Historically this boat and this team love Scarlino. It was good to be back in a venue where the boat had nothing but success in the past.
Honestly, looking ahead at the weather forecast for the week I was worried. There was decent breeze predicted for the training days but nothing from day one of the racing all the way through until the last day. The training days turned out to be beautiful sailing days with sunny conditions and perfect breeze with flat water which made for great practice races. These boats love a good breeze without waves! And we had practice races every day. This was great for us, since we needed to practice our starts and positioning and I had plenty of opportunities to play around with the numbers on my tablet.
Race day one arrived and surprisingly the wind was still fine. Just like during the training we had good breeze. Unfortunately, the rest of the week still looked bad, except for the last day of racing. We had two bad races and were pretty bummed on the sail in. But we would not be Team Niramo if we didn’t bounce back. On day two we found our groove with a 2nd and a 3rd. Day three we waited around for wind and ended up with a 10th place in the only race of the day. The race committee actually started a second race which we came out of very strong but sadly the race was abandoned ¼ up the upwind because of too little wind.
Going into the last day we were not in a strong position in the results and the forecast that had looked so good only two days ago was now looking really bad. There were two chances for raceable conditions: very early in the morning with a northerly gradient or after a midday transition to a southerly breeze. The fleet ended up leaving the dock too late for the northerly breeze as it was already dying when we did our warmup. What followed was a couple of hours of very tedious waiting in no breeze and swell which made me feel a little seasick. As we waited it looked less and less likely that we were going to get any more races in. Then suddenly I heard the race committee over the radio informing us that they had a stable southerly breeze at the top mark.
We quickly got the boat ready and went for a short practice beat. With time running short the RC started us right away. We had a good race and ended up in 4th place and thought we had finished the season in a decent position. It was almost 3:30pm which was the last time we could start another race. So it was unlikely that there was gonna be another race.
We were wrong. There was another race and we sailed it beautifully, leading the fleet after the first lap and extending our lead further into the finish. With the 4th and the final race win we were the winner of the day and earned ourselves 4th place in the overall ranking. Yet again we showed that it pays off to have a team where people don’t rotate every event (the crew has more or less been the same since I joined them in 2021) and where people respect each other and help each other out. Yet again we came back strong after bad races and bad days and did not let ourselves feel down.
segellena 