The Biggest Losers

Tuesday night was spent racing at the sailing club. It was really windy, so we put on a small foresail and reefed down our main (to make it smaller too).
All eight boats ran along the starting line, and when the horn went off we were at the head of the pack. The wind blew our hair back, the waves splashed against the hull, we were speeding through the harbour.
About 10 seconds later, a 2' rip appeared in our mainsail. It turns out that the reefing line wasn't reinforced (cheap sail), and the force of the wind pulled it through the fabric. Our night of racing ended immediately.

Wednesday night was also spent racing at the sailing club. This time, we didn't hear the 5-minute warning horn, and thus weren't ready when the starting horn went off. Still, we headed up the course and had caught up to the pack at the turning buoy. Unfortunately we hit some bad wind and wandered aimlessly for around 5 minutes while watching all the other boats escape. Finally back on track and with power, we bumped into the buoy. This meant that we had to circle around it before getting back on track. While circling, we hit the bad wind again.
We were so far behind the pack that when we were 1/2 finished, the commodore (ref) thought we were finishing and rated us 3rd place! Unfortunately this meant that we were only 3/4 finished the first race when he started the second.
Again, we managed to find some good wind and sped back up to the rest of the pack. We didn’t finish last on that second race, which was quite an accomplishment considering we started quite far behind everyone else.

This was not an ideal week for sailing. Still, I'm discovering the truth in an old saying: A bad day sailing is better than a good day in the office.