Woodies 2012 (the story)

This year's Woodies Regatta did not disappoint and lived up to its wet and wild reputation.
Attempting a gybe we failed, pitched the boat in 30+ knots and broke the pole. But we carry a spare. It's one my dad made out of a dried up old 2x2 shaped to fit the pole ends he custom welded. He called it his "high performance pole", but I was more worried about it splintering and impaling my guys on foredeck. It's also a lot shorter, it was made in another era and I snagged it from the guy who bought my dad's boat many years ago. Anyway, it worked for the rest of the day. Oh, and we snapped the windex... I never use that thing anyway. Great first day, 2 bullets for Kurt's birthday and the 3rd race was postponed due to gnarly conditions. A 4.4 knot ebb and gusts well over 30 made for some mega chopped up wave patterns I like to equate to skiing down double black diamond moguls. We got to the dock, put the boat away and went straight to work in making a new pole. Of course, the John Mast pole that came with the boat was metric, so the fittings didn't quite fit. We had to grind them down to accommodate the closest size pole. We made this one a little longer than the old one... As some may recount, in comparing our pole to the Wilson's we discovered a possible advantage team Wilson might have been enjoying. We'll see.
Day 2 started off really bad; horrible start, a few hasty decisions and we thought we had a 6th and Peter got the 1. 2nd race; we make mistakes, Peter wins, we get a 3rd and now we're depressed. We just thought we'd go out, do our best in the 5th race and be fine with 2nd place. We won, Peter got a fourth and we had no idea a 5th rather than a 6th. We tied and won on the tiebreaker and didn't know it until we looked it up on line.
Thanks to my excellent crew and good friends we had an awesome birthday weekend and victory in the Woodies regatta!