Tom Jenkins wrote: .....congrats to you and Sean for surviving the Border Run in style. I hate those nasty cross swells off the SoCal coast some summers; they make me feel a bit queasy, and the feeling never completely goes away. Give me the Trades, or good old Puget Sound.
Thanks Tom. For those of you who are interested, Sean Mulligan and I just completed our second Border Run race down the SoCal coast in his M23 Dauntless. This was a 87nm course from Long Beach down to San Diego. We had a great time competing with the big boys and a favorable rating even allowed us to get a second place trophy despite having to sail in light overnight winds after all the big boys had completed the course. The afternoon and evening sailing was fantastic. We had Seans asymmetrical spinnaker up for hours on end and saw consistent speeds in the 7+knot range with occasional runs up to 8.4. A passing pod of dolphins turned to play with us for a while before continuing on their way and a flying fish crossed our bow on a flight of a good 100 yards. The sunset was beautiful and a bright moon in the early night hours reflected off the passing swells as they rolled away. The nasty cross swells Tom mentions were a real issue and made our night pretty miserable after we dropped the spinnaker at 11pm. If we had been able to fly it all night it would have been much better, both to steady the motion of the boat and to improve our finish time, but the angle of the wind had gradually become too far behind us and we couldn't hold the heading we needed. Wing on wing dead downwind in a miserable cross swell is not much fun. The genoa was poled out and the main rigged with a preventer. We survived till dawn and then had some better sailing into San Diego harbor. We trophied for second in class (1st was a Ranger 33) and second in doublehanded. Sean will be posting a report filling in the details soon I'm sure, as well as creating a YouTube video.