The forecast at the end of day 4 was for 20-25 knots, and the Race Committee scheduled us for a preposterously early 9am start. Fortunately, we were the only fleet at CORK today, so they put us on a new race course that was only a 15 minute sail from the harbor. I was one of the first people to get to the yard because I skipped out on my breakfast plans due to waking up too late. As it turned out, there were some practical jokers at work the night before. Two jokes were played, one was funny, one was questionable. Somebody shrink-wrapped and entire boat, and then wrote a note on it in left-over bbq rib bones, and then shrink-wrapped it again to keep the message in place. I didn't see it, but I heard that it said something like "You have been boned by the fat boys". That was funny.
What wasn't funny was that somebody also took the wheels off of everybody's dolly, and stacked them in a pile by the launch ramp. They even went to the trouble of putting the retaining clips *back* in the dolly axles after taking the wheels off, so it wasn't malicoius, and could have been funny. The problem was many people do not have their wheels labeled, and many wheels look alike. So, if your wheels weren't labeled, then you got whatever was left over, and in some cases, that turned out to be junk for people who had brand new dollies. Sadly, it worked out that Ryan and Matt were one of the two teams this happened to, and they're going to have to buy a new $60 wheel for a dolly they bought only a few weeks ago.
The forecast unfortunately changed drastically overnight, and became "light, increasing to 10 knots". So, the fleet sat on shore for a couple hours, but that at least gave us a chance to get pictures of the fleet, and talk about the future of the class. Finally we launched, and they RC hung on until the last thread, just barely managing to squeeze in two races in 8-10 knots, while also avoiding racing us in any widely shifting 3-6 knot garbage. Dan and I rocked another start on race one, and we were told we were in the top 10 at the windward mark, which sounds about right. We sailed to the compass, avoiding noticeable lulls, and had our rig tuned right for the conditions. We had a great downwind leg too, and set up for a great rounding, leaving room where we needed to, but also inside about 4 other boats.
As we rounded up, another boat came from well astern and barged right in between us and the mark, banking on us rounding wide. I screamed "You do *NOT* have room, do *NOT* go in there!" Their gamble failed, and my bow lightly tapped their leeward rail as we rounded up. For the record, I easily could have avoided them, the tap was deliberate, to remove any doubt as to whether they had room. After we all cleared the mark, I called for them to do turns, and they did them without any fuss. Unfortunately, we picked the wrong side of the course on the next beat, and at the top we had lost almost 15 boats (including the one who did turns). One of the boats we lost was Ellie and Elizabeth, and I couldn't have been happier that they pulled ahead of us! But trust me, they were the only one I was happy about. We sailed a good run, but not great, and the Mexicans were hot on our tail. We tried to fight them off, but somehow that effort was making us even slower, and they rolled us. I later learned that one of these two Mexicans, with three friends, had in the past trained heavily, and gone to the Europeans in 2000. Apparently, they "schooled" the entire fleet, taking 1st & 2nd place, and there was a big fuss that resulted in them taking the trophies, but not the title of "European Champion" ;-) Anyway, nobody else made any ground on us after that, and it ended up a 24th place finish. Overall a finish to be happy about, but not having come down from top 10. Ellie and Elizabeth got a 20th place in this race! When we caught up to them, they weren't even celebrating, they were just getting their boat ready for the next race. But they were psyched, they just weren't showing it...
