Location: West End, Tortola
The morning started with a 7 am wake-up. It’s the very anticipated race day. I had 15 minutes until I had to go to the skipper’s meeting. I brushed my teeth quickly, skipped breakfast, and hopped into a dingy. All the skippers that day in the fleet had a quick briefing on where the race will take place and what the course was. After we were briefed, we all went back to our boats to prepare for the race. We wore all matching outfits, threw on face paint, and I assigned everyone jobs. I assigned Claire and Anda to the helm, Ari and I were put on the jib, Anno was on the main sheet, and Mary, Carolina, Jada, and Alejandro were throwers.
After that was all figured out, we lined up on the line. I picked number 1, which I found out later was not ideal, so we were all the way windward of the fleet. At 9 am, we started the race. We pulled out the Jib fast. I thought we had a great start, but it wasn’t good enough as I looked to the left, and some boats were ahead of us already. We sailed for 30 minutes, and we came across our first marker. We tacked around it and were still in fourth to fifth place. We then sailed for another 30 minutes and started coming up to the finish line. As we were closing in, a boat came up on our starboard side of the boat. As we were getting closer, we chucked rotten fruit at the other boat. We got a few hits in, but in the end, we still had gotten fifth. After the race was done, we had to clean the whole boat. It took what felt like forever, but in the end, we had the boat spotless. Later that evening, we had our first whole fleet barbecue. The food was better delicious, and it was the first time in a while that we interacted with the other boats, which was so much fun. After dinner, we had a meeting with Mike, where he said his goodbyes. After that, we had some shore time where we can go boat to boat and socialize