PENALTY BOX

Race Leader (and reigning World Champ) Mauricio SantaCruz and Bruschetta shoot the wind every two minutes or so prior to the start.

Well boys and girls, it’s not going that well for the Aussie Millions/Rudy Project/Sailing Anarchy team down here in Nuevo Vallarta. The first day of the ’07 J/24 Worlds was a tough one for us. A 58th and 52nd (out of 70 boats) were somehow transformed into a 71 and a DSQ, and once all the protests were final, we were an unhappy DFL on Monday night. The DSQ came when a Mexican national team protested us, yet it didn’t appear on the board so we didn’t know about it and we got tossed in default.

The protest was a joke, and we’re going to try and reopen the hearing later because of the lack of accurate notice, but I’m not that optimistic for us.

Our less-than-stellar positioning left us nowhere to go but up, and yesterday we did a bit better. After almost 3 hours of milling around, the RC managed to get Race 3 off in about 12 knots of breeze from the South. One of the locals said to me later, “I’ve only ever seen a wind this far south when a hurricane was coming.” I’m pretty sure that there’s no hurricane, but a bizarre inversion layer was likely to blame, and the RC did the best they could with the wind going back and forth between 230 and 180 – but the line was still skewed by more than 15 degrees. I’m waiting on pics of one US boat port-tacking the fleet – according to a spectator they were giggling and laughing when they did it, expecting another general recall that never came. PRO Mike Wathen said, “we’re going to get the races off, but when the wind is this fickle there’s not much we can do.”

We got off a bit better, and finally our rig is working well for us, and we finished in the high 40’s. Our second race we were a bit further back, but the wind had increased to around 15, and our lack of meat on the rail (we’re 30 kg light) starts to show somewhere around there. Still, Tim is steering through the big lumpy chop well and we expect to keep moving up (update: after 3 OCS and 3 DNF for race 4, we moved up to 47 in that race).

Two boats test as the RC tries to set a square course.

The conditions are very tough to steer to as the wind up the bay is 40 or more degrees to the right, which sends 3 to 4 foot lump down to us from almost directly on the bow when on port tack. This means that our bowgirl and Mer are soaked all race, but it also means that a good wave driver (or mogul skier) can make up a lot on that tack. Tim’s getting into it, and if we can get him on the right side of the shifts we’ll be up the top half. It didn’t help that our best finish yet was penalized ten places for a technical violation, but we think we’ve finally got that sorted out as well. So far we’ve got four penalties against us, which is frankly pretty frightening for four races – it could have been 5 after an incident that was just hilarious: Race Chairman Peter W, driving Microsoft/W, gave up the helm to his co-driver for the series, Thierry Jean, for race 3. We have gotten to know Thierry well, since he owns the boat we’re chartering for the race, Asterix, and we spent around 10 hours with him as we grinded and bondo’d the boat to something close to official measurement specs (it wasn’t even close, along with OVER 40 OTHER BOATS!)

For some bizarre reason, Thierry tried to stick his nose in at a leeward rounding despite having no rights whatsoever, and he actually crashed into us. I’ve just never seen that before, and if it had been nuking it would have been a great headline: Chairman’s Team DSQ’d After Driver Crashes Into and Sinks His Own Chartered Boat.” Thierry bought us a few beers, and we dropped our protest after a discussion at the tent that was marked by each of us nodding off in mid-sentence – we were that tired. We were so tired, in fact, that we didn’t even make it to last night’s free beer/beach volleyball tournament, but I’ll see how it went. The Comex Paint girls that were running it were wearing the smallest, tightest, shiniest blue shorts you’ve ever seen, and they were probably all 18 years old. I really wanted to go, but we ended up eating a home-cooked goose (thanks Roy) and passing out hard instead.

Official Aussie Millions Mascot "Fatso" gets the goods from Mascot 2 "kanga." We'll see what their sexual position of the day is today, on the pushpit of AUS 193

We’re off to go and retune for what we think will be lighter breeze today, and we hope to put some of our hard-earned lessons into effect on the course. Quite a few of the Mexican national teams play really fast and loose with the rules (assuming they actually know them, which might be a stretch), but we’ve got the speed to get away from some of these nut jobs, and if we can just get off this loud, epithet-filled line, we’ll be fine.

I’m going to stop linking the GlobalStar site until they figure the damned thing out – honestly I’m pretty confused as to why they can’t get it right after all the big talk from the GS reps. They’ve got about 5 technicians down here, and sponsor banners everywhere, yet it just ain’t happening. Maybe they’re just a bit ahead of themselves. The official website is also disappointing me terribly, and hopefully they’ll get it together as well. There are two official photogs on the course, but there are no pictures to be found anywhere, even though they have my e-mail address, and it’s a shame that the only pics I can post are from our own boat, in between races. Talk to y’all soon.

-Mr. Clean

7 Marzo, 2007