Long Beach Harbor Invitational Series

On Saturday, June 12th Mille raced in the fourth race of the Long Beach Harbor Invitational Series. We had raced in the second race of the series back in April. Many thanks to the crew of Steve and Lisa Anderson, Lesley MacDonald, David Harper and my co-captain Risa K. Scott. We were the biggest boat in our class and therefore had the lowest handicap. We placed fifth in our class. With the new sails we added this year from North Sails, Mille does extremely well upwind, but we have to improve our downwind performance.

At the start the winds were 10 knots and with the first leg an upwind run to Marker #2, we did well, crossing in second place in our class. After rounding the mark we popped the chute for the first downwind leg. The set was good and we threw in a good gybe about mid-way down the leg. The problems came at the take-down. We fouled the jib with the spinnaker lines and we dead in the water for a few minutes while they could be cleared. This allowed several of our competitors to pass us as we struggled to get Mille moving again.

The third leg was upwind and as has been the case, Mille made ground on the boats ahead of us and we rounded the mark in third place. As the wind was building and the crew was still tired and a bit discouraged from the last spinnaker run, we decided to leave the chute in the bag and run the downwind leg with the genoa and main. As the rest of the fleet was able to fly their chutes, we lost ground on this leg and were in fifth place as we rounded the final mark for the short upwind run to the finish.