Archive for July, 2009

Inter-Yacht Club Challenge-duel between St.Francis and Golden Gate Yacht Clubs

I spent this past weekend skippering the St. Francis entry in the very exciting Golden Gate Cup: Inter-Yacht Club Challenge, a match race in 1D35s between California yacht club teams.  The racing consisted of four round robins on Friday and Saturday followed by a semi-finals and finals on Sunday.  Three teams were all tied on Friday, GGYC, San Diego, and ourselves, and the competition narrowed a little on Saturday when GGYC and our team both beat San Diego in both matches.  So the race for first overall in the round robins and the ability to choose who to race in the semi-finals on Sunday was between us on the St. Francis team and Golden Gate YC.  For those of you who don’t know, these clubs are within a parking lot of distance of each other, sharing the peninsula that just into the San Francisco bay just near the Golden Gate.  Many of the members of the Golden Gate team (including their helm and tactician) are also members of St. Francis YC.  Needless to say, the clubs are closely linked.

In the first matchup of the day, we became even more closely linked…

Let me explain how that happened.  We actually led off of the starting line and had given GGYC a penalty in the pre-start, so with a 3-4 boatlength lead on the second upwind it seemed we may have the race locked up.  (No pun intended on that one).  However, our outhaul broke on the 2nd upwind, and while we were trying to repair it GGYC got by us and rounded the windward mark ahead.  They didn’t have enough stretch to get their penalty off, so we neared the finish line with them still needing to burn a tack or get an offsetting penalty against us.  We were matching–they put their jib up, we put ours up, they dropped their spinnaker, we dropped ours.  Our drop didn’t go quite as smoothly as theirs, so we got a little closer to them than would like.  Now overlapped, both boats tried to fight the flood and get over the top of the Race Committee boat.  We were windward boat, keeping clear, but as we rounded the RC our mainsheet caught on the anchor chain.  The rest was ugly.  Our stern got snagged on the RC, which caused our bow to swing down into GGYC’s stern.  We got off of the Race Committee but then our two boats clamshelled, with our bow hitting their stern forcing them to swing into us, so we  lined up bow to stern, stern to bow.  Somewhere there we crossed the finish line, with us fouling them clearing their old penalty, so they were deemed to have one the race. Their was some gelcoat damage to both boats, and our spinnaker pole was broken in contact with them, so there was going to be a hearing at the end of the day about the damage.  (The whole sequence is here on Ultimate Yachtshots.)

We were given a little break to repair our outhaul and wait for a replacement pole, which we were handed 20 seconds before the entry to our next race.  We won that one against Berkeley and the next against San Diego and then lined up against GGYC in the last race of the day to determine who was the winner of the round robins (without the decision from the hearing).  We were port entry in the pre-start and were pinned out to the left for awhile, but through some wriggling managed to get loose and beat them to the line in the flood and lead around the race course.  So we had  won the round robins on the water (tieing them but winning the last race), but it was now onto shore to await the hearing.

About that.  I cannot say that I wasn’t nervous, going into a protest hearing against the tactician of GGYC, Tom Ehman, who happens to be head of external affairs for BMW ORACLE Racing, and one of four BMW ORACLE team members on board their boat.  Fortunately, the umpires decided that neither boat was at fault for the contact (because neither of us would have known that our mainsheet would catch and thus force the contact) so the standings didn’t change.  We had won the four round robins.

We picked BerkeleyYC to race in the semis, and in the morning went 2-0 against them while GGYC went 2-0 against San DiegoYC.  Our final thus was against GGYC, but unfortunately wasn’t quite as much fun as the previous day’s racing.  The first race we lead them off the line by 2 or 3 boatlengths, but they were steadily higher and faster on our windward hip, even though we were leading to the current relief on the shore.  We closely crossed them, had a short tacking duel, dialed them down on the layline but they were still able to lay just underneath us.  We were close behind but a long port downwind, laying the marks, didn’t allow for too much of a changeup and they lead all the way to the finish.  The final race was the first start that we really gave up to them, we decided a little too late to try to push them over the line, so gave up our windward distance, without forcing them over.  They lead from there and it was second place in the regatta for us.

