Snow Tubes2006 San Diego NOOD - Too Tuff Crew Review
By Mark Engelhardt - Too Tuff and crew did the 2006 San Diego NOOD (stands for "National Offshore One-Design") this weekend. We raced 7 races over three days. The NOOD had a total of about 150 boats and the "Ultimate 20" class we sail in had 17 entries. We were sailing against the Silver Medal winner at the 2000 Olympics! Pease Glaser and Jay Glaser are world class sailors. No wonder it's so hard to win.
The drive down on I-5 was fairly uneventful. The trick was to leave at 5:30am to avoid Los Angeles traffic and arrive with enough daylight to prep the boat and get it in the water. We towed Too Tuff with our new 2006 Matrix XR. I really like the Matrix, and it tows the 1600lbs of Too Tuff and trailer quite well (even up the grapevine).
Racing on Friday was frustrating. The winds were light and variable, so it was hard to dream up a strategy that made anything happen. We ended near the back of the pack on each race.
Things changed drastically as far as the conditions on the second day of racing. Winds were up around 10-15 knots and the swell was about 5 feet (this is the off shore part of NOOD). We did much better since our home waters in Benicia have consistently strong afternoon winds. We hardly ever sail Too Tuff in light air. We placed 10th out of 17 boats in our best race on Saturday.
On Sunday, the winds were blowing about the same as Saturday, but we ended up shorthanded, so we couldn't safely fly the spinnaker until the last leg of the last race. This pretty much kept us from being very competitive on Sunday. We did have a really wild rounding of the leeward pin though. The hot shots from the J80 fleet arrived at the pin at the same time we did. One of the J80s took down its spinnaker and tacked right in front of us around the pin while two other J80s were right on top of us! We had to duck the first guy and sprint away to avoid being run down by one of the other J80s. How do you protest a boat in another fleet?
We packed up and drove part way home on Sunday night, flopped at a motel, then finished the drive on Monday. About 1000 miles by car, and probably 30 miles of sailing Too Tuff! It made for a great weekend.
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