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Wednesday, May 5, 2010

SYC Smith Island Convergence Zone

I finally had a few minutes to replay the SYC Smith Island race - very interesting to watch how the currents and wind changed over the course of our track and during the day.

Here is a very interesting picture of our start (the track on the left) showing consistent southerly winds of 20-20 knots.  On the right is our return track - at the top of the picture you can see our painful upwind progress in less than 5 knots searching for the wind.  In the middle you can see the sort-of tacks as the wind clocks nearly 180 degrees as we pass through the convergence zone and into the southwest winds of 10+ knots.

In talking with the other boats they never encountered this flat spot, and looking at the race logs this is where we went from an easy 2nd place to 4th given the amount of time we wasted getting through this hole...