Ken Howe gets the scoop from club member Karem on Rum Run, a popular sailboat race on Puget Sound from club member Karem.

Karem writes:
Yes, we did win a bronze duck. We had a pretty bad start because we got fouled 3 times within 2 minutes at the start. Even though we were the starboard boat, we had to crash tack to avoid a collision and then tack back again and then again to avoid another collision. We made up for that lousy start with a pretty straight upwind leg pointing high in clean air almost in the same tack all the way to the West Point mark and then a great spinnaker run afterwards. By the time we rounded the Meadow Point buoy, we were already quite a bit ahead of the pack and only saw 2 boats ahead of us and those were the True Blue and a J-24, which I believe had the name Death. Death tried to reach across to Port Madison keeping their spinnaker up. We contemplated doing the same, however, after some discussion among ourselves, we decided to douse at the Meadow Point mark and switch to our headsail. True Blue did the same. 

Our reasons were: (1) we thought the ebb would push us further north and we'd have a hard time keeping a straight line across to Port Madison had we had our spinnaker up (which would force us to douse eventually and sail back upwind with our headsail to make it through the finish line, all of which would translate into lost time), and (2) we saw some squalls approaching from southwest, so didn't want to risk getting caught in that with a spinnaker. We took advantage of a small trick, however. We moved our spinnaker block to the outer rail on our downwind gunwales, and ran our lazy sheet through that to use it as a reaching sheet to have a better trimming angle for our headsail, which probably helped with our boat speed quite a bit. Halfway through the reach to Port Madison, True Blue decided to host their spinnaker (probably after seeing Death), but we decided to stick to our original plan of using just the white sails. So, it turned out to be a a pretty interesting finish, we saw 3 different strategies playing out: True Blue's strategy to go with white sails first and then hoist the spinnaker, Death's strategy to stick to spinnaker all the way and our strategy to just sail a VMG course with the white sails. 

Our strategy paid off really well. We maintained our lead from the rest of the pack all the way to Port Madison, but at the same time closed the gap with True Blue and Death. At the finish, it was pretty much us, True Blue and Death. We didn't know Full Moon had finished way before all of us, so we were pretty convinced that we were going for a podium finish regardless. We didn't know whether that was going to be a gold, silver or bronze. Death ended up quite a bit downwind with the spinnaker, so they had to douse and sail up to make it to the finish line. At that point, we knew they had a much longer distance to cover and that it was pretty much between us and the True Blue. True Blue lost a lot of time messing with their spinnaker hoist/douse, which put us within a boat length behind them. That is when we (and True Blue) made a really bad call. We mistook a fishing boat and the orange buoy that marked the end of a gill net that they were deploying as our finish line. By the time we got close enough to realize that it actually wasn't the finish line, we had put ourselves in a really bad position because the gill net was now lying between us and the actual finish line. Both True Blue and we had to sail around it. That mistake gave Death enough time to recover from their lost time, so they finished 1-2 boat lengths ahead of us. We thought they got the gold and we were now competing with True Blue for the silver. Our bow was overlapped with True Blue's stern up until the last few boat lengths, but we were having a hard time passing them because of the bad air we were getting from them. At that point, I decided to fall off somewhat to get some clean air, and that gave us a final push ahead of them and our bow crossed the finish line about 1-2 feet ahead of their bow, so it was a really close finish. We got the horn from the committee boat, but they didn't, which surprised both us and them because we thought we got the silver duck and they got the bronze. Upon sailing by the committee boat to claim our duck, we learned that we actually won the bronze and True Blue got nothing. We were told the Full Moon won the gold. Since we never saw them, they must have been really ahead of us. It was a very fun Rum Run overall.