Time for Friday night racing.
Race/weather notes: A marine layer kept low clouds over the Sound until mid-afternoon and the wind was blowing fairly strong from the south all day until it cleared up. That left pressure must have prevented the right evening northerly because the race was abandoned at 7:40 with no wind.
We had enough people for 3 boats. I took the Cat 22 with BT as crew.
After floating around for 30 minutes in no wind, everyone congregated around the committee boat. You could have walked across the starting line on the boats. Then a Beneteau 36 started its motor and reversed through the fleet with the spinnaker up. We called starboard on them but they said they had no room to maneuver. At this point, the only obvious action was to race them. So I put up the spinnaker pole and readied the rigging. BT put the engine in forward to clear out of the fleet and then I asked her to put it in reverse. Nothing happened. Forward – nothing. I went back to check. The propeller had fallen off! (shear pin had sheared).
Because BT is quite attractive I was accused of running a variation of the old “oops, I ran out of gas” game as we were towed into the dock. However we were towed in by DT so all was good and we had great pizza, beer and conversation instead of racing. Actually, a pretty good night.