Race two was about 10 knots average. After swapping out our light air spinnaker sheets for regular ones (the light once look almost like dental floss ;-), we set up our start perfectly. We had a beautiful open spot to leeward to accelerate into, and I only had to yell at one pastor three times to defend it (that would be Baron, from Tennessee). We were high enough up on the boat above us not to have our wind blocked, so everything was just how I wanted it. One of the things we sometimes do once we're close to the line and in a good position is "heave-to", AKA "park." This is when you sheet the jib to windward to stop the boat from moving. Well, we did so on this race, and in the last 5 seconds when I wanted to accelerate, I forgot to tell Dan "Ok, power up" so he woudl trim the jib in normally. I beared away to accelerate, and nothing happened, and the fleet instantly got about 10 feet ahead of us. That was absolutely the end of that. 10 feet may be less than one boat length, but in a tightly grouped start, it means you are in nothing but turbulence (we call it "gas" or "bad air"), and boats don't go in it at all. You just get to sit there and watch 10 feet turn into 10 boat lengths before you can move, and then even when you do, it's still slower than everybody else. We probably rounded the windward mark in 40th place. At the end of the previous race, Dan had scolded me after the finish, because he caught me counting how many other boats had finished, trying to calculate our place. This is considered "bad luck", and as luck would have it, I made one of the smaller possible errors, but at the exact time when it would have the most disastrous effect. Well, we actually sailed fairly well after that. We picked up five or so boats between when the air cleared, and the run & next beat. We sailed great on the reach, which was up to 12 knots now, and passed another four boats, out-planing them all.
The 2nd run was slow, and we merely held our own, but we got jammed below a train of four boats at the leeward mark. This mark gets rounded for a port reach to the finish, and it is a disaster to be below someone on a reach. I had attempted to go wide to get behind instead of below them, because the normal tactic is to try to roll them to windward, but it just didn't work. I saw our spinnaker suffocating, and I said "Dan, there's only one chance we have, I'm heading down." He said "What are you talking about? We're on a reach, the mark's way over there!" I said "I know, but we can't do anything under all these boats, at least if we get away from them, we'll have a chance." So he brought the pole back, and we went way deep for about 10 seconds, and built a gap of about 12 boat-widths between us and the train, and I said "Ok, let's heat it up." It worked perfectly, we filled the sail, and even though the train was about 5 boats ahead of us, we completely out-sailed them. This was a 12 knot reach with 2-3 foot rollers that were at about a 30 degree angle to our hull. We worked the boat up onto a plan, and thanks to the wave angle, we were able to hold the plane almost 75% of the way to the line. We easily passed all four boats and very nearly picked off a fifth boat in the last 100 feet before the line. However, the wave finally ran out, and we slowed down a lot. We couldn't get it planing again, and I realized the spinnaker retrieval line had drooped just low enough to get caught under the bow; we were sailing with a speed break. The reason we were able to pass the train of boats is that in the wave, the bow was out of the water, and thus so was the line. This is a problem that I normally prevent by frequently checking that line on the run and making sure the slack is pulled into the boat, but apparently I just didn't do so in the last few seconds of the run. Well, it was too hard to kick the boat back up onto a plane, and by the time we did, the next boat had already crossed the line. There train was ancient history though, so there was nothing left to do but wait for the line, which we did. This turned out to be a 25th place finish, and I know I should be proud of the fact that we did such excellent work of making a bad situation better. But of course it's killing me that such a tiny mistake probably cost us 10-15 positions in the first place. We came in 21st place overall in the regatta. Either of those last two racing being sailed to their potential would have put us in the top 20 - we were only 9 points out of 19th place (our final score was 155). So, my personal track record for international regattas is: 2002/Europeans: 49/50. 2003/Worlds: 52/70. 2005 Worlds: 21/56. We also beat all of the other boats from Dan's club, so it was a good regatta for him too.
Now came the long scare & anxiety of getting the awards banquet under weigh, getting the fleet to it, figuring out all the trophies, and also getting word that somebody had walked away with the Italian competitors' chartered dolly. I had a lot of back & forth to do, so I tried to looked for it while I was doing other things, but mostly I was just praying the problem would solve itself, because I knew that I didn't have a solution for it. For the awards, CORK took responsibility for identifying the top 3 boats, and the top female & top junior. I had to figure out who was to receive the fleet tradition "Survivor" award; this goes to the "last place boat which finishes every race." We had a potential complication, because it wasn't clear whether being black flagged should count as finishing a race. A black-flagged boat is not supposed to finish a race, but it is likely they won't know they were black flagged until after they finished. Fortunately for me there was a clear winner, the black-flagged boats that would have been in the running also had DNF's or DNS's. I also had to produce an speech for the "Laser 2 Award", which goes to the person who has contributed the most to the class. This was awarded to Jens Lassman from Germany, who does significant youth fleet promotion and training in his homeland, and who has gone to nearly every international class regatta for a decade. I lucked out again, and Bryan Mobbs, the class treasurer, who has known Jens for a long time, offered to give the speech about why he was chosen for the award, so I was off the hook.
