Day 3 Recap - Matagorda Island to Surfside Beach

Rudders? Who needs them??? After a decent start to the 3rd leg of the GT300, Mike realized that the leeward rudder had been bent off the pintles as we emerged from the surf. If it were the windward rudder, we could have gone on, but the leeward rudder is much more important as it is guaranteed to remain in the water on the starboard tack, whereas the leeward lifts out of the water whenever you fly a hull. We turned back to the beach for a fix.

Unfortunately Michael did not have any spare gudgeons (to which the pintles are welded), so we had to take off the windward gudgeons and put them on the leeward hull. This process took about 10 minutes, but only after spending 10 minutes searching for the right tools. We then taped the tiller extension to the crossbar and loosely lashed both to the rear beam. There is some interesting video of this whole process linked in the post on the Justin.TV highlights below.

It was another day of main and jib reaching, with me on the wire, the chicken line keeping me steady. The wind died a little over the course of the day, around mile 30 of 50 (as opposed to the first two 91 nm legs). I tried the spinnaker, but we could not hold it with just me trapezing. Michael would have joined me, but the way in which we taped his tiller would not let him extend it to the length he needed to steer. We retained all our angles and calculated when we would be able to re-hoist the spinnaker.

About 10 miles from the finish, we passed the last place boat, Jack Flash. We could see several others, but catching them was unlikely. 5 nm out, I popped the chute. Our prediction was a bit off, though, and we ended up having to search for power a bit, heading a little higher (and down the beach from the finish) than we intended. We decided to put in a gybe about a mile out, which was a precarious move with only one rudder. On the port tack, we sailed very conservatively, then gybed back to starboard for the finish.

I estimated that we lost 25 minutes for the repair, then a good amount by not being able to carry our spinnaker. Without this deficit, we would have surely been in the top 5 boats... possibly even another third place? But we felt good about our handicapped performance, and headed out to shower up for a delicious pasta dinner. More on that in another post, though...