[Public-List] Second Race of the Year (for us...)

[Gordon Laco]

Here’s the race before last… for some reason I hadn’t sent it.


So there we were, wolfing down supper in our back yard… shish kabobs with rice and lemonade.  My boyhood friend Barry was visiting from Australia… we admired the way the wind was tossing the trees and hoped for a good evening racing.  Not only is Barry a good and old friend I don’t see often enough, it was he and his father who introduced me to sailing aboard their Alberg 30 SURYA, back when we were boys.

Aboard SURPRISE I introduced long-time crew members Clint and Steve to Bean (one of his printable nick-names) and away we went, for once a little early so we had plenty of time charge around before the start sequence.

The wind was blowing 15-18 knots NW… perfect.   About 20 boats were out, including MAID MARION and SUNDANCER, our arch rivals.  In B Fleet with us were the usual crapulous gaggle of squabbling Sharks…vermin... but I’ll not discuss that vermin till later.

This being the third time my new mainsail had been set, I was getting used to it and we had it tweaked into a really lovely shape.  The sun shone, the water sparkled… and game was afoot.

Steve caught the warning beeps from the committee boat and in due course the struggle for a good starting position began.   SUNDANCER knew we were gunning for him and wiggled away, scraping us off on a Shark, in irons after a near miss with one of its ilk.  I saw the fleet seemed off synch in the to and fro swinging, so broke from the flock (Jonathan Livingston Seagull reference) for the line… oh no, we’re early… but what ho… not so early at all… the last seconds counted down and up we went; a wonderful clean start with only SMOOOTH, a Niagara 26 near us.  (He wrote me after the race thanking me for not shoving him up and over early.)

We tacked onto port and managed to cross the whole fleet nicely… same thing happened again as we were coming in on starboard, this time they were on port.  What’s this?  Yes!  Both MAID MARION and SUNDANCER  were still behind us… wow.   On one of the crosses, we nipped across SUNDANCER’s bow and we heard Rachel aboard her saying to her father ‘I’ll bet Gord is grinning…’  Yup.    As we climbed to weather and I was eyeing the angle to the mark, as usual I wanted to tack too soon… I yelled to Barry ‘Hey Beanus, wadya think?’   Bean yelled back reading my mind ’sure, you can make that, can’t you?’  Steve looked startled and said to me ‘WHAT did you just call him?’   Well that was just another of his nick-names…I didn’t answer the question but yelled ‘OK, ready about! Helm’s alee... Round and round she goes, where she stops, noooobody knows!'

Round the windward mark we went, with SUNDANCER right on our transom.  Down the running leg we all went… the fleet spread out a little and when we got to the bottom of the leg SUNDANCER was about a boat length ahead. (Matt never seems to ease his main enough, but it doesn’t seem to hurt him…)  They point better than we can so sliding into their dirty air astern and to leeward was a mugs' game, so we tacked and then tacked again working our way back up.

The wind was fairly steady in direction… quite steady in strength… up and up we worked finally reaching the weather mark and rounding right behind SUNDANCER.  Down we went again, outhaul eased, main right out to the shrouds, genny wung out the other side, ‘reading both pages’ as they say in Nova Scotia.    Every time there was a puff we gained…every time the air subsided a bit they held us back.   However, I know Matt in SUNDANCER could hear our bow wave over his shoulder… 

The course was the weird Course 5, that is the new-fangled up and down with the leeward mark being to leeward of the line… so we had a short beat to do to finish the race.  SUNDANCER stretched her lead to 15 seconds and so we finished that far behind her.  

But… oh But…. PHRF, that wonderful rating system, dictated that they owed us considerably more than 15 seconds, so we got ‘em.  True, a real first-over-the-line win is more satisfying… But we’ll take that.  

Back at the club SUNDANCER’s crew and ours shared beers and re-lived the race.  What a great battle… how good it is to be racing again and with such good friends.

Gord
#426 Surprise