Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 2:36 PM

Subject: Race Day ! part 1

Hi Everyone,

  I hope my emails are back to normal.  We shall see.  Also, www.Odgamer.info should be back online soon.  It looks a little different, but Darlene and Marino will work with it so that’s great.  Thanks guys!  I really do love my library.  I will divide this up because of all of the photos.

Tuesday late afternoon, our friend and boat surveyor Ray Wolfe came by to recruit Randal to be the navigator for Jon Kerner’s sailboat for the President’s Cup Races.  Jon is a retired College of William and Mary sociology professor.  I thought the flag on the back of his boat was from VA, colors were right though the symbol wasn’t.  Actually it is from Belize.  A sailing club from Taiwan has chartered Jon’s boat to begin learning about racing. Ray would be the captain and teacher.  But, last minute, Ray needed a replacement navigator who owned and could use a handheld GPS.  Well, it took a while, but Randal found our handheld GPS and figured out how to use it.  Because we have other nav gear we don’t use the handheld GPS.  Now, however, if our electronic system should fail and our back up system should fail, Randal can use the handheld GPS.  So this all was a good thing for us too.  Randal spent the evening plotting the course on another chart plotter product we have so he could bring it up on his laptop screen and trace the route.  Randal wanted to be totally prepared for his first racing experience.  You have to navigate from point to point because the course covers lots of the bay and goes as far as Grande Island which is an hour’s cruise for us; you can’t see ahead where your next marker is.  That’s why you need a navigator to tell you what your heading should be from marker to marker.  Hope that makes sense.  If Randal writes up his experience I’ll forward those.  He did take his camera today, the second race day.  Though it had been fairly windy up to race week, the winds seem to be lessening for the actual race days and today’s race was delayed for lack of wind.  The wind picked up and the race started about an hour late.

Wednesday was the first race day.  There was an opening ceremony.

Getting ready to perform  The man in black in President of the Yacht club.

They were quite cute and seemed to enjoy performing.  They must have been roasting in those hats though.  It was in the mid 80s.

  They set of air guns and yell, let the races begin…or something along those lines.

Ray has just taken a photo of the Taiwanese crew.  They take turns going out for different races. You might not be able to tell from the photo, but there are both boys and girls.