Race day 3 at the Medcup Murcia in Cartagena

3:28 AM 0 Comments

Today was moving day for us on the Roma. As a team we needed to decide if we were going to continue to slide after a bad day 2 or if we were going to come back swinging. The team was down early on the boat cleaning up after our CODE RED day yesterday. The navigator was still working frantically trying to get the new computer working. The mood in the team was focused but happy I think that the work list was almost cleaned up.

We headed out on time and got a nice beat in and a run back to the starting area. The windspeed was around 8-10 knots and the sea state was surprisingly calm given the state we left it in the day before. Even if the sea state was calmed it was certainly disproportionate for the wind speed. I’ve always felt that we have an advantage in a sloppy sea way relative to the newer boats so I was pretty confident heading into the race.

We started race 3 reasonable well but couldn’t really get anything going upwind. At one stage we were certainly last near the top of the beat. We rounded the top mark 4th and headed off down the run to grind a few boats down. We had a good boat on boat battle with Puerto Calero and rolled them. We rounded the leeward mark 2nd but coughed up a position on the beat near the top. Down the run we passed Puerto Calero again in a nice boat on boat battle to finish up 2nd. I think maybe we passed those guys 3 times…

Race 4 started off reasonable well but still only got us to the top mark in 3rd. We gained a spot on the run and then benefited from a massive shift on the second beat. The shift moved us up to first where we managed to stay through to the finish.

The breeze was back up into the mid 20’s for race 4 and the waves were back as well. We started well but didn’t have a great upwind mode going and gave up a few positions to round the top mark 4th. Our run went much better than the other breezy day and we were right in the thick of things. We were set up to round the right gate but had a last minute change to left and rounded inside the whole pack. That rounding pushed us right up to 2nd. We couldn’t get to Madrid but we were able to hold onto our 2nd to the finish.

So 2,1,2 for the day which when combined with Puerto Calero’s day gave us a 2 point lead going into the final day. A few repairs to work on overnight and more computer work for the navigator. Hopefully tomorrow he will have the Deckman back up so that we can run full instrumentation. Let’s see how we handle the lead on the last day.

Patrick Shaughnessy