Reef Race
By Tomasz Dvorak
Will they? Won’t they? The fleet dithered on the porch in the face of twenty knots from the southwest. Really, we should go, but did we want to go? First we postponed our decision, hoping for the wind to drop. Then we turned to Rumblefish, cruising around the harbor, for a report on the conditions. “It’s fine” failed to inspire, and eventually Luciole decided to go out and “see what it’s like out there – if it’s nasty, we’ll come back, and if it’s nice, we’ll sail.” (Luciole’s skipper didn’t want to bail after Tuesday’s rain, and had to lure the crew out somehow.)
Three other boats followed suit. After a mutiny on Rumblefish, only Luciole, Luna Nova, Escargot, and Ghost went out for a mandatory-reef, mandatory-lifejacket race. Our course would take us into outer Hadley’s, using the “new” mark O (where?) and mark V for two windward/leeward legs. With relatively little tide, especially at the start, this race would test boat-speed and high-wind sailing-skill, rather than current-knowledge.
A lack of hulls alleviated the usual traffic jam at the line, and the fleet hardened up, hiked out, and began splitting tacks heading for the channel. Luna Nova led, then Luciole, then Ghost, with Escargot bringing up the rear. Luciole, putting in a reef for the first time, and in a hurry to get off the mooring, had omitted an important part of rigging: checking sail trim. Outhaul over-trimmed, downhaul under-trimmed, and jib un-hanked, Luciole ceded second place to Escargot, and the fleet began reaching for mark O, somewhere off Penzance.
Mark O is a new-to-us mark this year. We don't usually bother to learn the course sheet and instead rely on an osmotic process; by visiting the marks, we can then hopefully remember where they are the next time we go there. Since this was the fleet's first time going to that indeterminate point labeled "O", and since Luciole still entertained delusions of overtaking Escargot, those two boats edged up, goading each other into sailing further and further away from the direct line to the mark. Eventually, they realized that the mark wasn't merely an hypothetical “off Penzance, somewhere over there,” but it was too late. Luna Nova and Ghost, having donned reading glasses and consulted the chart, had sailed directly for the mark. Luna Nova opened up a big lead, Ghost caught up to Luciole, and at the first leeward the order was Luna Nova, Escargot, Luciole, and Ghost.
A fitful and shifty breeze led to moments of (false) optimism when a lift made it look – just for a second – like we’d make the mark. We’d hike out, sheet in, and the mark would go from clearly visible upwind, the object of all our pinching-pointing-feathering skill, to magically now “made”, under our lee, our thoughts now turning towards the downwind leg (and the possibility of opening the cooler). Such a lift never lasts, of course, and there were headers a-plenty to kill boatspeed, shatter illusions of reaching the mark (at least on this tack), and soak any crew slow enough not to scramble back in the boat when they felt the prodigious leeward heel of the lift suddenly shift to a slight windward heel as the sails depowered.
With so few boats, each had the opportunity to pick their “slot” and work their way to weather, seizing every advantage from the lifts and tacking or footing off to keep speed in the headers. After an invigorating upwind, downwind, and upwind, the results of our arduous application of sailing skill were in: no position changes, but maybe the leaders had gained a bit. Oh, and mark O was now stored in the skippers’ memory, overwriting useless factoids like “where I left my keys” and “mom’s birthday is next week.”
The run homewards from V against the current was unremarkable except for a move by Ghost on the south side of the day mark. Not being a superyacht, Ghost slipped over Middle Ledge with ease and took fourth – last of the boats racing, but beating the majority of the fleet, who hadn’t bothered to come out.
Our scoring system uses a profusion of three letter acronyms (DNS, DSQ, RAF, and OCS may be familiar), and normally boats not racing would receive a Did Not Sail, which counts as the number of boats racing plus one. However, I’d like to propose a new one, DSC, for Didn’t Sail – Chicken, for when a boat’s best judgment and reasonable concern for safety get in the way of racing in marginal conditions.
Results:
1. Luna Nova (Fran Elder) 0:00
2. Escargot (Brett Longworth) 0:19
3. Luciole (Tomasz Dvorak) 2:00
4. Ghost (Tom Lanagan) 2:14
DSC. Rest of the fleet