Tides and fog

Paul Brotherton reports from a hectic first day at the 470 World Championship

A fleet of 64 men divided into two groups and a womens fleet of 34 started the 470 Worlds in San Francisco on Monday. The first to be held in the USA for over 30 years.

Sailing in the bay between Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge is a magnificent backdrop, only spoiled by the thick summer mist which has shrouded most of the bay for the last week. Famed big breeze and strong tides were both part of racing on day one.

The 10 am start was scheduled to coincide with the "slack water". A thirty minute postponement to wait for a container ship to pass added a small delay. An eager fleet combined with a clearly liberal Californian race team who wanted to make it fair on everyone and refused to show the black flag ensured further long delays. At start time the flood tide was really starting to truck, an initial one to two knots looked strong but paled to nothing when measured against the four and half knots that the womens fleet, the last to start ,had at their first weather mark.

All three fleets headed to the shore to escape the increasing tide, only leaving the relief when certain of laying in one. Even the boats that passed directly by the weather mark had to sail for a further thirty to forty seconds before tacking to make it past the mark. Any boat that had any amount of starboard left was dead. The tide was so strong that the first three womens teams around the weather mark had been teleported downwind, rounded the leeward mark and were back heading to the shore before any of the rest of the pack had made it round mark one. Twentynine 470's packed into a space of 40m by 40m of water stood almost stationary, flat wiring. It was formation yachting at its best, the lead boat from the right would tack, get assaulted by the tide miss the mark and then join the back of the que and repeat, several times.

Pippa Wilson and Sheena Craig were first round and biggest smilers followed by the Swedish Team of Theresa Torgersson and Vendela Zahrisson. Smiles were short lived on both the boats as at the following windward mark, only recently vacated by the squatters, they were pulled out as OCS. Eventually all the boats finished and were sent ashore to wait for the next "slack" period.

A 15:30 planned start was missed, the race committee pulled every flag up but the big bad black one, resulting in more recalls. Another ship, a delay to wait for the mens second group on the inner loop to clear. All added to the women finally facing 4 knots of ebb tide and an increasing afternoon breeze, in the fog.

As the last boat to finish the race staggered over the finish at 18:08 the final statistics were:

Eight Hours afloat, 32 360 penalties for hitting the windward mark 98 suits of flogged 470 sails soon to be for sale.

The two womens teams correctly identified as OCS were given redress of average points for the series as the second gun was not fired until 11 seconds after the start. (The flag was displayed immediately). This probably rounded off a bad day nicely for the race management team.

The St Francis Yacht Club has a superb reputation for running big regattas well and efficiently. Sadly, nothing seemed to go their way today. My shriveled and frozen fingers are crossed that they go their way tomorrow.