Sailing in 2025

The future of sailing? It's here right now:

• Advanced materials
• Engineering first, art second
• Multihulls

Oh, and the Laser -- after all, tradition and resistance to change are sailing's strongest forces.

Back to you, Tillerman.

Season 4

No, it's not some box set of reruns to help you waste hours and hours on the couch watching other people pretend to be other people. No, the only way to see it is to do it. Fleet 76 is back at it, racing Vanguard 15s Friday night out of Benicia. The fleet is looking as healthy as ever with one new boat and several "new guys" looking for a crew spot. Rich is going to skipper an underutilized boat this year which means David is back in the crew training business. And hey, the owners even have a new old outboard on the way to replace the one that was stolen off the committee/chase boat last year.

I missed the first racing night of the season (had to get my speed rest before Corinthian), but made it out last Friday for day 2. We were blessed with perfect conditions--enough current to make some break from the parade downwind to look for an advantage and enough wind to get even us big boys in the hiking straps. Other than feeling a little awkward with boat handling it felt like we just picked up where we left off last October, except that I hate Dean's new tiller extension--sorry, Dean.

The parking lot post race camaraderie also flowed right in from last year with renewed pressure from some for me to buy and campaign my own Vanguard now that the Megabyte is gone. They are not going to be too happy with me when they find out what I did at the boat show last weekend . . .

Corinthian Survival

OK, right out with it: we were the last boat to finish in our class. But hey, the keyword there is "finish." This race turned out to be more of a real fiasco than the real fiasco--about a third of the boats in the fleet never made it to the finish. Heck, with 38 mph gusts at the start, some never even started the race. We made a reasonable show of it, getting our pudgy little cruiser around the bay tour race course, but being on your ear all the way up wind (we ran out of reefs) and wiping out several times downwind (despite being in the non-spinnaker class) ain't exactly fast.


Other than being well outside our optimal conditions, we probably had at least 15 minutes worth of slow start, extra tacks, misjudged laylines, uncoordinated sail handling, etc. That's the difference between finishing 5th and 8th. It was tough on everybody, but especially so on the little guys and those of us with basically cruising sails and such. In that kind of weather Lapras probably can't sail to her rating, anyway, but with a little more help from her humans she could have a closer look at the front.

Last or first, it was still a ton of fun. We got around the course on a really rough day, one if not for the race we would have spent at home watching TV or something.

More here: Blustery SSS Corinthian Race

Are We (They) Having Fun, Yet?

Video games, play dates, excessive homework--seems these days there are just so many things better to do than go sailing. And even in the off chance that there really was nothing else to do, for the non-sailors out there, what's the attraction? How can sitting around on a bobbing hunk of plastic (or whatever) moving no faster than most of us can jog actually be any fun? Man, does that sound lame. Maybe I'll just sit here and do nothing instead.

OK, those of you with kids know where I'm going with this.

"Hey, kids, want to go sailing today?"

"Ummm, well, umm . . . not really, Dad."

"Well, what if we go get some nice sandwiches and eat them on the boat. After that we can walk around the marina to the playground."

"OK, maybe that would be fun."

I loved to go sailing when I was a kid. Couldn't get enough of it. Big boats, little boats, all day in my sabot, racing with Dad around the buoys or over to Catalina. All good. This is my perspective. So why would my kids not be begging me to take them sailing? As I think on that, though, I remember that my siblings weren't all that jazzed about sailing either. They usually did have something better to do (stay home and party while the rest of us went racing for the weekend.) They put up with it as the "family sport", and I know they usually had fun when dragged along. It just wasn't always their choice. I wonder why. I'll ask--stay tuned . . .

So what of my family? Did the lunch and park bribe work. Of course it did, and once aboard for lunch it made perfect sense to slip the dock lines and go for just a little sail, right? Yeah, there was a little grumping, but in the end all enjoyed themselves. Would they do it again when given the choice between video games on the couch and sailing on the bay? Maybe we're not quite there, yet.

At dinner the next night, I pushed the topic.

"So, how did you like sailing yesterday?"

"It was OK."

"What would you think if I decided to sell the boat?"

"NO, don't do that. WE LIKE SAILING!"

Well OK, then.

Soup's On!

