Century Club: Jonathan Nepini

One last round for the Patuxent Pursuit. We had our windward/leeward course in the river today, right off the boardwalk and up against the shallows. We fought hard again in several comptitive races, working with shifty conditions, patchy breeze, and boat wakes chopping up the course. We ran the boat harder and sharper than yesterday, by far the best work we've done this season. On the last race, the breeze got reachy on the course, and we capitalized on a good start and a mistake from Pony Express and finally pulled off our only bullet for the weekend. In hindsight we probably could've squeezed in a fourth race. A great way to cap off a fantastic weekend of racing, parties, and camraderie, and certainly a worthy successor to Screwpile. 

Racing on Dangerous this weekend in the inaugural Patuxent Pursuit. The event was born out of the vacuum created by Screwpile's cancellation, and a number of friends are involved in its planning and execution. Today's race was a pursuit race for all competitors. We started at PR3 in light conditions, and close reached out to PR1. We clawed back a lot of ground and nearly led the fleet rounding PR3 again, but got caught in light air close to the next mark, involving a tight rounding and nearly the whole fleet rolling us from over by Drum Point. We did manage to gain back a lot of ground in the river, but only managed a 6th of 9 boats. Despite the mediocre result, the pursuit race was a tremendously fun format, and got us thinking outside the box sailing the boat on a lot of reaching angles we don't usually spend a lot of time on. A great afternoon and a great start to the weekend!

Sailing one short today for our usual Wednesday night race. Conditions were dynamic, with high potential for a thunderstorm. We left the dock with the #1 on deck, planning to run it, got out in some breeze and forming whitecaps and changed to putting the #3 up, then as the gusts backed off ultimately settled back to the #1 again. We started low on course and a little late, and went left by necessity as we didn't have a clean window to tack into. We ultimately made it back across the middle of the course, before putting in a quick pair of tacks close to the mark. We fumbled a couple of them for various small issues, but kept pressing on into the reaching leg. We thought about putting up a spinnaker, and re-rigged to do so, but utlimately couldn't hold the angle and did it as a jib reach. We rounded the second mark and reached back across the course, dodging traffic and staying above several boats below us. We finally got to set a spinnaker on the final leg, and sailed a clean race home. We had to crash gybe after the finish to avoid the shallows. Not our best race, with some notable mistakes and oversights, but we still pulled off a third-place podium finish, and didn't get stormed on, so it's hard to complain too much.

Another day threatening thunderstorms, so I once again left off Clarke's Landing and planned a low-risk route in some close-by coves. No storms ever really materialized, and instead I enjoyed a nice paddle in Nat's Creek and Placid Harbor.