Racing with GP, Kerry, and Dave

One Wednesday night, I got to Spinnaker and was told I was on Howard's boat (one of the Spinnaker instructors I'd sailed with before). My buddy, Dave, caught me on the dock and said come sail with us! So I ditched Howard and crew (sorry Howard!) and went off to get M1 ready with Dave, GP, and Kerry.

GP and Kerry are serious about racing. We trimmed those sails perfectly, and it paid off! We passed the starting line along with four other Merits and were quickly in first place with two other boats only a few feet behind us. We sailed neck-and-neck all the way out of the channel, hugging the red markers on the left to keep M3 from passing us upwind. Somehow, they did get ahead of us, though, just before we got to the S marker.

Now we were in between two other boats in a staggered pattern, all on a port tack, and needed to tack left, keeping the marker on the port side. We were locked in, and none of us could tack until the last boat in line tacked. So we kept on going!

After a few minutes, the boat in front told us (because we were all within speaking distance) that they were going to tack. We noticed that the boat behind us was falling off, so we told them we were going to tack, too, and the first two boats started tacking. When the third boat saw us tacking, they changed their minds and tacked, too! But there wasn't enough space between them and us, and their bow collided with our transom and swept past our engine. It was a light tap -- no damage -- but both boats were disqualified from the race because of it. Damn it!

After that tack, we didn't lose much time. In fact, fairly quickly we regained the lead. Our sail trim must have been perfect, because we got so far ahead of the other boats that there was no way we could lose the race. If only we hadn't been disqualified! Our crew knows we won, so it doesn't matter that we didn't get credit for winning.

Here's a very short movie of the race:

The other boats are so far behind us you can hardly see them!