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     1999 LIME CUP, Miami FL Rating: N/A |
Miami FL - The Lime Cup is Biscayne Bay Yacht Club’s Annual mid-summer Offshore Race. The Fleet started in reverse PHRF order. The start went off with everyone approaching the line on Starboard, setting spinnakers in almost no wind. Because of the Gulf Stream’s influence, this race is a Tactician’s nightmare. To the casual observer it seems simple, sail to the Gulf Stream head North and finish. The trick is to not go too far out and know when to come back in. It can make as much as 3 Knots difference. When your boat speed is hovering around 2.5 Knots, this is huge. C-SHELL an S2 9.1 owned by John Duncan of Coral Gables FL, was for a while the furthest boat out from shore, as much as 5 miles east of the rhumb line. The wind filled in from the SE, and was building. We continued to work down, in an ever increasing breeze. The new breeze allowed us to almost sail to the finish on that tack. We were pretty sure we had a good race, because we were counting from the front, not the back of the fleet. After a great dinner Saturday night, we retired knowing Sunday was going to be another scorcher. On Sunday, we started 5 minutes behind the Hobies, and watched them head for the beach. The thought now, is to stay out of the Gulf Stream, and look for counter current that may be in close. We short tacked along the beach, going in to the areas marked off for swimming, which took us into 8 ft. of water. Then we went East, toward the Gulf Stream, mindful of the information we gathered on Friday. We discussed not going into water deeper than 40 ft., this set up a series of long Port tacks, and short Starboards. Things were going well. We felt that the important consideration was how to approach the finish. Our plan was to try to hit the Starboad tack lay line. We almost made the line on Starboard and tacked over to finish 7 min 31 ahead of a Soverel 26 on corrected. We felt we had moved up in the overall standings. We knew we had saved enough time to give us overall in our PHRF division. At the Awards Presentation we were a little surprised to hear the Hobies had finished 1, 2, 3, overall, but were grateful to get our Beer mugs & Silver Platter. Its not over till it’s over, someone once said. On Tuesday morning we got a call from another competitor who told us he was pretty sure we had won the overall on the weekends race. The race committee had gotten the Hobie 33’s mixed up in the starting order somehow, on both Sat. and Sun. It is a shame that we didn’t get to bask in the Lime Cup spot light but that’s Yacht Racing! - submitted by the CShell crew |
