| Captain Vic Looks at the UBS RI Trophy AC Boats Racing Page 5 UBS Page 1 , UBS Page 2 UBS Page 3 , UBS Page 4 |
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| Friday [6/25/2004] was Foggy Day in Newport ... but the cup boats had
a schedule not to be tampered with. After a hour of floating around in
visibility that ran from a quarter mile to 100 ft., race committee sent one of
the mark boats north and found a relatively open space north of Newport Bridge
about three miles north of the bridge.
The wind is generally lighter up Narragansett Bay, but that is where we all went. The fog lifted pretty well for the first race . The second race was the interesting one. Just as the start went off fog started to creep up the bay to the upwind mark. And with the AC boats well on the way up the first leg ... the race committee stopped the race. Fog you say? No ... it seems that the signal flag holder on the committee boat for the over early call to Oracle ... had not held the flag high enough which caused Oracle to dip start the line twice more ... after Oracle first went over early. So we all hung around while the fog continued to fill in ... for another start. By then the boats after a couple of minutes of that start disappeared into the solid white fog bank moving toward us with the wind. We decided to bail out and ran along the coast of Gould Island navigating entirely on GPS with our running lights on for about 20 minutes ... We thought that was the safe way back to Newport. Somehow we ended up directly in front of the two AC boats with A spinnakers out about 500 ft. in front of us. A little quick change of course ... and we were out of their way ... as well as out of the way of about 75 or so power boats of every size following them as closely as they could. The Course Minders in their zodiacs were unable to control that crowd in the fog ... and believe it or not ... the race committee continued another leg up for a upwind finish through that spectator fleet which was spread out everywhere. The only people who knew where the AC boats were ... were those power boats that were closely following the AC boats in 200-500 ft. marginal visibility. One of the comments from Oracle ... who lost ... was they had a problem finding the up wind mark. Oh ... and I forgot to mention that the race committee at that time was also trying to convince a tug boat hauling a barge to not run up the race course but divert to the other side [West] of Gould Isl. |
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