After a couple of days of coaching with John Tihansky, coach of US Naval Academy Offshore Racing Team/founder of Sobstad Sails on Monday and Tuesday, John took the team for a complete tour of the US Academy. This included the sailing center, their R/P66 footer, Farr 53 and the Offshore 44s. We also had a tour of the inter-collegiate hall-of-fame, which is hosted in the USNA Sailing Admin Center. It was a tremendous treat for the team to experience this!
At the same time, Lulu flew back to SF on Monday; took Dylan down to Houston on Tuesday for a client meeting on Wednesday, while Dylan got to hang out w/ friends of ours during the day. She flew back out to Annapolis on Friday, re-joining the team.
Registration/measurement process started on Thursday morning at 8 am. Michael was in line at 6:40 am; TMC Racing was 1st through the registration process and the measurement process. This is the onshore piece of the competition where every single one of the 82 boats, has to be completely re-measured. We finally measured in by Friday at 4:30 pm, after having to replace a main hayard, build a new deck plate (=shorten the J by 5mm) and build a new longer forestay.
Some of the trials and tribulations of measurement process are:
1. One of the boats had to add 100 lbs of lead
2. One competitor, after having their rudder/keel measured and certified, continued to sand/fill/reshape their keel and rudder. they received a special visit from a group of measurers.
3. one of the charter boats was found to have 65 lbs of loose lead that was shoved under the floorboards that had to be removed and reinstalled as corrector weights
4. one of the Italian boats was proported to have an illegal sump…no clue what this means yet but the owner was asking US boats to look at sumps
All in all, it was quite successful and relatively smooth. This has alot to do w/ the pre-prep work that Michael has done and the support from Wayne Clough having the boat measured several times in the past 2-3 years and learning about the pitfalls.
Crew weigh-in, which has usually worked against TMC Racing, went really, really well. As a matter of fact, the scale showed us to be 12 lbs light. Now we’re eating lots of carbs; drinking alcohol and enjoying the freedom from an unrestricted diet.