Our team had a wonderful time throughout the weekend and I had a fabulous time being able to take part, getting to represent St. Francis in a match race on our home waters instead of far away.  We’re hoping to be able to come back next year, (perhaps even in a boat with working instruments and a mainsail that’s newer than 10 years old!) and give Golden Gate Yacht Club a real fight to the finish.

I’d really like to thank our team of Russ Silvestri, Shawn Bennett, Holt Condon, Matt Gregory, Peter Lane, Mario Yovkov, Dale Carlson, and Chris Exell.  Special thanks to Mario for all of his help and the use of all of his equipment, Bob Turnbull for the use of his boat Jazzy, and Susan Ruhne for handling so much on the organization side.  Thanks also to St. Francis Yacht Club, Commodore McNeill, and all of the members who came out and supported us, and to Golden Gate Yacht Club and Commodore Marcus Young for hosting such a wonderful event.  Let’s hope the third annual next year can at least equal the fun and excitement both on and off the water this year.

Transpac Race Report: We’ve been Frankensteined…

Three offshores I’ve done on Ragtime, and first night’s have always been eventful.

This year’s Sydney Hobart was the most dramatic, being involved in the rescue of a sinking boat, but at least we got time back for that.  Last year’s Tahiti race our course took us almost straight over the Cortez Bank, the sea mount 100 miles offshore famous for 100 ft waves in the surf movies.  The Transpac Race this year began no differently, but more unfortunate for our speed.  Our decision to take the main that was used in the 07 Transpac and the 08 Tahiti race was based on the fact that it’s bigger and faster downwind than the new main that we got for the Hobart.  That being said, we had brought a lot of sail material in case we needed to repair it.  We didnt know that would be as soon as the first night… TWICE.  First just after we’d rounded Catalina (after catching Mirage by short tacking the shore out of the current), we watched vertical wrinkles develop as one of the lower seams fell apart just above the first reef.  Luckily our sailmaker Harry Pattison is aboard, so in went the reef, out come the epoxy and sail material, and the fix was initiated.  Good thing I’m the medic, cuz once we ran out of epoxy Harry had me cut up strips of ’stitches’ of stickyback.  Hence, the original thinking behind the name Frankenstein instead of mainsail.  The reef stayed in to let the epoxy cure and luckily the breeze built as we got into the synoptic so it didn’t hurt us too much.

Unfortunately though around midnight there came a call from on deck that the top of the main was going.  The main came all the way down into the companionway with a tear almost leech to luff about 15 feet from the top.  Two hours of krazy glue and stitching later and Harry had been redubbed Dreamweaver, and I got seasick from sniffing glue for two hours.  No wonder Harry is wearing a patch!  Up to this point I’d thought it wasn’t possible for me to get seasick-I’d withstood a horrendous run on Morning Light off Molokai in 35+ with huge waves where a teammate and I had spent an hour pumping the bilge and then just as the stack was thrown below to tack, he got sick.  Since he couldn’t climb up the stairs it all happened below, and I helped in the cleanup, feeling queasy myself but never actually puking.  Well, I found my fault last night-sail repair and glue, but at least Frankie went back up.

Ragtime found two more faults in her sail inventory over the next 24 hours, first with a small tear in our #3 jib, which we haven’t repaired as we’re saving the material for our mainsail and probably won’t see jibs again (although we might as the backup plan is to use the #4 jib as a main if we have to).  Next up was the code zero spinnaker, which lost its leech tape at some point in the morning.  I didn’t see it happen but woke up to helping Harry stitch the tape back on.  I guess that would make me Dreamweaver’s assistant, although I’m not sure if he actually has one, though Dr. Frankenstein surely did.  We’re not quite sure what to call Ragtime right now–both Ragstime and Bride of Frankie seem to fit the bill.

The good news is we saw a light on the horizon in the night, that became a sail on the horizon this morning, that became a TP52 that we passed midday.  We’re assuming it’s Cazador, as we all could spot that big red TP52 square on their mainsail.  Definitely good for us, as they’re in the class above us and should be much faster.  All we have to do now is keep reeling in the rest of the fleet, and see if we can get our email to send out not just receive!

Update: Skipper, Stardate 7/7/09, 1521 hours. Genny, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, is doing woman’s work on the cabin floor, i.e. finishing sewing the tape back on the Code 0. She’s got the Betsy Ross look, with thread and needle in pursed lips. She says if she had written the above yesterday, it would have been a lot more dark and angry.

