We'll start in Redwood City and take out three Merits from Spinnaker Sailing. We'll raft up out there between races and do two mid-bay crew transfers, so each crew can do all three races—one in each boat. This strategy removes any specific boat advantages, so the crew actually wins the race, not the boat.
My crew is Norbert (my frequent sailing buddy since BCC a year ago), Kerry (my frequent sailing buddy since the Cheeseburger Regata last summer), and Phill (who I'd never met or sailed with but recruited through a mutual acquaintance).
Norbert sailed a lot in the Netherlands when he was growing up and throughout his adulthood, spending a couple of weeks a year on a boat. He started sailing in the bay last summer when he took a BCC class at Spinnaker, which is where we met. He does mostly pleasure sailing, although he's raced on Smokin' J a few times this year, did the Cheeseburger with Kerry, Sandi, and me last summer, and we've managed to drag him away from work for a couple of beer cans this year.Kerry's been sailing for 3 years with a mix of beer can racing and pleasure sailing in the bay, off Santa Cruz, and in France, and he's raced on Smokin' J a couple of times this year in the SYC races on weekends.
Phill owns a Merit 25, has been racing it out of Berkeley for 8 years, and was champion in the one-design races there for 5 out of those 8 years. He says he went pleasure sailing once but didn't really like it. He's definitely a die-hard racer.
Sunday was our first practice together. Everyone thought I was crazy to think we needed practice, but they humored me. I knew we'd have to figure out the best position for each crew member and help Phill get oriented to the South Bay. What I didn't know was how much Phill could teach us all about racing Merits.
Phill started teaching us about tuning the standing rigging right at the dock. On our way out the channel, we practiced tacking and gybing a bit, and he started teaching us about weight distribution and how to really use weight effectively. In fact, using weight effectively was the single biggest lesson I learned from this whole experience... and believe me, I learned a lot!
So in the channel, we had maybe 18-20 kts of wind. I insisted on reefing. Out in the bay, it was around 25 kts with pretty good size waves fairly close together, so I was glad we were reefed. Phill said he'd never reefed a Merit in the bay before. Wow.
When we got out in the bay, Phill took the helm and main, and he decided to try positioning me in the front-most rail position, then Norbert, then Kerry, and Kerry would manage the jib. We had to hike out as far as we could, so that only our butt cheeks were on the rail... legs out and arms, head, and shoulders reaching out over the lifeline. Phill said to huddle close together to make ourselves into a sort of sail to catch more wind. We did and it worked. Wow.
We did a few tacks like that. On each tack, because I was in the front and Norbert and I couldn't both fit under the boom, I had to cross the bow in front of the mast, getting whipped by the jib as it was coming across, and get situated on the other rail by the end of the tack... and the tacks took only about 5 seconds! I felt slow, clutzy, and got very wet. I also got very banged up in a short period of time. So I asked Phill if we could try some other positions.
Next we tried Kerry and I sharing the jib sheets. I'd release and tail on one tack and he'd grind, and then we'd switch on the next tack. We both had to end up on the rail facing out. I felt really slow, so I tried to speed it up, but the waves were pretty big, and we were heeling quite a bit, so I kept slip sliding around. At one point, I actually fell backwards into the cabin! Fortunately, all that tacking had caused all of our gear bags to land on the floor, so I fell onto the bags. All I could think of was that it was cushy... thank goodness! (What I didn't realize until that night was that I'd banged the backs of my knees really hard against the bottom of the hatch and the backs of my arms against the sides of the hatch, and I was really badly bruised all over.)
At that point, I asked Phill to just drive straight for a while (no tacking) so we could talk. I told him that this type of racing was way too intense for me... at least in the strong wind and big wave conditions we had that day. I told him that I wasn't having fun at all, that I felt really incompetent, slow, and clutzy and that I felt like I was holding back the crew. I also felt like I was getting hurt and that if I kept doing what I was doing, I was either going to go overboard or get seriously hurt. I had already talked to Norbert about this on the rail, and he said he was loving it. I knew Kerry was, too. So I told Phill that I was thinking about replacing myself on the crew with someone who was more agile and could keep up with the intensity (not to mention all the testosterone flying around!) and do a better job than I could do.
Phill was fantastic. He asked me a lot of questions to try to figure out what the problem was for me. He said he didn't want me to quit and wanted to find a way to make sure I was having fun, too, without sacrificing our ability to win the race. We talked for about 20 minutes and then invited Kerry and Norbert into the discussion. They'd been listening all the time, so they knew what was up. They helped me explain the level of intensity (or lack thereof) of the races we usually do, and they all agreed that I shouldn't quit and that they wanted to find a way to make it work for all of us. What great guys! I feel really lucky to have the opportunity to sail with all of them.
So next we tried having me stay in the cockpit and always release and tail the jib sheets and Kerry always grind. That worked out pretty well, except that when Kerry was grinding, his weight was on the low side, not on the high side where it was really needed. So the boat was heeling too much at the end of each tack. Phill had told me from the beginning that we needed 5 crew members, not 4, and now I could see why. So we went back into the channel to practice where there wasn't as much wind, and we could see that it was going to work out better, if we had one more person.
So when we ended our practice session that day, we decided to practice again at the beer can race on Wednesday—to get some practice with other Merits and to get a preview of the other skippers in the challenge race on Saturday. We started making phone calls right there on the dock to people we knew who might be able to practice with us on Wednesday and race with us on Saturday. As it turned out, no one we asked was available both days.
To find out what happened next, check out the racing blog I write for Spinnaker Sailing for beer can race #12. Sorry about the lack of pictures. I was really busy!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment