Doug and Andy finished in 2 hrs 27 minutes on Saturday; 29!!minutes ahead of us! Flying is the right description. Of course, we did flip twice, and Todd pulled a rudder off on the second one when he grabbed the tiller to hang on to the boat. Took some time to reattach the rudder in 2-3' waves. Our first flip was right beside Donnybrook as we tried to gybe behind them; a little too high too soon. They must have had 15 people on the rail who saw that one :-) Definitely more wind south; some monohulls told us they saw 20+ down the bay on their instruments; the waves definitely got bigger south as there had been a steady north wind for 36 hours or so. The close reach up the Choptank was a workout with the puffs coming and going. AWESOME to be on the beach and watch 170 boats finish; they were coming across the line overlapped for almost 45 minutes. Donnybrook (SC 72) was the only mono to beat us; we were griding them back down but ran out of distance. Only bad news is that we beat the beer truck guys by about an hour :-( Roger and Keith both broke some battens, and Doug and Andy had a crack in the hull; possibly from one of the logs that were plentiful in the bay.

Sunday had nice semi-trap wind out of the river, and then it died. Eric Williams was the only beachcat to make the time limit (he went up the Eastern Shore very early and it paid off); Keith and Alec were less than 200 yards away when the 6 hr time limit ran out :-( Only multihull and beachcat classes had finishers; NONE of the other classes had anyone beat the time limit. Lots of unhappy sailors out there... Long day; our tow home behind Relentless (thanks guys!) was 1.5 hours :-(