|
|
| Lucky,
or Good? Our long time friend Deke Klatt from Ullman Ventura pulled off a rare port tack start at the J/24 Worlds in Puerto Vallarta Mexico last month. Deke gives a pretty good description of how he pulled it off, but be sure to click on the video to see just how he pulled this one off - amazing! Oh and for the record, Deke's good, but was lucky here!  On
board Jaded in the 2007 J-24 worlds were Deke Klatt, David Paudler, Bruce
Labins, Jon Avery, and Lane Desborough. In race 3 the wind had a major
shift to the left. This made for a very biased starting line. We had planned
on starting on starboard at the port end of the line. With two minutes
to the start the wind shifted even further to the left so we changed our
plan to try a port tack start. The fleet was lining up for a very aggressive
pin end start. We could see that most of the boats were not going to make
the line on starboard tack. Our plan was to hang back a find a hole at
the pin boat. With 25 seconds to the horn, I luffed-up to kill some time.  This was almost a fatal fuck up as we had too much speed and started to
pass the committee boat on the wrong side. We had to fall off really hard
to miss the committee boat. This made us a little early, which turned
out to be good as the massive group starboard tackers were starting to
trim for speed. We ended up about one foot behind the line at the horn.
The only close cross was with Canada, which was a little early, but was
low on the line. Despite our start line magic, we ended up in 6th place
that race. Here is the video.04/10/07 |