Friday, August 27, 2010

1st day of racing at the Melges 20 US National Championship. Three bullets for Team Bacio

Once again I'm sailing on board the Melges 20 "Bacio"with Michael Kiss and his son Mitchell. It's the highlight of the season for our team, the US National Championships hosted at Michael's home Club, Macatawa Bay Yacht Club in western Michigan.
Our team had some good practice Monday through Wednesday and a well deserved day off on Thursday. We worked on maneuvers, tuned our boat and sorted out all the important details.
The entry list is looking good with plenty of well skilled owners and professionals helping to get the boat around the course. The weather has been very cooperative and today even the wind was on its best behavior. We were greeted with 15-17 knots of South-Westerly breeze, a nasty chop and an impressive 1 knot southerly current on the race course. After a couple of failed starts the pin  boat was finally in the right spot and the fleet was behaving better (maybe because of the Z-Flag?) and the race was on.
We're USA 13, stomping through the chop

We played two shifts and rounded in first, put the kite up and were....... gone. We won the first race in great fashion and did the same in the second and third race. Three bullets, nice way to kick off the championship!

We have 5 more races scheduled over the next two days, we just need to take race by race and not get over confident.
Preliminary results can be found here and the pics are from the local Photographer Mark Niskanen.
Mitchell, Michael and me

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