Bacio wins first first Miami Winter Series Event

The Audi Melges 20 Winter Series have started with a bang for us! It was great to get back in the boat again since our last event on Lake Geneva at the beginning of October. We had two days of practice on Thursday and Wednesday to shake off the cobwebs, which we used mainly to work on maneuvers and starting. Our boatspeed has never really been an issue so it's a bit on the back burner right now. New on the team for this season we will have Jamie Kimball joining us for a couple of events, substituting for Mitchell (Michael's son) when school or his Laser radial sailing has priority over the Melges 20 schedule.
With an incredible 26 boats on the starting line and various teams practicing hard in November and December we were really excited about this regatta. Obviously the competition had stepped it up and as the number 1 ranked team in the USA they were coming after us!
On Saturday there was only very little wind on Biscayne bay and the Race Committee found a small window of opportunity to get one race in. It started with 4 knots (class minimum) and by the end of the first run it had more or less fizzled out again. John Arendhorst's "Blink" with Scott Nixon and Dani Gamache showed great overall performance to take the race win ahead of Mary-Ann Ward and class new comer Ryan Devos.

Light air action on "Blink"

We, on the other hand, only looked good in the beginning. Showing great speed for the first two legs, but then we picked the wrong side of the course for the second upwind and lost over 9 places on one upwind! Puh, tough one... Luckily, we rallied back on the last down wind to finish 9th.
Needlessly to say, not quite the start to the Winter Series we had envisioned.
But better times were on their way with some solid breeze in the forecast for Sunday's racing. And Aelous delivered on his promise.

Three more races were held on Sunday in increasing breezes with gusts over 20 knots. Just what the doctor had ordered! Luckily we had just received our new SLAM team gear from Filippo Bovio (US SLAM destributor) so we were all set to go.
Now it was time for Bacio (Italian for "Kiss" by the way) to pull out the plugs. Again it was Ryan Devos with Morgan Reeser and Drew Weirda that was challenging for the top spot in the first race, but eventually we reeled them in and scored our first win.

As the wind increased for the the last two races, more and more teams struggled with boat handling and we capitalized on superior upwind and downwind speed to take two more bullets and the overall win. This also allowed us to win the most important race, the one back to the hoist at Shake-a-Leg before all the Etchells would come in.

Chris, Michael and Jamie

 Obviously a great start for "Bacio" for the Audi Melges 20 Winter Series. Full Results can be found here.
Our thanks go out to the Audi Melges 20 Class and their superb class secretary Joy Dunigan for organizing a great event and also to SLAM and Filippo Bovio for our outfitting our team.
All Pictures by Joy Dunigan