The Racecourse is No Place for Schizophrenia

I have to wonder if this is somehow related to that "what would Ben do?" thing, maybe the opposite of it. Good sailors know what they need to do, adjust that to what they can do, and then execute, maybe pushing the limits a bit. Through our haphazard Vanguard 15 foray into PHRF racing last week I learned that it is also very important to make your intentions clear to others. Being the dedicated bunch of dinghy sailors who launch every Friday night just down the other end of the marina from Benicia Yacht Club apparently we'd been casually invited to join in the BYC Thursday night beer can races, but (apparently) unbeknownst to that night's race committee. Or, maybe they had figured we'd join in some way other than showing up with our own boats? :-) In any event, the race committee wasn't keen on having us officially entered (something about "liability"), but they hinted that if we were to happen to cross the starting line they wouldn't try to stop us. In my opinion, that was the beginning of a bad idea.

In order to avoid messing with those officially racing, we chose to start one minute after the first class (the slowest of three) and get well clear of the line before the next class started four minutes later. This maneuver plus the fact that not all of our class chose to cross the line "properly" was the beginning of the confusion we caused for all the real racers. "What are those little boats doing out here? They're not racing are they?" I believe this contributed to a couple of right of way incidents following. The first was a simple port/starboard thing except the 15 foot Vanguard on starboard, not wanting to mess with the real racers, attempted to relinquish it's rights to the 33 foot keelboat on port. This just confused the big boaters and it got messy ending in shouts of "Hey, we're racing here!" and "So are we! (sort of)" The second was a clear leeward mark overlap case again with the 15 footer with rights over the really big boys from class A who had by now caught all the slow boats ahead. With an appropriate amount of yelling, the little guys likely could have defended their position without incident, but being insecure about the not-really-racing thing, they just bailed out and didn't bother rounding the mark. OK, still might have been the right thing to do, but I wonder if our big boat friends would have shown a bit more respect for us had it been clear that we were racing just like them.

I hope the nice folks at BYC invite us out again, but I somehow doubt it.