{"id":78,"date":"2012-02-02T14:22:14","date_gmt":"2012-02-02T19:22:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomdove.com\/blog\/?p=78"},"modified":"2012-08-16T07:50:15","modified_gmt":"2012-08-16T11:50:15","slug":"a-dose-of-vitamin-s-the-hard-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomdove.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/a-dose-of-vitamin-s-the-hard-way\/","title":{"rendered":"A Dose Of “Vitamin S”, The Hard Way"},"content":{"rendered":"

One who believed in omens would not have gone racing that day.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I call a day sail or a race, a “Dose of Vitamin S” because it inevitably revives my spirits when they are sagging and energizes both body and mind. It’s a good, easy physical workout in beautiful surroundings.<\/p>\n

While rigging EDGE,<\/em>\u00a0our 19′ Flying Scot sailboat at the Lake Eustis (FL) Sailing Club in mid-December, the mast fell on my right hand, bruising it badly enough that I could not race for several weeks. Then, while rigging for the first race in January, my new crew spotted a broken boom gooseneck (the fitting that holds the boom to the mast). No racing that weekend, either.<\/p>\n

Finally, with my hand healed and the boom repaired, we rigged and went out for some LESC club races on January 21. These are small events, with fewer than a dozen boats in the Flying Scot class, but I wanted to do well. Last year, I seemed stuck in third place on most races and that wasn’t good enough.<\/p>\n

As always, the excellent LESC Race Committee set a perfect course for us to sail and away we went. I got a good start and was second at the windward (first) mark. Then came the disaster: I messed up setting the spinnaker\u00a0so badly that the entire fleet passed me. Despite passing a few boats on the next windward leg and then barely holding my own on the final run downwind to the finish, I was seventh out of ten boats. Truly bad.<\/p>\n

At the second race, I miscounted the starting time and started dead last. I picked up a few boats on the subsequent legs of the race but still finished only sixth.<\/p>\n

So my path to improvement is clear and simple:<\/p>\n

1. Learn to set the spinnaker properly<\/p>\n

2. Learn how to count down backwards from five.<\/p>\n

It’s all so obvious now. You’d think I would have learned this from 66 years of sailing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One who believed in omens would not have gone racing that day. I call a day sail or a race, a “Dose of Vitamin S” because it inevitably revives my spirits when they are sagging and energizes both body and mind. It’s a good, easy physical workout in beautiful surroundings. While rigging EDGE,\u00a0our 19′ Flying Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomdove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomdove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomdove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomdove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomdove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/tomdove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161,"href":"http:\/\/tomdove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions\/161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomdove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomdove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomdove.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}