Weary At The Worlds, II
After 1 hour of sleep, 9 hours on the water, and 5 hours on interviews and general producer-type duties, I’m spent, and just have almost nothing left for this front page piece – see Petey’s Day 3 Highlight Reel for more on this – it’ll make you laugh..
Suffice to say that our old pals on Joe Fly have moved into the lead by one point over local Chris Larson with his all-Canadian crew, but the fleet is piled up on points and the slightest misstep can change everything.
Fortunately, Katie is young and can carry both our weight. Please be sure to check out the live feed starting at 1030 EST, and today is the beginning of the Velocitek contest, so use the Day 4 thread to register your pick of the top 3 spots for the Worlds – winner will get a brand new Velocitek Speedpuck (you can see pics of this great product in the Day 3 thread)
Thanks again to Latis Yachting Solutions, Velocitek, Point Loma Outfitting, Ullman Sails Newport Beach, Saving Sailing, RBS Battens, Ocean Sailing Academy, Eastport Yachts, Charleston Harbor Access, and Justin.TV for making this coverage possible.
Katie Report
Well it was a beautiful day for us out here in Annapolis today, but it’s too bad I can’t say the same on behalf of the competitors in the Melges 24 fleet. It might have been sunny and relatively warm … but the wind was where, exactly?
To the Northwest, apparently. After sitting out on the course for an hour plus, RC finally dropped the AP flag, and we moved into sequence to start our third day at the Melges 24 Worlds.
Here are the things we did while waiting for the races to kick off: Fix stuff. Program stuff. Untangle stuff. Set up stuff. Plan stuff. Talk about stuff. Drink stuff. Take pictures of stuff. Talk to other boats about stuff. Talk on the phone about stuff. Joke about stuff. Film stuff. Look for stuff. Write stuff. Drink more stuff. And I challenged Petey to a dance-off but he didn’t accept. I would have won, though.
Anyways, the racing finally got off, and despite the wind sucking at life, the RC was able to get two races in for the day. Chiefly, I really need to talk about something called fleet inversion. In day 3, we saw some of the weirdest stuff. There were a lot of positions gained and lost on every leg, with teams starting aggressively and not quite staying that way, and the other way around. Teams like Quantum were able to progressively make their way up in the standings on each leg, gradually moving from the 20’s to an 8th place finish in the 1st race of the day, and then from mid-fleet to 13th to 7th in the last race. Talk about a climb.
There were plenty of other position reversals, and we got all of it on video for you to watch. We put everything up in short clips so it is easy to load and watch when you have a couple of free minutes at the links Clean posted above.
With over a thousand people watching the live feed simulataneously at times and over ten thousand hits on the Day 3 thread, we were very engouraged to keep up the tough work of providing live video, recorded video, commentary and photos that people were beating us up about earlier in the week. So thanks for that, and personally, I’m still learning how to do this – By the moon and the stars, for better or worse … oh wait, that was something completely different ….
Much Love
Katie
Photo by Meredith Block.
