The second event of my busy September / three regatta tour was the Rolex Big Boat Series in San Francisco. For this event I was sailing as tactician aboard the TP 52 PATCHES with her new Mexican owner. Patches is one of several TP52’s that are enjoying a second life as a very competitive IRC racer after retiring from the high-end TP52 Med-Cup circuit. Owners are able to pick them up at a fair price, optimize them to the IRC rule, and have a great racing yacht.

We had four 52’s in our class, plus a 55 footer, making for a great class with some good racing. San Francisco provided its usual wild mix of strong tides, fog, and strong wind to make the racing a full-on challenge. Day one was a beauty: 20+ knot winds and pea soup fog that you could barely see 100ft in. Now add in our TP52’s screaming along down wind, large oil tankers and barges going through the bay, high speed ferry boats, and the fleet of over 100 boats all racing around looking for marks. And to cap it off, our on-board computer and navigation instruments were not working. Talk about sailing blind! Honestly some of the craziest, scariest sailing I have ever done.

Back to the race- we had a slow handheld GPS giving us a rough idea where the mark was and we were in 1^st as we approached the first upwind mark and the fog came in super thick. I opted just to cover the opponents, hoping they would find the mark for us. First one boat peels off and hoists their kite, then the next. We never saw a mark, but just had to assume they knew where they were. We go from first to last and take off following them downwind to find the next mark. Three of us almost hit Alcatraz Island, missing it by meters, but going inside one of the Government buoys we later realize we are supposed to honor. We sail on, knowing we will likely get thrown from this race for that error. On the second lap to that same windward mark, the fog lifts just enough to find it (remember this point). We go on to finish second in the race, but head to shore knowing we might get tossed for violating the mark off Alcatraz. Now here’s the interesting thing- our navigator looks over the GPS on the way in and it shows the tracks we sailed for the race…..and none of us rounded that first windward mark in the thick fog based on where we actually found and rounded the mark on the second lap!

We proceed to shore with a plan to see if we are being protested for passing the Govt. mark on the wrong side, and if so, then we will protest to have us all thrown out for not sailing the course. Sure enough this is how it plays out – we are being protested, so we file ours against the fleet. Then after waiting around for 6 hours for the hearing, they disallow our protest because we failed to notify each of the boats that we were protesting them. (Although we told each boat that we were doing this, the rules require you to tell each boat “we are protesting you”. I was not in the hearing, my navigator was, but I would have put up one hell of a fight on this and not allow the other boats to duck out of a hearing because of this questionable technicality).

Anyway, end result is that three of us get disqualified from the race, and the race stands. So we go out angry and proceed to win the next four races! This puts us tied for first going into the final race, making it a who-beats-who to determine the winner. We sail a tough final race, trading positions around the track, and end up 10 seconds behind after 2 hours of racing. Bugger!

But what an event. Great drama. In our minds that wild race should have been thrown out, and we would have won the event easily. But that’s life. In the end we sailed a great regatta, a new team came together really well, and we punched well above our weight compared to the other teams and boats. A 2^nd place result, but a 1^st place in effort and performance, so all good in my book.