The events of this racing season so far are like the lyrics to a John Lennon song: "Life happens while you're making other plans". Over the winter, we got several requests to make the Sunfish racing season longer. Due to lack of resources, we opted to make the first three races of the season on Sundays. The problem was, the weather didn't cooperate for the first week, and we found out that very few of our avid racers can make it on the other two Sundays.
But like life, racing found a way. It turns out that the Wednesday night pursuit race made for perfect Sunfish racing too. Wednesdays at Massapoag are ostensibly a multi-fleet handicap race, but this year The Wednesday Night Series has attracted more Sunfish Skippers than the Sunday racing has. The skippers present all agreed that we should run a race within a race, keep our own scores, and treat it as an unofficial second Sunfish series. And so the Double Secret Sunfish Series is now underway.
Four skippers turned out for last night's racing. The race was a long, 7 leg race, shortened to 5 when the wind died and the Sun was very low on the horizon. For this race within a race, Gary Werden played the shifts brilliantly and got so far in front that he simply disappeared from view to take the 1st first of the series. He came in third overall in the official pursuit race, which is an outstanding finish for a Sunfish skipper. On the fourth leg, Bernadette Levesque played the contrarian, going right, and ducking under the Flying Scot fleet when the rest of the fleet went left into clear air. When the fleet came back together, she was in second place, and she held on to it all the way to the finish line. Mark Stoughton was in last place going around the last mark, went right when everyone else went left, and ended up in third place at the finish with a comfortable lead over John Houstle and Rick Schlosser.
We will be keeping the results on the blog here.
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