49er FX Europeans Day 2

First start - holding our place, countdown, go, full speed, another gun, it's a recall, then suddenly we are  hit by another boat from above. I think they bore away into us without looking, and they hit us hard with their wing and bow. After some yelling we sail away. I take a glance for damage, but don't look that close, I tell Kristen to focus on the next race and forget about it. The other teams coach call us over to look for damage, but the next start sequence has begun and we get lined up for our start. We have a good lane at the pin, and once we are out on the wire we can see a big hole in our boat that I didn't see before. So we sail the whole race, but we are slow and finish dead last. We check the hole and discover that I can put my fingers through the boat, so we sail back to the dock. Drain about 40 gallons of water out of the boat and cover the hole with packing tape and sticky back. Made it back out in time for race 3. Start in the middle, maintaining our place on the line. Another good start. We weren't the fastest upwind, but we sailed ok. Passed some boats downwind. Even though we were struggling to find speed and balance upwind and never felt fast, we sailed a solid race. Did I mention it got windy right after the start? We are racing where it is shallow, so the waves stand up, they are short and steep. Quite a few boats capsized downwind.

At the end of the day we were given redress for races 1 and 2 today because of our damage. (Average points) So, tomorrow is another day.

Lessons learned:

Check for damage and if you have a big hole, go in right away to maximize your chances of making it back out to compete in more races. (I was too stubborn about racing race 1 when we were sinking - we should have bailed and might have made it back for race 2)

Get your setup right - we were still on our light air rig settings from the morning at the start of race 3, and that might have been the source our our upwind troubles with speed.

If you see a bubble in the main upwind, ease jib. Also, use the vang to flatten the front of the sail. (we were sailing too eased on vang and too trimmed on jib. Our rig settings were light so the main was too deep, and our jib tack was high so the leech was too tight.

Better settings might have been: down on the tack, tighter jib halyard, tighter shrouds, tighter outhaul, car 5 on the jib (maybe), vang harder.

We are just recovering from almost capsizing to windward in bad air as we cross the finish line in race 3