This weekend was Raritan Yacht Club's biggest regatta of the year the Red Grant. There were around 100 boats racing across a dozen or so fleets from J80s to leisurely cruisers.
As ever I was racing on Knot Again,a 34.5 C&C in Division 6, non-spinnaker. There were 4 races on Saturday, followed by a big party and a couple of races on Sunday. It was quite the shindig!
On Saturday we had 15+kts and we did reasonably well finishing third overall out of 6 boats at the end of 4 races. Sunday was much lighter air and not kind to Knot Again. We didn't fair quite as well and dropped to fourth behind our three club nemeses, the aggressively skippered Taz a J27, Regardless a tight-pointing Pearson and Forbidden a J29.
For grins I thought I would try to twitter the race. This is me on my iPhone between races. (I really need to get a life!)
I tried a few photos that I twitpic'ed. I am sure that their hitting the interwebs almost brought the great series of tubes to a crashing halt. Anyone notice any lags in internet speed on Saturday morning?
I then tweeted our progress in the race.
My usual job is starboard winch. I love it as it can be a damn good work-out especially with 4 races in a strong breeze. Trying to string together 140 characters of pithy wit worthy of Stephen Fry would do my head in at the best of times trying to do it between tacks was definitely inadvisable.
No sooner would I think of something to tweet, than our tyrannical skipper, Cap'n Howard "Bligh" Paul would call "Ready to tack". I mean really! Doesn't he know that I have a number of followers to rival Ashton Kutcher standing by for my every digital emission? So what if we overstand the layline by a few hundred yards.
It took half a leg to windward to realize that this wasn't going to work. I knocked it on the head. Downwind I was able to fire off a few twitpics like this of Howard at the wheel with Bodacious, a cruising J34 in the rear-view mirror.
No more twittering while racing for me. Frankly I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief. My few tweets were up there with "Just woke up", "Had a great latte".
And I get annoyed when my crew merely starts to take pictures during a race ...
Posted by: Carol Anne | July 21, 2009 at 12:06 AM
Geeze. If those ocean racers can file video reports from the Southern Ocean I don't see why it's so hard to tweet from Raritan Bay. I think you need to find a skipper who appreciates what a modern media star you are and how your vast following of fans demand to be tweeted when you are racing.
Actually I did notice the slowdown on the Interwebs that you caused on Saturday morning. I said to Tillerwoman, "I think the Interwebs is broken. I bet Adam is twitpicking."
Posted by: tillerman | July 21, 2009 at 08:45 AM
I am thinking of asking whether I could take a position as tweeter. I will perch on the pushpit to starboard of the skipper and tweet our every move. I am sure he will be fine with it
For the record Howard is the least tyrannical person on the planet.
Posted by: Adam Turinas | July 21, 2009 at 09:36 PM