A Bit Of Racing On The Side

I have previously told the people at the Harlem Yacht Club that racers and cruisers are different breeds of sailing cats (and again distinct from the feline sailing cats).

For racers speed is the thing and competition. There are defensive moves in racing -- techniques to slow down the opposition.  And racers spend a lot of money on high tech racing sails which cost quite a bit more than our dacron non-racing ones but do not last as long. Why? Because until racing sails useful lives expire (at which point they will literally fall apart) they maintain their near perfect shape to utilize the wind and make the boat go faster. Non racing sails last longer but get stretched out of shape a bit when they get older and as a result, become less effective in maximizing the propulsive power of the wind to the optimal extent. Racers have also been known to motor to the area of the race, rather than sail there, so as to not be "using up" their sails. They also strictly control weight, which slows a boat down, by leaving gear ashore, emptying water tanks, and taking minimal fuel, etc. Legend has it that the crew of one raceboat was ordered to cut off the bottom half of the handles of their toothbrushes to save weight. Serious racers also use a much more expensive and slicker bottom point than we use to reduce friction.

Cruisers like to go fast too, but endurance is the thing and the joy is in the journey. Lene and I are definitely cruisers, not racers. And yet, there is fun in seeing how the other half live and enjoying their sport. In fact we have raced ILENE a few times and have even won a race back in 2010. But ILENE is better for ocean racing than for "around the buoy" style racing here in Long Island Sound, in which the ability to make numerous tacks and gybes quickly and efficiently is a key to success. Our big genoa  must be furled before tacking, and then unfurled again after the tack, which takes a few minutes, during which the rest of the boats will have pulled away.

But I have recently engaged in three racing activities in one way or another and they reminded me how much fun racing can be.

On  Monday nights the J24 fleet engages in training races. The J24 is the most popular raceboat, at least in the Northeast; small, light and fast. http://www.jboats.com/j24/  There are seven of them in our club. They were teaching a group of young architects how to sail and I was invited to join for the night and assigned to "Panic Attack" owned by Ellen and Roy. Ellen, pictured below on ILENE, was captain and Roy was elsewhere but Robin had the helm. Robin sailed on a 48 foot Saga during the Caribbean 1500 Rally with which I sailed ILENE to Tortola. But that rally involves so many boats with so many people that I had not met him them. He is an excellent helmsman, sensed every puff of wind before it arrived and continually talked about what each crew member was to do so they would be ready for the next move. The wind was light but J24s are so light that we moved at a nice speed. The two architects, under Ellen's expert tutelage, were on the foredeck handling the spinnaker pole and sail. I sat in the tiny cockpit with Robin and was the genoa trimmer and also handled one of the spinnaker control lines, called the spinnaker guy, which runs from the outboard end of the pole back to the cockpit -- with the objective to keep the pole at a 90 degree angle to the wind. This being practice, we did not have a committee boat. Rather one of the boats used a horn to count down the time to the start. No handicaps were necessary because all of the boats are ostensibly identical. And was not an official race so there were no losers or winners.

For my next racing adventure I went to the Club to race on somebody's boat in the annual Treat regatta.  The Treat family donated the perpetual trophies for this annual race and it is divided into two classes for faster and slower boats. I was invited to join Vince and his never-been-on-a-sailboat-before friend, Phil, on Vince's "Adagio" a 35 foot Beneteau. An adagio, in music, is a slow and stately movement; and Adagio is a cruiser, not a racer; but with an appropriate handicap she could be competitive.
During the pre-race Captains' meeting someone asked how long the race would be and the answer was given that a course would be selected of such length that with the predicted wind, the race, which would start about 1:30 would be end about 1 - 2 hours later. I made a mistake at the start. The wind was light to moderate during the 45 minutes that we were sailing before the start to get our roles down and give Phil some practice, but it died at the start. I steered close to the start line and parallel to it for almost its entire length on starboard tack during the four minute period before the start. The plan was then to trim in the sails and then head upwind, across the line. And it almost worked. But the wind totally died and we drifted a few feet past the end of the line without crossing it and had to make a 360 degree turn to come back at the line. The next time we touched the plastic buoy at the end of the line and accordingly had to make another 360 degree turn as a penalty. On our third attempt to start, we touched the mark again, but by now we were so far behind that I did not do another circle. We tried to find tiny patches of wind and get to them and actually were catching up on some of the other boats which were sitting in windless holes. But at 4:15 we had completed only about two thirds of the first one of the five legs of the race course and, all of us having evening plans, we radioed in that we were dropping out of the race and would be recorded as DNF: "Did Not Finish". The winners were those who stuck it out and finished in the 5:30 to 6:30 time frame. So it was frustrating, but still a nice day out on the water, though Phil has yet to experience the true "joys" of sailing.

My third racing experience was not as a racer but as volunteer captain of ILENE as the Race Committee boat. This was for the last of the series of Friday evening races that the Club ran this summer. The photos below were taken during that experience. Fortunately, Ellen was aboard because I would never have gotten the job done correctly by myself.  The first trick is to get the Committee Boat anchored in such a place that an imaginary line, the start/finish line (between an orange flag tied to ILENE's shroud and fixed a racing buoy) is perpendicular to the direction of the wind so that the start will be an upwind leg. Ellen also tied up a big flag with "RC" on it and lettered flags indicating the course, see photo below. Then I held aloft various flags, mounted on the ends of sticks, that got raised and lowered at specific fixed intervals, 5, 4, and 1 minute before the start, and at the start, for each of two divisions. At those instants, Ellen also announced the time via VHF radio.

Five of the eight boats of the slower division, pulling away from the starting line. The nearest one has racing sails.

"L", "C", "2". This means to go from the starting line to buoy L (which was southeast) then to  buoy "C" (which was northwest) and then repeat a second time (back to L and then to C) before coming back to the finish line. The buoys are all marked with their letter designations on a little chartlet so the racers can know where to go.

Ellen listing the boats so we would know when they had all completed the course

The Rear Commodore's boat, "Deuce of Heart", a catamaran, which alas, got a five minute late start and finished last; better luck next  time, Mark.

We ended up anchoring three times. Shortly before the race the wind came in from the south so we had to reset ILENE to draw a different start line to be perpendicular to the new wind direction. And after the race started the wind died down quite a bit so we moved ILENE to near mark "C" to shorten the racecourse by one of its five legs and end the race closer to home. As each boat crossed the finish line, I tried to identify it by its shape and or sail number and tooted the horn when Ellen, seated under the orange pennant on the shroud, saw the first part of it cross the line and recorded its time.  The bottom line: all boats finished, no one hurt or damaged, but it was not until well after dark that the Committee Boat got back to its mooring.

Conclusion: racing is fun too.