, we delayed our morning departure three hours waiting for a bit more water and then plowed our way out of the marina and down their channel to the main channel. After getting to the main channel, we had no problems. But as nice a place as this is, two feet of water is a problem. A big problem. This may prove to be more of a marina for power boats. If we do this regatta again next year, we will dock at the Sequoia Yacht Club and walk over to the party. BTW the restaurant has a giant aquarium and it's worth the drive down just to see it. They also have a little outside service that opens early for coffee and soft serve ice cream. Something that I am sure is a big hit with kids and grandparents in the afternoon!

Just a little disappointed that we were the only Islander there. Peter had signed up but was a no show. This regatta was on the race schedule, so I was hoping for a bit more.

Here's a link to the video: Westpoint Regatta YouTube. It is about three hours long, but the race took about five hours and we just stopped filming after the battery went dead the second time. There is actually video of us passing boats which is always fun to watch. At least for me.

Happy Sailing.

--Dan
Luna Sea, #420