Transpac Race: 2nd Update

As you can tell by now our email did not send out, as it’s been 3 more days and you’re only just getting this!  Three relatively good/easy days of starboard reaching/running with a kite, trying to make up some of our losses from the first two days and put some miles back on the fleet in the north lane.  Mostly overcast skies and 14-22 knots got us to last night’s halfway party of Pacificos, rum and coke’s, and choc chip cookies dipped in rum.  All feeling pretty good and happy, and then there was today.

Since we haven’t sailed together yet as a team except for a 2 hr practice sail two day’s before the start, and we’ve had three easy days of straight driving and trimming, today was a day of learning/practicing our maneuvers. . .

First, we practiced gybes–starting at 2 am, our initial gybe onto port wasn’t too pretty, especially as we realized halfway through the turn there was no one on the grinders.  Our second through 5th gybes got consecutively better, and right after I’d gone off watch we practiced something new-the wipeout!  The breeze was in the high 20s and our skipper/owner Chris was on the helm, gunning for the highest boat speed score.  I heard the shouts as he launched past our current high score and was still accelerating at 21 kts as we wiped out.  Commence wipeout recovery practice.   Vang came off immediately and sheet was blown but our boom was still fully dug in the water and the boat hard over.  Hatchboards went in as the concern was great that we’d start taking on water.  Staysail tack blew shortly thereafter, leaving the staysail tangled up in the spinnaker, so we cut the luff cord, only thing attaching it to the boat, and then got it down.  Spinnaker down next, and finally the boat came back upright.  Whew.  Next kite up (the 3A reacher), get the boat going again, then deal with the aftermath.

First we had to pack the dry and ziploc bagged 4A, then do a spinnaker peel to get it up and the 3A down, which all went very well.  Next up was the biggest issue–Frankenmain had returned.  Unfortunately the second repair that we had made on the main blew in the wipeout, so we had another lesson in mainsail repair.  This time slightly better, as it was midday, we did the repair above deck, and we’d found the remaining epoxy so were able to repair it properly (hopefully).  While we were repairing above deck, the two kites we’d just used were being packed below decks, and the boat was still relatively happy doing 12s to 13s with just a spinnaker.  Two hours later we went back up with the main and commenced real sailing, and watch systems again.

I was back on watch again, so there went my opportunity for the shower break that most of the team did yesterday.  Unfortunately I was waiting for the sunny sky warm weather that the Transpac’s famous for, but now am going another day with just baby wipe bath.  The team will have to deal if I stink!

10 pm now, just had dinner and am off to get my first good sleep of the day.  Fingers crossed the Northern route pays off for us and that we’ll keep the breeze and get the lift first and get to gybe into Hawaii with some gains on our fleet.

Transpac Race-3rd Update

Yesterday was a day for sail changes.  First we did a spinnaker peel, then we spent the afternoon changing mainsails.

Yup, changing mainsails. The repair to the top of Frankenstein after the wipeout had not held well (the assumption is that the epoxy we found to use was quite old), so we tied slugs to the luff of the #4 jib and swapped it in for the main.  Once that was done successfully, the decision was that it was too small to sail the next three days with, so we debated jury rigging the old main by cutting off the top, or going to the bigger #3 jib.  Discussion didn’t last long, the old main would have lost too much sail area being chopped off (plus we were sick of Frankie), so we started to prep the number 3 jib.  Two problems, first it didn’t have pre-made holes in the luff so each slug had to be hand-sewn in (no problem-Harry, or renamed again Father Stitch, was on it).  Second, we didn’t have enough slugs since they’d all just gone up on the #4.  We cut the first couple slugs off, keeping the sail up, and Harry started to sew them in, but each one took awhile.  So then we brought the four down, cut off 2 out of every 3 slugs, then put it back up, while those slugs were sewn into the 3.  Finally, we brought the number four down completely, and, quick like an ‘organ patient transfer’, cut the final slugs off the four and stitched them onto the #3 on deck and then put it up.  In all it was 4 mainsail up/downs before dark, but the #3 had way more sail area and looked pretty good.  The next morning Harry and Eric did a luff recut—cutting off the bottom 4 slugs and adding more distance between them and the main, so that the jib actually fit the mast a bit better.  It was flat, and didn’t have nearly the roach of a mainsail, but at least we had sail area up to last and hopefully can sail the rest of the way to Hawaii with this setup.

