BiState Regatta Labor Day weekend

This is the 2017 Bi-State regatta.  Chicago to St. Joseph Michigan and back.  Fifty miles as the bird flies each way.  Held over Labor Day weekend and my brother's birthday.  Arne and Gordon have done this race many times.  Now that they are both gone, my brother and I use this race as a memorial of sorts to our dad and uncle.  God we miss you two!

While racing back from St. Joe, we had some hitchhikers.  Two little birds landed on board and proceeded to get into everything.  One landed on my beer-can, went in the cabin, ate a spider, and in general was hanging out, I named him Arne after my dad.  The other was on Kristopher, the steering wheel, the spinnaker sheets, the jib sheets, everything.  That is Gordon.  Funny little birds.

We came in last for the race to St. Joe.  I'd like to think that we did so poorly because of the rigging slowly loosening itself as we raced.  The port side turnbuckle had two more spins and it would have come out resulting in a lost of the mast possibly.  We caught this once in St. Joe.  The Bi-State is a night race there on a Friday and a day race back on Sunday.  It was so dark and windy that we didn't notice anything amiss other than it getting increasing harder to make the boat sail close to the wind.  Dummy me should have checked the shroud tension when that started to happen.  Stupid.

But basically, I think my tactics might have been suspect.  The other boats went close to the Michigan shore and then tacked north.  The wind was right out of the direction that we wanted to go, meaning we had to tack back and forth to get to St. Joe.  In retrospect, we should have gone into the shore more and then tacked.  This would have alleviated some of the waves that were causing the boat to almost come to a dead stop at times.  That tactic of banging the shore and tacking goes against J24 racing where you never hit the corners of a race course.  The difference between long distance racing and buoy racing I guess.  I am more of a driver than a tactician but we had fun.  Next time...

The race back to Chicago, I shut my mouth and just had fun.  We tacked right at the right time and the wind started to back to the SE from the E.  The wind backed a bit more and we were able to hoist the chute.  We also put the finish line coordinates in Garmin correctly.  Some boats had the old coordinates in and they paid dearly for that.  We took a bullet (meaning first place) for the race home.  Kristopher and Peter did the driving.  I was kinda sulking about my poor performance on Friday night.  I am good at sulking.

Here is a link that mentions Kristopher and us.  Also mentions my old J24 boat Tremendous Slouch. We are down near the bottom.

The songs used in the video are Eric Clapton Sweet Home Chicago (YouTube didn't allow the Blues Brothers version), Van Morrison Into the Mystic, John Hiatt Gone, and Nickel Creek Ode to a Butterfly.

Hope you enjoy the video.  I am still learning how to photograph interesting stuff and trying to find my way.  I think finding the right music is almost as hard.

On the cancer front, I had my 6 month checkup and am clear.  The spot on the right lung has shrunk considerably after radiation and that means it was cancerous.  We will check it again in 4 months to make sure.  So far so good.