Great to see Taylor and Matthew hanging in, still tied for third!

Qualification round is done, correct?

Mike

Correct, they made the cut yesterday.

from SA this morning on the F18 fleet:

...if you’re looking for a fast fleet that allows out-of-the-box boats and decade-old designs to race competitively, this is the one

is this really a true statement?

The class was built on that premise 2 decades ago and it's a formula that works and works well. No, it's not a class for everyone and if you want the latest and greatest go fast with steep price tags the class is not for you.

The Infusion is 10 years old and in my opinion is the best all around shape.

Clearly I'm a huge fan and very bias so take the opinion for what it is worth.

Well there are probably 9 year old infusions here that are being competitive.. we had a bad race for us yesterday, but still mid fleet and were nearly beaten by a 2001 Hobie Tiger. So yes it's true. It comes down to almost entirely the sailor.
Absolutely brutal conditions today. Just like the second half of yesterday, light wind with brutal chop that is difficult to steer through, though the chop was smaller today. I was lucky enough to spend my first day on the blue course where we had 5 general recalls and spent over 2 hours trying to get a race off while the yellow course got a race off with just one recall. Luckily we had great starts every time and the 6th start finally went off managed to force a hole and win the left side against some really good sailors. We were 6th around the windward mark, the wind died way down on the downwind and it became a crapshoot. Not sure where we rounded the leeward mark as we were a bit busy, the course was shortened at the windward mark and we were able to finish 11th but the wind nearly completely died and a lot of boats didn't finish. IMO the race shouldn't have happened but our RC was under pressure to have a race to match the yellow course.
Looks like 15-20 the next two days, will be good for the top 4 American teams. But the Euros are all fast in this stuff, will be fun racing at least, not the head pounding of the last 1.5 days.

Only one race today in very light conditions, a lot of BFDs on the yellow course (+/-10).
Finished as 28th that race so not too bad considering.
Happy to have made the gold fleet, next two days are suppose to be quite windy (15kts-ish).

Good luck tomorrow, I've enjoyed watching!

If the RC could add a mid-line RC boat, that could help with the generals, but not a guarantee. Black flag and chip away is sometimes the only thing to do in a large aggressive fleet.

I've seen races go inside out, and still be shortened and counted, at a few Worlds, under several highly respected IROs. Nobody's first choice, obviously.

Mike

Sounds like the US team is having a tough one today- lots of broken boats.

From Todd R:

Laura and Alex: Damage to hull, mast, and broken pole
Taylor : Broken pole (unconfirmed)
Mike and Tripp: 3 broken rudders
Mischa: broke spin halyard
Max Loiselle: hit and transom ripped off
Todd: ripped spin

Holy Sh*t! That's a lot of bad juju for one day...

It sucks to see so much broken gear in one day heck one freaking race!

Take a look at silver fleet... Uli is posting very respectable numbers! It looks like wind and waves might be Uli and Seabass's thing!

Steve and Juke are also rocking the silver fleet.

Right on! You know those two are having a freaking ball! All those 300's make you strong! :-)

I was looking at the results earlier, but they aren't sorted in a way that makes sense, not sure if that's because they were still entering data? But, I did see a DNF and some DNCs for Mike and others. I was hoping there was better news coming...

Knowing nothing about the incident(s), all we can do as fans is hope for redress, but even if they get it, it will be hard to maintain, let alone improve, overall position in the regatta.

Big time bummer for those guys...

Mike

good lord.

Really bummed to be out of the running for a top result but we are very happy with our event and it is what it is. The intensity in gold fleet today was insane... racing was super tight and aggressive. Paired with the conditions of 18-23 (some reports of 25 but I'm not sure I believe that) it was really easy to make mistake and break something. We had 2 crappy starts and I thought for sure we could lean on our upwind speed (which was fast against all the boats around us). But in these conditions all the Euros are fast! I considered myself lucky to make it out of the windward roundings alive as 3/4 of the fleet arrived at nearly the same time with lots of boats coming in on port within the zone.
Mitch Booth broke both daggerboards in race 1.
Taylor did break a pole but was second around the windward mark and still finished 21st in race 3.

I love suicide port approaches at weekend regattas, but with a fleet of 30 or more boats, especially if they're good, nothing good happens in the middle third of the fleet. Unless you're the jury looking for hearings for your resume, or own a fiberglass repair shop...

Mike

Lots of wind yesterday and short steep waves, we broke our mainsheet shackle so didn't finish the 2nd race.
There was quite a lot of damage on the course, mainly broken spin poles though.
Although this Wildcat had it a bit worse:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/dyvdvjaksbgf9yt/f18-wildcat.jpg

Reiss/Whitehead got a bullet in the first race on Saturday! Doing very well in the next race

Sweet! Uli/Seabass got a 3 in the first silver fleet race.