Puddle Duck Race at Lake Woodlands 7-10-04
By Doug Day (retired) #1 "DUB"Puddle Duck Race at Lake Woodlands 7-10-04
Skip Johnson showed up with his $50 Proa and a strip built canoe.
He says that it is more like 80 or 90 now, but hasn't broken the $100 mark yet.
Ray and Pat from Houston came to watch the race, and Chris drove down from Huntsville where he has a few buddies that are looking to build a fleet of boats.
Andrew Creamer brought his Dolphin Sr and a couple of kids.
Notice his paddle, it was made from a political sign post and an old license plate.
Pat was telling me that he will go out infront of road crews and just before they pull (and throw away) polital banner signs, he will grab them up and use the 1x2 stock.
Sounds like a great source of free materials.
Another source of free materials is from construction site dumpsters. I have heard that if you ask permission, they will allow you to dig for the scraps, which many of them are very large pieces of good wood and plywood.
Since it was just Ken and I, we invited the rest to come sail multi-class with us.
Here we are mulling around the starting line.
Somehow I was the first AND the last to cross the line.
The start signal went off, I sheeted in and my bow clearly crossed ahead of everyone else.
Then Andrew went zipping off, and Ken passed me by, and what seemed like 2 minutes later my stern transom finally went across the line.
Skip was having problems getting his proa to go in the super light winds, so I am not sure if he ever crossed the line or not.
He ended up going right back to the dock, and switching to his canoe, which he soon passed me in.
I learned that in light air, the pdracer performs just a little bit better if you heel the boat way over and sail on the chine, so I was doing my best to keep her balanced and try to keep up with Ken.
Ken rounds the mark first.
And way ahead of us.....
Andrew makes it around the mark, and then I finally get around it.
The wind was just non-existant, it would go from nothing to really nothing.
Figured it wouldn't hurt, so I deployed my mary poppins spinnaker.
Andrew and crew are heading up the 2nd lap.
With a clear view that I had absolutely no chance of pulling anything but last place, I decided to enjoy the rest of the course in a more relaxed helmsman position.
The last lap was more of a close fight, Ken was somehow able to stay just ahead of Andrew and crossed the line with 1/2 a boat length lead!
You can see one mark on this side, the other mark is just on the other side, and in this picture Ken is half over the line.
Bout 15 minutes later I come moseying over the line, picking up the marks as I went....
Ken and Sondra hadn't brought a lunch, so Ray and I went to Jack In The Box with them afterwards.
From the left: Ken, Sondra, Ray, Shorty.