John's big adventure Lightning Southern Circuit 2009

John Sawyer is doing the Southern Circuit. Check out his reports below from the first leg of the
series in Savannah. See full results at end of report. You go John!

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Day one, Savannah Yacht Club:

42 boats are registered; Bob Cowen and Toby Wells are sailing with me on this leg. The Wilmington and Skidaway river course complete with mud flats, oyster beds and 8 feet + tide is a really unforgiving place. Usually I break something on the boat here but so far all is holding up. We were looking OK in the first race until we missed a wind shift on the downwind finish with 50 yards to go and lost 5 boats finishing 22^nd. Wind was ENE at 8/12. falling tide all day. In this fleet an OK finish for me is anything in the teens. Race two was no better, in a dying wind we finished 27^th. Hopefully we will make better decisions tomorrow and at least get up to mid fleet.

Savannah is gearing up for St. Patrick’s day everything is turning green, fountains, the river, faces, beards. The clubs hospitality is great. They even washed our car windshield, while we were out racing. The Canadians and snowbirds are sailing in shorts, we are layered up in 55 - 60 degree overcast conditions.

John Sawyer , Lightning 14318

Day two, Savannah Yacht Club:

A great finish today for us. The day started in dense fog no breeze and the gnats were having bike week at the Yacht Club. The RC wisely postponed ashore while we all hung out inside. The weather improved and by about 1pm we were ready to start race 3 in sun and 8/10 k. Our starts have been terrible, today we got some practice through 3 general recalls, finally got started with the I flag. We did better on the start and worked the current to our advantage and finished 4^th today. Overall we were 18^th for the regatta.

I started driving to Miami for the winter regatta at Coral Reef YC with a stop in St Augustine tonight. Pulled off the road at 7:45 to watch the space shuttle launch which was many miles away but still an amazing sight. Even from my distance the audacity of the space program and astronauts to ride a rocket into space was right there. It really was a fireball, red exhaust, black soot and smoke arcing into space very fast.

John Sawyer, Lightning 14318

RESULTS