Somewhere between the end of the Fiasco and home port (the lights off the starboard bow.) Gotta get out there again . . .

First Race, First Fiasco

Start in any direction. Go around the three marks (under or at the three bridges on the bay) in any order, any direction. Finish before 7pm. That's the Fiasco. Simple, huh? If not for 349 other other boats out there, big current, big wind shifts (and big wind holes), and every boat just single or doublehanded.

And did I mention it's a reverse handicap pursuit race? Being one of the slowest boats entered, that meant we got to go early in clear, albeit hardly a puff of, air. It also meant we had to pick our start direction and first mark without the benefit of watching others' mistakes.

This was the first time I've ever raced my own keel boat. Wait, what's this racing the cruising boat? Well, with Feraligatr gone, Lapras is pressed into double duty, and with Dean as crew we were ready. So, first time for Lapras, and save for a race/cruise across across San Pablo a few years back on Don Holden's boat, I hadn't raced anything bigger than a dinghy since high school. Incidentally, it had been that day on Don's boat out in the middle of San Pablo that I had one of those epiphany things and decided to get back into sailing after being away from the sport for . . . well . . . a long time.

Having started at the front of the pack, I almost feel bad that we made it look relatively easy getting out west and around Blackaller Buoy just East of Ft. Point. Our plan was to get Blackaller crossed off early so that we would not have to risk getting swept out The Gate on the afternoon max ebb if the wind never filled in. Before the start, we'd discovered a nice little eddy to counter the morning's flood tide. And it worked. "1.8, 2.2," I called off the the speed over ground as we crawled east from the start in a very fickle morning breeze. And even when the wind fully shutdown within spittin' distance of the mark, "0.5, 0.6", the eddy washed us along. By staying inshore, we had made the most of this and passed all the boats that started in front of us and went offshore looking for wind.

Oh yeah, back to making it look easy. Turns out about half the fleet decided to follow us to Blackaller first, the other half taking Yuerba Buena first-minus a few oddballs who chose Red Rock first. With this mass of a hundred or more boats bearing down on us we were sure to be overrun in no time. Then, the weirdest thing happened. A little puff from the East carried us and the four other little boats rounding the mark just behind us out into the middle of the channel while the mass of boats behind sailed into, perhaps created by their own, um, massiness, one giant hole. Once into the full strength of the flood mid-channel, the breeze filled in further from the Southeast and we were making eight knots for Angel Island. "Wahoo! See ya suckas!" Here's a good picture of the parking lot behind (I think that's us in the upper right of the photo ripping out to Point Blunt.) And here's a report from the ugly mess back there.

After rounding Angel Island to port (wanted to stay in that nice Southeast wind) we noticed a big honkin' boat, well more honkin' than Lapras anyway, coming directly across from San Francisco with no spinnaker flying. "Are they racing? Surely they must have a spinnaker on a boat like that. Heck, I bet they have more spinnakers than anchors on that thing." Check out the report from Valis for the other side of the story and the "spirited race with a Catalina 22". Er, um, that would be a Catalina 250.

After that it was pretty much just a nice sail around the bay. We rode the flood to Red Rock arriving just minutes after slack. Mixed it up with a bunch of the speedsters coming around the other way from Yuerba Buena (including Eight Ball, the eventual overall winner), rode the newly formed ebb South to Berkeley, crept by YB in a now failing wind with the South Bay ebb now on our nose, sailed backwards for a while, caught a big blast of wind under the Western span of the Bay Bridge and ripped on home on that huge ebb.

Finished at 4:44. Not bad, and looking good.

Other firsts in a long time? Navigating a boat at night during the two hour trip back to Richmond after the race, and eating a good pot of stew on board. Brought back memories of many nights like that aboard Scotch Mist (that Dasher built by the father of the guy who won the Three Bridge Fiasco this year. Weird, huh?)

How'd we do? I think we were the only boat in our class to go clockwise and actually finish before the time limit. We were 4th of 19 in our class, 7th of 43 total non-spinnaker class boats, and 123rd of 282 overall starters.

Doublehanding and Oreos. A Fulton-Anderson tradition

Light Air Doublehanded?

Dean and I used to do that all the time.


3BF report coming soon . . .