Ok...sorry I brought it up again.

Nothing I'm going to say here will surprise anyone I'm sure. As the class flag came up, I never really questioned whether or not we had enough breeze to race. I do remember hoping that it would stay filled in or get stronger because I don't like sailing amongst potholes anymore than anyone else. Looking up the course David and I saw that the wind was filled in evenly but with stripes inbetween (streaky) up the course indicating there were some pretty consistant shifts meaning that we need to wait a few seconds before tacking when we felt one (so we don't tack right on the edge of it and right back out of it again). As I'm sure most everyone did, we had our mind set to treat our momentum carefully and our placement on the course out of dirty air at a premium.

I'm sure it would be easy to fool myself into thinking there was enough breeze but I've been through it in my mind again and again and I certainly feel like there was. Not all of the 22 teams that filed the second redress did well in that race but all of them felt that it was a fair race and were dissapointed that it was thrown out. I've been asked if I would feel the same way had I placed in last place in the race and I can honestly say that I would. My dissapointment that the race was tossed might have been slightly lessened but I would not have participated in the original file for redress nor would I have supported the notion that it was "unfair" regardless.

I was in 5th place with a group of 4 boats about 20 feet in front of me and three boats about 10 feet behind as we all made the only rounding of C mark. The three boats behind me went way left while we went right with the boats in front of us. After sailing about half the way back to A feeling that we weren't going to outrun the boats in front of us we started to work back to the left to try and defend our position. We barely won those crossings and lost no distance on the pack in front of us. The breeze was quite steady all over the course (unless you got trapped in the shadow of other boats). I felt it was a fair race ... that really is my honest answer. I've done a lot of lake racing where the light air racing was NOT fair and where, in my opinion, luck had more to do with the outcome (but strangely Nigel Pitt still always comes out in front). This wasn't one of those....except for the Nigel part.

Lastly, and I promise it will be the last time I bring it up, the SI rule 11.5 is really quite clear in context and intent that there should be 5knots or better at all marks of the course at the start as determined by the Race Committee and that somehow this got over complicated and twisted into making the RC "prove" that he had 5 knots. That's not what it says. I honestly feel that there was enough wind, a fair race took place, and that even if there wasn't and it didn't, we had no room to toss it based on SI 11.5.