The Cayard Chronicles - 2004 Star World Championship Day 2
Gaeta, Italy April 25-May 2

Monday, April 26

Well, the first good thing is that today didn’t cost $5K. The next decent thing is that we finished 8th in a race that was not straightforward.

The wind was from the northeast again today (that is from the land) and so it was very shifty and puffy. Leaving the harbor we had a gust of 25 knots but it then began to moderate quickly. We had to change mainsails just before the start as we had our heavy air main on.

We had a bad start…gun shy as yesterday we were actually OCS at the start, and then we broke our rig…so we had to do a lot of shucking and jiving to get an open lane. Finally we did and again our speed was very good.

We rounded the first mark 17th and made some small gains on the next couple of legs. On the final run we passed 5 boats by going offshore and getting more breeze. Then up the last beat, the wind went crazy. First it dropped from 10 knots to 6 knots. Then it shifted 50 degrees right and it looked like we were going to be 40th as we had worked the left up until then. Then we saw some wind on the left filling back out form shore so we tacked back to the left. It finally filled from there and we ended up 8th.

It was a tough leg. Ian Percy (GBR) went from 5th to 23rd on the last leg. Bromby (BER) went from 15th to 3rd. I am sure there were more horror stories than that.

Freddy Loof is sailing very well and got second today to go with his third of yesterday. So he is leading and I think Max Tracy (IRL) has two 5ths so he may be in second place. Torben Grael got 4th today and I am not sure what he finished yesterday but he must be near third place. Mark Neelman
(NED) won the race today.

This morning we had a little surprise in that the committee decided to weigh everyone between 09:30 and 11:30. Problem was that they posted this notice on the board at 2100 last night and no one knew of it. So most people ate breakfast before coming down to the harbor and some did not even make it to the harbor by 11:30 as the start is not until 14:00. So there was a big hurang about that. George Szabo (USA) did not make the weight and neither did class president Ricardo Simonechi. So they had there rule books out and were waiting for the jury when we got back to the dock.

Tomorrow’s forecast is for less of this north easterly gradient so it should give way to a nice sea breeze in the afternoon….hopefully. Then we have the “Rest Day” on Wednesday. This is a pretty casual schedule…1 race a day for three days, then a rest day, then 1 race a day for 3 more days. Time-consuming!
--- Paul Cayard

A small sample of (low resolution) pictures by Jan Walker from the Star Worlds in Gaeta is available HERE