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Highlights:
An offshore - always a challenge due to that slight knot in your stomach in trepidation of a rough, tough, 25 knot offshore slog. Realising that ultra-light conditions over a long race mean you're going to trounce the fleet.
Downers:
Not being able to trounce the fleet.
Result:
2nd on PYR and Personal. Bloody lucky considering our snail-like performance.
Lessons Learnt:
Be very careful about guest crew. Make them sign a mute clause, or use duct tape, the really sticky kind. Ensure that they are rendered unable to mention any alternative vessel. Keep the crew out of temptation. Keep a diving mask on board and don't be afraid to throw someone over the side during a race to check the keel properly. Just in case of seaweed. Remember to interrogate Yella Belly about the lack of exhaust smoke from their in-cabin-mounted silent caterpillar drive unit - like the one in Red October.
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Race 2 Winter Series. Long Offshore. Friday 6th January
Wind 7-12 South East becoming 12-20 at times throughout the day.
The trouble with offshore races is that they involve getting up earlier than you have to during the week, so once again I struggle down to the Club for an 09:00 briefing. The forecast predicts good wind, albeit from an unseasonal direction, so I opt for the small jib, thinking perhaps we may have to reef later. The course is a spaggetti-junction, that takes in just about every bouy, beacon and rusting stilt in the Mina Salman approach, but it looks like it favours us with plenty of broad reaches. Panicking a bit (Andy's away) because Freddy, our regular team stand-in hasn't turned up yet we ask if we can declare no-spinnaker, cringe at the reply from our Racing Secretary, and call his mobile/land-line/SMS...only to find him already down on the pontoon.
We set off, motoring through the long cut in the reef past Al-Dar island, to arrive offshore (well, more of a haphazard mixture of tugs, barges, oil-slicks and bloody huge tankers that just havn't learnt to give way to sailing boats) when the breeze - which really was quite good - dies completely and utterly. Flat calm. Not a ripple on the surface. We wait. The division 2 boats were to have started at 10:30, with us at 11:00, but nobody's moved! We wait some more. Ken calls a postponement to 11:00, then 11:30. Nobody wants to pack up. 11:30, 12:00 then 12:15. Still everybody drifts, still waiting. 12:30 is also muted as a start time. No wind. So Ken calls "12:45 and we'll race anyway, any takers?" All are unanimous. We finally have a start! The faintest whispers of wind are creeping in, not yet causing a ripple on the glassy, weed-thick water.
We creep off to the far starboard of the start transit and, right on the nail, tack across the line. Tacking takes about 5 minutes in these non-existent airs, but then away we go, surging east to the first mark at about 0.1 of a knot! Our line, rather than speed, takes us ahead of the others and we turn around the mark to head west again when 50 metres later we crawl straight into a hole - and sit there for about 10 minutes, totally motionless, while the fleet catches up. The wind is now coming from our bow, a 180 degree shift. So we beat again (sounds a bit energetic for these conditions) to the next mark, Mina Salman Approach bouy.
Jackal feels sluggish in the water as the wind picks up to about 6 knots. She doesn't react and checking that we havn't screwed up our sail trim we can't understand why. It's as if we're dragging a bucket from our keel. Perhaps Mike (Blue Chip) has tied a couple on for a joke!
Not too sure about the guest crew either. Guests are supposed to be polite, well-meaning, helpful. Freddy is only the latter, giving far too much lip. I can understand this from the regular crew as it's their way of letting off steam, distracting themselves from fear and from the hardship of our little jaunts out to sea... but Freddy telling them that they should crew on 'Aquilla' because he serves continuous beer, has a cooker and always brings the crew food, is just a bit much.
I silently delibarate about chucking him overboard, especially in view of the fact that, in these conditions, we really need to keep crew weight to a minimum. The penalty for loss of a crew member restrains me at the very last moment.
We crawl upwind (what wind?) to the Siestan Wreck bouy about 2 miles to the east. The wind has turned and is on the nose again! Still Jackal feels sluggish. We tack out to a finger of puff and manage to lose over 200 metres to Yella Belly, helmed by Peter Spicer. She's slipping along at about 47 knots it seems, while we can't get Jackal past about 2.5 knots when we should be doing 4.. Something's wrong. Hamish peers over the side repeatedly but the water, slick with oil and huge patches of weed, prevents him from a good view of the keel. Mike must have used translucent buckets...
The race continues in similar manner. Downwind (hey it doesn't shift as we turn the mark this time) we launch our incredibly smart black spinnaker, though we manage to forget which is the clew and which is the tack, resulting in a bit of tense "change the bloody thing right now" stress. We face off a 470,000 tonne bulk carrier steaming up the channel as we approach the downwind mark again, albeit under the control of the Bitch, and anyway, everyone (except whoever was driving the bulk carrier) knows that power always has to give way to sail...not....approach the mark and suddenly find the wind right on our bow again. We drop the spinnaker rather smartly, and the wind drops to zero at exactly the same time. So there we sit once more.
Creeping around only moments before course-shortening of 15:30 we crawl at less than half a knot to the revised finish, the next mark, and finish at 15:50:45.
Thankfully the wind now drops to just about zero. Yella Belly finishes 20 minutes after us, thus taking a resounding first place on handicap, but the others are way, way back. (I love it when the wind finishes at the same time as us!) So we come 2nd on PYR and 2nd on Personal - an honour that I really don't believe we achieved through sailing.
Everyone on Yella Belly are dead certain we've been dragging a ton of seaweed around the course, and gratiously tell us so. I really, really hope they're right.... The alternative is just too miserable to bear...
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