Helsinki Tallinna Race 2015

First Race for the boat that still haven't been on Finnish mainland:)

Helsinki Tallinna Race is one the biggest Regattas in Finland. This year 144 boats had signed up for the challenge. We sailed in the national LYS 1 Class, 40 boats competing. In addition there were LYS 2&3, Business-LYS, IRC and ORC -Classes. LYS being the biggest by far. IRC only had 5 boats in it, and ORC around 10, so what's the point? OK this weekend was very busy with other Regattas around the Baltics..

 We were able to gather a crew of 8, who came to the boat for the first time few hours before the start so no time for training this time, we just wing it and have fun while going as fast as possible:)

Wind on the start area was around 15-17 knots before the start and looked like an beam reach to the first mark. LYS class race was a chasing start and we had the third last start time, first start for all classes was at 18:00 and our start was 20:30. What happened maybe half an hour before our start was that wind dropped to below 10 knots for 1-1,5 hours. That probably had some effect on  our boatspeed in the archipelago.

Brief summary of the 41,6nm sailing over the pond puddle:

-Start with Code 0, reach to first mark
-Round the first mark wind shifted to almost running but due to the short leg we limped it to the 2. mark with the code 0 only.
-Rounding the mark 2 wind picked up and was good leg for code 0
-Mark 3, Helsinki Lighthouse. L/M Jib hoisted, Code didn't furl properly and "foredeck office" had take it down manually ie. partly furled. This costed us maybe 5 minutes as we couldn't get to the next layline to Mark 4 and drifted too much downwind. Trimming the Jib for optimal shape/power was at times challenging for the new crew in darkness. At open sea the weather was nice, slight chop slowed the fleet down a little bit.
-From open sea all the way to the finish line on Stbd Tack, switched to Code again west of island of Aegna, it worked for a while but then wind shifted again and Symmetric was required but due to new crew and almost complete darkness decision was made to just go with what we had up.

 Note: Crew beanies from our sponsor www.superyellow.fi

We finished the race at 18th, and were 13th fastest on average speed of all some 143 boats. OK results and the boat showed good potential. For the next race we fix the small issues, get a full crew of 10-12 and aim for the podium:)

 

Thanks for organizing Club and see you again next year!