J/125 DOUBLE TROUBLE sea story- SA contributor Jeff "Elvis" Thorpe from Quantum 'frisco takes you onboard a smokin' downwind race: "It all started by hoping there was no room for me on my friend Andy Costello’s J-125 Double trouble for this year’s Coastal Cup so I could stay home and spend a nice weekend home not sailing, as last year I did the race and we broke our rudder just before sunset off Monterey and we were glad that we did not have to go thru the night with our current spinnaker inventory as we did not have any kite small enough. If you have never raced from SF to Santa Barbara this stretch of coast line can be some of the windiest and most confused short & steep wave period waves to drive. If you can drive a boat in this I would bet you could drive anywhere in the world.Now to last week I was on the phone with Andy reviewing that the new kite that we designed for the race would make it in time and I had to open my mouth saying thanks for the invite as I was just giving him a hard time as I really did not want to go, So next thing I know I am doing the race ?? So much for my weekend off..After reviewing the weather for the race and packing my gear seeing that the weather might be backing off a bit with winds in the low 20 knots forecasted. I still over packed warm dry gear as I showed up to the boat and Trevor gave me shit for how much gear I brought but as it turns out I wore every bit of kit and was still shivering the whole night!!
The race started at 10 am in a max ebb tide so we had a great start at the weather end of the line but could not tack over as limit was a bit late to the line and they were charging up to us at max speed we could not tack and clear them so we waited until they became over lapped with us and then gave them some encouragement on which way was favored they tacked we extended for 3 lengths then tacked and followed them towards the north Tower of the golden gate bridge. Once outside the gate with the wind a fair bit lighter which is normal for a race that starts this early in the morning we saw that there was a bit more wind to the south near mile rock so we tacked and went to the left as to pick up the left shift as limit and the Andrews 70 alchemy and most of the boats stayed right trying to get out to the northwesterly breeze as the wind got even lighter and went 50 degrees left by mile rock we were boat for boat with limit when they came out from the right could not cross us and went back to the right to pick up the north westerly. From this point we were the most left boat so we stayed on port and worked out to sea as soon as we saw a bit of northwesterly us and the SC 52 Prevail tacked and started heading down the beach on course....." Read more about the J/125 DOUBLE TROUBLE story here.