Transpac Race Report #4-Ashore!

The final

days of the trip were relatively uneventful, compared to the major sail repairs we’d done early on, instead we were just racing to Hawaii (with a jib as a main!).  We had a second round of Pacifico’s after the wipeout and following repair of the mainsail—kind of an acquiescence that we weren’t going to do nearly as well as we would have liked.  We started seeing birds about two days out from Hawaii, and we got some good shooting stars as most of the cloud cover cleared.  We gybed our way along the shifts to Hawaii (unfortunately not banging the right corner as hard as some of the winners), and ended up sailing down from Kokohead towards the finish line at Diamondhead about 4 am.  No repeat dawn finish, but the whole crew was up on deck when we saw the biggest, brightest, coolest shooting start literally cross our bow headed right at Diamond Head!  It looked like it was going to hit the mountain before it burned up it was so close to us!!!  Very cool ending to the race!  We hit the dock for some MaiTais and a wonderful breakfast catered by The Chart House and our host Trish Steele.  Spent the next couple days recuperating, catching up on sleep, and cleaning up the boat and getting it ready for the delivery.
I also got to spend some time catching up with my Morning Light teammates, hearing good stories from them about how their races had gone, and what life was like with different teams.  We had a Wednesday night Morning Light/Pyewacket reunion, and it was great to see and catch up with Roy and Leslie Disney as well and also to see how their new house is coming along.  The old Morning Light house, the place where we spent all our time off the water in Hawaii, was leveled and a beautiful establishment is being completed in its place.   It looks out on the finish line buoy, and at dinner afterwards, we all saw the lights of the tallship Lynx coming in after finishing.  We all went to the club to welcome home our final two teammates after their 19 day journey!

I got a couple of days vacation in Maui

, including swimming in beautiful waterfalls in Hana, exploring lava tubes, and watching the sunset from the top of the Haleakala crater, then flew home to San Francisco on Tuesday night  and right into a full two days of match racing practice with Dave Perry, first on J22s, then on 1d35s.  Starting tomorrow I’m skippering the St. Francis YC team in the GGYC InterYacht Club Challenge, a match racing event in 1D35s between the clubs here on the bay.  Should be a fantastic event!

Morning Light visits Miller Children’s Hospital

Nine out of the original 15 Morning Light members competed in this year’s Transpac Race.  Four had already started, two on the tallship Lynx (link), two on a Santa Cruz 50, and two had to work with their teams.  The remaining three of us, Jeremy Wilmot, Jesse Fielding and I, spent the Friday afternoon before the Transpac race visiting children in the Miller Children’s Hospital, as part of Racing for Kids, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing racers to visit sick children.  Previously the organization had worked with automobile racers, but they heard about the Transpac Race and our team, so for the first time they brought in sailors.

We went first into the younger children’s playroom, where about 15 kids under the age of 10 were all playing with toys and trucks and decorating.  We told the children we met all about sailing and the Transpac race, the Morning Light team we’d been a part of and the team’s we were going to sail with this year.  If they got bored of that (some of them were quite young), we were armed with memorabilia to dole out—Transpac and Morning Light posters, hats, t-shirts, keychains, and even a few DVDs.  That turned into a signing fiasco for the posters, which we said we would do, as long as they all signed a poster for us, for a friend of ours who is also sick and in the hospital.  Next, in the older children’s ward we didn’t need the poster distraction, there was plenty going on with the Wii and Nintendo games to keep Jesse and Jeremy and the kids in an excited mood.  There was one girl Felicia who was fabulous with music, both real on the computer keyboard in the room and on the Wii RockBand set, and Montel, who was quietly competitive every time his player beat ours to the finish line.  They still wanted us to sign posters for them, but it was more a prize, for beating us in all the games we tried to take them on in.

There were such great personalities.

