Monday Night Race 8-11 Currents and Oscillations

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Monday Night Race 8-11 Currents and Oscillations
Monday Night Race 8-11 Currents and Oscillations

Monday Night Race 8-11-25

It was a night of variable winds and unpredicted current. The evening was supposed to start with a fairly strong flooding tide, but in actuality the ebb held on 2 hours plus later and we started in the slack tide that slowly built into a flood as the races progressed. Here is predicted tide data vs. the actual current data from the NOAA Naval Academy buoy:

This actually led to me giving some bad advice out on the race course. I hadn’t checked any buoys since I set the course over an before and was relying on the tankers out in the channel, which were showing flood. I do always urge people to check a buoy to know what the current is doing on the actual race course.

With the slack current the most important element then became wind speed and direction. Which started out ESE and steadily clocked South. That made playing the shifts on the right side of the course the favored way to go – while always looking for pressure. In light conditions pressure trumps direction every time. Here is the wind data from the Annapolis Buoy that night:

Date Time Direction Avg Gust

Strangely we saw double those breeze amounts close to shore as the “sea breeze” effect was much greater. We were easily seeing 5 knots gusting 8 on the race course. This data is an average of the data between the times listed so the direction was not nearly as steady as the table shows. We had a persistent clocking oscillating breeze. To say persistent and oscillating is a bit of an oxymoron, but it just means that while the average of wind direction is moving in a persistent direction it is also oscillating back and forth within a range. Think of these lawn sprinklers from your youth.