QCYC Series 1, Race 3
Ok so the title isn’t my best work. I was trying to put a positive spin on an exciting night that ended early on the water with a DNF, yet still felt like a win in some ways. For example, the Bruins won game 4 by a score of 4-0 just two nights after I was in Boston to witness one of the best games in Stanley Cup finals history (at least for Bruins fans)… an 8-1 blowout win that was just insane to be in the building for.
But back to the sailing.
Last night the various wind models were predicting anything from 5 to 20 knots. On the way over the island, we got hit with a short sunny shower, but the wind felt closer to 5 than to 20. Back in the lagoon there was no breeze at all… just lots of mosquitos. I got a couple of last-minute cancellations, so with only Quentin and Astra on board we cast off to get away from the bugs.
Almost immediately after we got out into the harbour, the wind started to build and by the start it was up to 10 or 12 knots. During the pre-start we got the video camera going on the stern rail (hopefully I’ll have time to edit and post the footage soon). Also, we noticed the winch handle lock was broken, so we switched to the “backup” winch handle… which prompty got stuck in the winch with the opposite problem: the lock worked TOO well and wouldn’t come unlocked. While trying to fix it we kinda lost track of time and ended up starting a good 30 seconds behind.
The course was a triangle: N-W-E. As we were stuck behind the fleet we tacked early toward to the city and beat it right out almost to sugar beach before tacking back at the mark. You never know with the north mark what the wind will do, but as it happened we had overlayed it by a bit and made it easily.
Dove and Gone With the Wind 2 were just ahead of us on the second leg, which was basically one long close-hauled tack to the west mark. We had to deal with Kokoro right under us the whole leg and dropped back a bit from the leaders in our division. At the west mark it was basically straight downwind back to the starting area (east mark). Quentin got the pole up on the big sail (Q’s maybe a little out of practise with the whisker pole and we had an amusing time watching him try to keep it scoped out…) and we cruised downwind, taking a higher line than Dove and GWtW2, who were busy shadowing each other down the middle.
Whatever it was, it worked for us. The legs are pretty short on these Wed nights, but we had so much more speed than they did that we not only caught up and passed them, but had several boatlengths to spare. Right at the mark, Candy Cane was sitting not really moving anywhere and seemed like they would cause us a lot of trouble, but lucky for us they started to round just at the right time for us to do a tactical wide-and-close rounding, shooting close behind them right at the mark and coming tight to windward… putting us right on top of them after the rounding.
So we maintained our lead over Dove and GWtW2 all the way to sugar beach and past the first mark. After Blue Streak passed under us and took off ahead, we got clean air to sail in for the second leg. Dove seemed to be eating into us only slightly. But on the downwind they were close enough behind just to make a difference for us and they managed to pull even, just inside us by the mark.
I think it was at this point that we really noticed the amazing, black sky over the city. The wind started to kick up and we started seeing lightning flashes. I remember thinking that it would have been nice if the race committee decided to finish us after that second lap… not only would we have won the race, but we wouldn’t have to deal with possible thunderstorms.
Anyway, they didn’t finish us, so we headed back to the beach as the wind started building and stronger gusts began hitting us. Just as we tacked in front of the beach a big one hit us and rounded us right back over. We scrambled to get some way on so we could try to tack again before hitting the wall. The second attempt was successful, but we’d given up quite of bit of distance to Dove, and GWtW2 had just passed us as well.
It was getting to be too much wind for the amount of sail we had up and we could feel the hot air from the storm hitting us. With only three crew aboard the boat was getting to be a lot to handle.
By the time we started the downwind leg, the harbour was frothy with whitecaps and the ominous black clouds, cool as they looked, were covering half the sky; lightning flashes were more regular and it didn’t seem like a very smart move to try to finish the race. Better to save the sails and the crew and get back to the club while we still could.
It was a bit frustrating to abandon a race that we’d been doing so well in, but there’s not point in wrecking the boat or losing a friend overboard just for an extra point in the Wednesday night standings. As it was, we had a pretty hard time getting the main down – the topping lift has this annoying habit of getting stuck on the top of the sail and making it impossible to get it down.
We finally got sorted out and back into the safety of the lagoon; I think about half the boats were DNFs on the night. Next time I have a free weekend, I’ve got to get the mast down and see what can be done to avoid that issue in the future.
Anyway. Boston won and we’ve got the RCYC Open to look forward to this weekend.
