For the opening day, our captain who was taking a few hours away from his other big toys (Full size trains) had assembled the following crew. Gretchen, Jane, Stacy, Winston and Philippe were joined by Ben Rochard who was in Texas for a few days.  Stacy made full honors to this opening day ceremony sailing with pearl earing, necklace and full make up.

We decided to go out early to do a bit of practice.  Apart from droping the pole on our number 1 (Oops, sorry Gretchen), everything went very well and we are very quickly progressing as a team in the way we handle the boat.

The race committee had decided to run two short courses. The first one was a W3 with 10 knots of wind and the second one, a W2,  was ran in much lighter air.  We had two good starts.  In the frist race we consistantly increased our lead but believe that by the end of the race it was not enough to claim victory.  We should finish second behind J.Bartlett J-80.  In the second race, John was able to pass us with a mystery puff that I never saw on the second upwind leg. We passed him back just before the mark before opening a decisive gap in the downwind run.  We should win this second race with a confortable margin.

This was another good day on the water and we all look forward to next week end races which should see the return of Austin standard racing conditions. 13 Knots of wind in very sunny conditions :-)

Gretchen, Jane, Stacy, John, Winston and Philippe left the dock early to practice some roll tacks and a few jibes.  This practice came in handy as we raced in dying wind.  In fact the race committee even surprised us with a start sequence.  We were lucky to be at just about 5 minutes from the pin and started there on port which was our only option.We had to dice a little bit thru the starboard fleet but as every boat was almost stopped we managed a reasonable start.

The final race of the serie was cancelled as we were reaching the first mark.  It took one hour to go from the start line to X and the cancelation of the race was the only reasonable option.  We still raced Ray Schull to the first mark after the cancellation. We powered up the boat with some very illegal pumping action while rolling the boat while Ray turned on his engine.  The muscle power proved to be faster than the mechanical engine and we went around the mark ahead of Ray. Ray still did beat us to the dock.

As a result of this cancellation, all the races of the frostbite serie count and our DNS in the first race costs us the victory.