© Michael Lovett

2009 Sperry Top-Sider St. Petersburg NOOD

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In one race of the Spring Soling Bowl off Annapolis in a dying northwesterly, we led up the second beat until nipped at the mark by Manfred Kantor, of Canada, who had come in from the right corner. After rounding, instead of recognizing that Kantor's success might have indicated something good off to the east, we both headed west, in very light air, high on starboard jibe, toward the dark line of the sea breeze advancing up the Severn River about 30 feet to the right of our rhumbline. We were both convinced that getting away from the dying northwesterly and into the approaching sea breeze was essential to winning the race.

Although our spinnakers were barely lifting, the fleet astern, some of whom had jibed to port a quarter-mile back, looked to be in even less wind and, at first, the gap between us widened. But then we noticed the sea breeze line was not advancing. It was no longer as dark as it had been. When we were about halfway down the run, the last boats, on port jibe, a half mile astern and to our left, started to move. The fleet rapidly turned inside out.
 
We jibed to try to reach their wind before it was too late, but it was already too late. Four boats carried the northwesterly across in front of us and almost all the way to the finish. The sea breeze finally filled, first on our side of the line as Kantor crossed in fourth, and then, as we salvaged sixth, spread across the entire course. All of the boats that had jibed left at the mark into the last vestiges of the offshore gradient wind (brought to the surface by thermal turbulence over the nearby peninsula had beaten all of those who had opted for a direct shot at the sea breeze.

The dying of an existing wind and the development of a new one at midday almost always means that a thermal wind is undermining and replacing a gradient wind, thereby creating "two winds simultaneously." The presence of two winds makes one side of the course obviously advantaged, may justify heading immediately from the start toward the advantaged side and continuing until the advantage or the layline is reached, but the advantage, notwithstanding the common belief, is not necessarily on the side from which the new wind is developing. Some sailors (John Sherwood, for example) don't head for anything invisible on the water. They wait until the new wind has appeared before heading for it, and that's good advice.