The older sister (age eight) bossing around her sneaky little brother Paul-for trying to do everything from cover his face with his (new) hat in the pictures to hide under the table when he didn’t want to play.  Patrick, who seemed the oldest and most mature in the young ward and also the quietest, but had this shocking electric blue hair that let you know there was a lot to him when you talked to him.  The youngest girl, Gabriella who was very shy, but whose mom brought her over and introduced her to us, and from then on I had a secondhand to help me in the room. Preston who we called the little Richard Prior, because he just could not stop talking and cracking jokes for the life of him.  And his roommate, who came into the lil’ kids room specifically to meet us, because he liked sailing, even though he was 15 and from a different ward-recovering from a horrible car accident.  I remember Felecia, wheeling around her IV stand to her different musical games, telling me after awhile that she only had three more days of treatment, then she could go home… for now.  She seemed truly happy about going home, but when I asked her if she’d be sad to come back she said, no, it’s not too bad here, then picked the next song to play with me.

The one who touched me most I met last, Carlos.  His cousin came in first, and while I was talking to him, Carlos came in and sat quietly at the table.  Carlos was clearly the one being treated for leukemia, and his family had come to visit him for the day.  We signed posters for both, and Carlos’s father thanked us on their behalf.  Only then did I see his father sign to Carlos.  I asked them both if Carlos could sign the poster for our friend.  He did, and he had such beautiful handwriting.  I took another poster and signed it for him, asking him to always keep up such wonderful handwriting.  I left him for a while to take on (and get destroyed by) Felicia in the Wii game, and when I came back, he had decorated a cutout dragon with glitter and markers.  I signed to him the only sign language word I know—beautiful—and he smiled.  The first smile I saw from him all day, and probably the most lasting impact of the whole trip.

While lining up outside the hospital Tom Garrett, the Vice Commmodore of Tranpac YC, had said to us that this experience would touch all of us way more than it would touch them.  Of course he was he right.  Racing across the ocean again this year,

nursing our way across with a mainsail that needed constant repair, I couldn’t help but think about what positive attitudes those children had, most of whom were also in a competition, but with life, to repair their bodies.  I didn’t need more than that to remind me how lucky I was to be racing on the ocean, but also how lucky I was to have had the privilege to meet them all.

Ride with Alfa Romeo!

The past two days I had the luck and privilege of getting to go sailing on Alfa Romeo-one of the coolest, sweetest, prettiest, and not to mention FASTEST super-maxis in the world of sailing. With winches powered by push buttons, I felt like the smallest grinder in the world as I mainsheet and traveler caddied on board.  The first year that Transpac is letting in boats with stored power has allowed Alfa Romeo’s owner Neville Crichton to come back to the Transpac after doing the race 30 years ago!

He’s in America now (after more than ten years away) ready to launch an assault on the Transpac race, in particular the race record of 6 days 19 hours, currently held by Hasso Plattner’s Morning Glory.  My friend and teacher Stan Honey is the navigator on board, and says if the weather turns out to be anything like the forecasts, they should jump the old record by an easy 10 hours….

Hopefully they have smooth sailing and a fast crossing, and that they stick around on shore so we get to see them when we show up a couple days later on Ragtime!  We’re currently getting the boat ready and loaded and are going out for a sail this evening with the whole crew, perhaps for the last time before the start on Sunday.  Wish us luck!

If you’d like to follow the Transpac, the website is  www.transpacrace.com and the race tracking is http://race.ionearth.com/2009/tpyc/transpac/

Sailing with Ericsson in Boston VOR Stopover

Writing about Alfa Romeo reminded me of the Volvo Ocean Race stopover in Boston, where I got to spend a couple of days sailing with the ERICSSON spectator boat, an excellent (and well-decorated!) Judel-Vrolijk 43  owned by Ted Johnson.

Ted and his regular crew from Buffalo NY combined with some Swedish Ericsson boys and I had a fun time sailing the boat and hosting some VIPs on the sunny days leading up to the start.  The start itself was shrouded with fog and the inshore lap slightly interrupted by the arrival of a container ship splitting the fleet and causing major grievence to Delta Lloyd.  But it was neat to see all the boats start, head up in the fog to the weather mark, reappear through the mist with kites flying and Boston’s buildings in the background, and then disappear upwind again to the Atlantic.  The race is over now and the scores concluded—congrats to both Ericsson and Puma on their excellent finishes—and  I hear that guys from both teams are headed over here for the Transpac on board Alfa Romeo!