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Three Bridges, One Big Fiasco

In Saturday’s Three Bridge Fiasco, a trio of counterclockwise boats rounds their first ‘bridge’ at Yerba Buena Island. On the left, the Cal 40 Azure might have been one of the first finishers — had it not run aground just short of the finish.

© Erik Simonson

The 362 entries in the Singlehanded Sailing Society’s Three Bridge Fiasco had more wind than predicted — except when they had none at all. One of the factors that makes this race a fiasco is that the crews, all singlehanded and doublehanded, must choose which way to start and finish and which direction to sail around the three marks: Blackaller Buoy near the Golden Gate Bridge, Red Rock just south of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, and Yerba Buena Island in the middle of the Bay Bridge.

The clockwise pack had a restart when the wind died north of Treasure Island. Fortunately, the current on this patch of water was mellow, though at least one boat dropped an anchor.

© 2017 Vikas Kapur

Kame Richards, a local sailmaker and highly successful racer, offered some advice about strategy at the skippers’ meeting on Wednesday. "If you go clockwise you’re statistically in an okay group," he commented. Probably 95% of the racers went clockwise on Saturday, but this year it was the contrarians who finished first. "The tidebooks are going to be wrong," stated Richards. "The tides will not be normal," He was right on that score. It wasn’t so simple as flood turning to ebb. Rip currents abounded. The velocity of rushing water in some places was unusual on the Bay. Patches of meringue and weird whirlpools popped up in seemingly random places, all adding to the day’s challenges. 

With so little breeze and such strong currents, the starboard rounding of Yerba Buena was far trickier than the much earlier port rounding of it by the CCW boats had been. Some boats were dragged into the island and ran aground, others piled up into a buoy tender docked at the Coast Guard station there.

© 2017 Erik Simonson

Some of the clockwise crews had fretted about typically light air at Red Rock and the flood turning to ebb, so they went straight to Red Rock after the start, leaving Blackaller Buoy for last. (As it turned out, there was plenty of breeze at Red Rock, though the ebb did start early there.) In the late afternoon, this group shot toward the Golden Gate Bridge on a river of 4- to 5-knot ebb. Turning toward shore, they found an equivalent back eddy of flood surrounding their last mark. As Kame explained: "When it’s ebbing very hard, all the water can’t fit under the Golden Gate Bridge. Some of it hits Fort Point and gets bounced back along the Cityfront."

Blackaller Buoy looked like a torpedo shooting toward the boats attempting to round it to port in the countercurrent of the late afternoon.

latitude/Chris
©Latitude 38 Media, LLC

Updated 2/2/17: Preliminary division and overall results are now posted on Jibeset. Awards and shirts will be handed out at Oakland YC in Alameda on Wednesday, February 8. We’ll have much more in the March issue of Latitude 38.

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