From the RC27- race started a little stressed for us. Replaced rudder damaged by lightning with the spare we carried. Checked hull and found some small holes from lightning going to ground. We thought (hoped)this would be just cosmetic. Our thoughts on leaving the boat over night now, are to leave part of the boat on the ground. Carbon does a good job of transmitting electricity. We may have avoided all damage if the boat had been on the ground. The front was on cat trax and the rear we had on foam noodles. This meant the lightning had to jump to the ground. In doing so we had damage. Bill Roberts, commented that he had a boat the was suspended higher off the ground and it recieved much more damage when it was hit by lightning several years ago. So if you have a carbon boat, suggestion is to leave some part of the boat on the ground.
Back to race- we had a slow start, got clear and set the kite. It looked like the CFR was way out in front followed by M20 and the rest going to the first bridge. The CFR seemed very fast under spinnaker, we eventually passed them going to the sea bouy off Destin Inlet. Then going up wind the M20 had the advantage and over took both us and the CFR. They had very good speed and pointing. This is where we started to look for the beer boat that was promised to be serving us out in the Gulf. Then the Nacras showed up, at this point we began to suspect we had more problems than just poor sailing. We began to go under more waves than we went over. Our speed felt very slow for conditions and we suspected we were taking on water. Rather than risk a complete disaster we decided to retire and head back to FWYC. This was about at 25 miles west of Inlet. Upon reaching the beach we found the starboard hull very full of water. Once again we have our excuse to cling too. It really wasn't our bad sailing...right???
Anyway, thanks to the gang at FWYC, they have always gone out of their way to make sure everyone is having a great time. As we were packing up the boat, I can attest to the fact that the "race committee" has way more fun than the racers in this event(yep, that's where the beer boat was..). I think they had a 3 to 1 ratio of race committee personel to racers and they found a way to spend their time waiting on finishers. We will be back to try again next year. If nothing else we will stay close to the beer boat.