Weird Wind...

THE WIND-GNOME from Jonas Lie's "Weird Tales From Northern Seas"

Maybe you've heard that it never rains on a golf course... Sometimes I think the same applies to sailing in that it never rains on the lake but we all know better! Last night was Women Skipper night, race 1. It's done once per month and over the course of the season constitutes a series. For the past three years, Don and I have traded our skipper for a women and won the Women Skipper series.
With the rain coming down in buckets at times, it seemed likely our first night with a new skipper would be interesting. As it turned out, not a drop of rain fell on us the entire night. That's not to say that rain wasn't falling... It's just that it was falling all around us! With the wind coming out of the SW (where we typically get rain), the RC set up for a 6C which is a windward, leeward (once around) with a center finish on our Olympic circle.
Our pre-race approach was conservative. We checked the wind... pretty square. We checked the line... boat favored. We set our tacking angles. Making note of the time as we passed the committee boat on port, we timed our return for the start. That worked pretty well for someone driving a Santana 20 for the first time in a race. We were about a boat length shy of the line but had good speed when the "gun" went off.
The first leg was about finding the groove for our skipper. Trying to make subtle corrections to keep the boat pointing without stalling or luffing too much. We also tacked a few times which takes some getting used to for a 20 skipper. There's not much room back there with the old deck. We came into the windward mark hot on the tail of the first place boat. Both of us hoisted fairly well but we were the first to jibe and head down for the leeward mark. Ordinarily, we'd do a jibe set but not with a new skipper....
Now we get to the fluky part. After we pass through the center of the course, we notice a significant wind shift. At first, it's a reach but moving too far forward to carry the spinnaker. We fall off. We soon realize that we need to douse quickly and end up beating into the leeward mark! Do you get the irony? As we round the leeward mark in first place, we hoist the kite to run to the line.... only this wind won't take us that far. It's not long before we have to douse again and beat upwind to the finish.

H2O Boa (yellow boat) beating to the leeward mark...

So, what's going on? Well we had wind and rain coming in from the SW (over the Coast Range). We also had wind and rain from earlier in the day that was dropping its load in the Coburg Hills to the east. In the image, north is to the right, the Pacific is along the top and Fern Ridge Lake is the blue area at the southwest end of the Willamette Valley. The Coburgs are the big hills in the left, center. All this rain generated an east wind. The (fuzzy) line where east wind met west wind ran through our race course and likely kept us dry... It's always interesting when you have upwind and downwind racing on the same legs of a race!