Finally, I gave myself the privilege of awarding a "Spirit" trophy. This was something of a throwback to my trip to Italy with Kevin, where he and I received the "Special Prize." I told the fleet the story about how he and I came in last place in that regatta, so Kevin said to me "I guess this is the 'Short Bus' award". Actually, it was an award to be decided by the organizing committee for who most deserves an award that didn't already get one, and they decided to give it to give it to us for being "the team that travelled the farthest distance to compete," to acknowledge the very significant effort we made to get there. Without a committee, I decided that this would be the "organizer's prerogative" award. The truth is, the three US boats that were in their first international regatta, and also only second Laser 2 regatta at all, all deserved this award. They all worked & fought & learned so hard all week. But I knew by the end of the 2nd day who it had to go to, I just didn't know what the criteria was going to be. Well, Ellie and Elizabeth made that job easy for me too, by grabbing that fantastic 20th place finish, and thereby becoming the last overall boat to get a top 20 finish in their results. That was nominally what I gave the award for, but it's hard to really explain how great they both were at this event. Ellie is so amazing to watch - at 14 years old, she was completely undaunted by being thrown into the mix in a real adult championship regatta, surrounded by people many of whom have 10 times as much experience in this as her, and taking every opportunity to ask questions and learn and take criticism, and all the while being so polite and well mannered that it almost breaks your heart that she seems to feel bad for taking 10 seconds of your time. And what's more, it's nearly impossible to conceive of how Elizabeth is able to be a mom when it's time to be a mom but just as easily switch gears and be a crew, taking direction from, and completely putting her trust and faith in her daughter as the skipper and boss on the boat. They kept going after dropping their rig in the practice regatta, and still kept smiling even after a nasty capsize in 22 knots on day one. The two of them had flown the spinnaker I believe once before this regatta, and they finished the last reach of the last race on a screaming planing spinnaker reach with mom flat-out on the wire and Ellie straight-leg hiking. Way to go.
For the record, first place went to Trevor and Ian McEwen. Third place when to their brother Andrew and his skipper Jason Kobrick. And second place went to Bryan Mobbs and Alex Taylor, from the UK. Fourth and Fifth went to Nigel Skudder/Kieth Hills (UK), and Marty O'Leary/Yvette Deacon from (Ireland). These results were all extremely solid; 1-3 were closely contested, with only a 5 point spread between them - then it was over 10 points to 4th place, almost 30 points to fifth, and over 10 more to 6th. The Mexicans finished 15th, the Italians 19th, and the Germans (Jens) 29th. Oh, and the top US boat was a surprise entry (to me) from Chicago; these two guys bought saw that the regatta wasn't too far away, and bought a boat about a month ago, and came in 14th place. The McEwen kids are ridiculously fast. I'm amazed that we were able to stay ahead of Ian and Trevor on that first beat in yesterday's last race, and except for our blunder aiming at the wrong leeward mark for a bit, they did not pull away from us on the run or the 2nd beat either. On the reach they smoked us, and if we hadn't made our blunder and had still been in first at that point, I think it's likely that still would have happened. But the fact that we were able to hang with the world champions on two out of three points of sail and for three legs is a pretty good feeling.
Last & final comments: The budget worked out perfectly. The regatta did not end up loosing any money other than the expected class's subsidy of the youth entries. The T-shirt organization had some hitches, and 3 boats ended up without shirts. This probably really is the biggest blunder of the event, because for someone to do a major event like this, they really deserve to take something away from it. This is the one thing I really wish I could go back and fix. Oh, and the Italians did find their chartered dolly.
-Avram
2005 Worlds