One of the interesting thing about sailboat racing is you can have fun whether you do well or not. If you do well, you have something to be proud of - if you do not, that is often because something went wrong that makes for an interesting story. If you do *really* badly that my well mean that you several *very* interesting stories to tell - and telling "war stories" after the day is over (and complaining about your tired and sore bodies) is as much fun as being in the race.
So, I'll bet you think you're in for a great story now, huh? Well, I'll do my best, but the truth is, this epiphany came about as I listened to all of my fellow US fleet members talk about how they came to have their disappointing results. Dan and I had a modest 24th (still out of 56) on the first race, and a rather unbelievable 11th in race two - and it occurred to me "Huh, I don't really have any interesting stories to tell - oh, that's be cause we did fine!" We are in 14th place over-all.
Today started out dead, 5-8 knots, and CORK doesn't like to start in light air. They know what they are doing when it comes to weather though because after 2 hours of floating around the line, the wind wound up to 12-15 for a decent first race (with four general recalls) and then by the start of the 2nd race, we were looking at 22 gusting to 26. This is thanks to Kingston's famous thermals (aka sea-breezes). The problem is that the Lake Ontario has nearly infinite fetch for the seas to build up. Sailing a Laser 2 in 22 knots i great fun. Doing that in 6-8 foot seas is, well I have to quote Matt from dinner tonight - "It's like driving a motorcycle with one wheel".
When Dan and I rounded the 2nd windward mark, onto the reach, we knew it was going to be too crazy to hoist the spinnaker, and sailing upright with 2 sails is faster than sailing upside down with three. So, we decided to wait until after the wing mark to hoist. Well, after we rounded it, we found ourselves carving through waves who's height was more than half our boat's length. After about 5 minutes of "BACK BACK! LEFT RIGHT BACK RIGHT LEFT! HIKE HIKE HIKE! GO IN! HIKE! BACK BACK BACK!" it was painfully obvious that we were 100% occupied by the task of keeping the mast out of the water. Reaches are more stable than runs, so we were thankful to finally make the 2nd leeward mark to be able to reach to the finish. Well, as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. This reach was hotter than the last one, and even without the spinnaker, we had so much speed that the spray from the bow was almost continuously blinding. I was able to see anything other than white for only about 3 out of every 10 seconds. I'm sure we were going well over 20 mph, so try to imagine driving 20 over a continuous terrain of hills that are as tall as your car, with your eyes closed. Thankfully people are built with a sense of balance that goes beyond what we can see, because I was literally navigating by balance; Dan could see from the wire, so it was up to him to tell me if I needed to avoid anything, and other than that, it turns out a person can sheet and hike with your eyes closed (or open but full of white-water) and actually keep a boat moving incredibly fast and even a little bit stable. I never knew it was possible to sail blind.
Kevin and Brandy clobbered us in the first race, with a fantastic 9th place finish. Unfortunately, things fell apart for them in the bigger air of race two. They lost track of how many capsizes they had. The Laser 2 is a hard boat to keep stable when the mix is big air and big seas. The real reason I was able to keep our boat upright is actually the Laser Frostbite fleet; The Laser is the one boat I have sailed a lot that is even harder to keep stable on runs than the Laser 2.
Baron and Ben were ecstatic that they actually finished a race, and not even in last place! They were 42 out of 46 non-penalized boats in race 1 (there were 6 z-flags, 8 black-flags, and 2 DNF's). Baron has been sailing for 18 years, but the Laser 2 is turning out to be a totally different degree of challenge than anything he's dealt with before, so they've been struggling a bit. But they are having a blast, and it's really great to see them feeling a sense of progress. They keep saying they can't believe how much they are learning, and it's only the second day of racing! Baron, by the way, is a pastor at a church in Tennessee, and Ben is a college student from the same region that he found during his crew search for this regatta.
Elizabeth and Ellie got a very respectable 35th in their very first world championship race, and were doing surprisingly well up to more than half way through the crazy second race before they capsized. It took them a while to get their boat righted however, and by the time they did the remaining boats had been sent in due to increasing winds. The drive back to the harbor was actually exactly dead-downwind, so it was just as challenging as the downwind leg, and they handled it beautifully, and as usual, came out of it smiling.
Matt and Ryan, well, they got a lot of experience today. They had one tangled spinnaker mess (of many) that involved Matt falling out of the boat after many of Ryan's failed attempts to get the sheets out from under the hull. Matt figured he was in there anyway, and he's a scuba-diver, so I "just went under" to straighten out the mess. I was not actually able to comprehend what the mess actually was, except that it somehow involved working on spinnaker sheets from below the empty dagger-board slot (this was in race 1, in 12-15 knots, not the big stuff). They didn't finish either race, and they came out of it kinda discourage. They need to take some time to reflect that most people in the world never even attempt what they are actually doing, and it is Ryan's second regatta ever, and Matt's second regatta as a skipper. I've been exactly where they are, and I feel for them. Getting used to this craziness takes time and experience, and I have no doubt that they are improving drastically before their very eyes - they just can't see it yet because their second race was probably as difficult a set of conditions as they will ever see.
-Avram
Days 2-3