Sounds like you had good wind and I'm more depressed than I was earlier in the week.
The speeds were right, but it was a beat all the way down (rough at some points) in steady 15-20 knots with periods of higher gusts, until the last couple of miles when we got a shift to the southwest along with a softening to an excruciating drift against a 1.5-2 knot current, the last 3 or 4 miles, desperately trying to keep the spinniker full of the nearly nonexistant breeze.
I will have the memory of my 4am stint at the helm, close hauled in a steady 18 knots on a moonless night for a long, long time. The shooting stars sparking across the constellations like fireflies, as the boat moved effortlessly from my slight corrections at the helm kept me in awe, inspite of my weariness. Occasionally, the navigation lights of a fellow racer would appear, sometimes just to recede in the darkness as we crossed tacks, other times hovering with us, until one boat or the other tacked away again to once again become a solitary speck under the canopy of the Milky Way. Just an amazing experience.
Unfortunately, we gambled on a longer route to avoid the flood tide and it was not a winning bet. We crossed the finish line second in class, but were not far enough ahead of our competition to hold our place and fell to 5th on corrected time.
