(In the absence of anything to write about this week, a little piece from November 2009)
To set the scene, there we are in the Fireball just going
round mark ‘A’ in a twenty-something mph WSW, half way around the 3rd
lap of a fleet championship race. We’re in 3rd place and we’ve just
lapped the RS300s, so you can tell it’s fairly windy. The next mark is ‘C’ and Pete
in the boat in front is already halfway to ‘B’. He’s gone high, up by the wall,
with a view to putting his kite up at some point, but he’s not rushing into it
as we all know from previous laps that putting the kite up anywhere on this leg
where you can’t get a decent angle to ‘C’ is a BAD IDEA, various boats tried it
on the previous laps and it wasn’t pretty. Thus far, I have been sailing with
self preservation uppermost in my mind, which is why the more risk-inclined
boats are either well ahead or massively behind us.
But I want that 2nd place dammit. If only we had
a turbocharger, or some big red button I could press to engage warp drive…
And I swear the big red mad spinnaker winked at me from its
bag.
So we bung it up, and the wind promptly notices and comes
over the wall in a big lump, and the world starts to go past us considerably more
quickly. The initial acceleration is a fairly intense while the various forces
battle it out for supremacy, and there’s a few iffy moments and the odd wobble.
While this is going on, the slim delicate rudder blade whispers occasional messages
suggesting that some of my demands are not entirely reasonable and that steering will become an optional extra if I continue in this
fashion. And then it’s all under control again and there is nothing quite like
this; the boat is fully engaged, crew flat out on the wire and all three sails are
pulling 100%. Gust builds upon gust but we are now going so fast that the boat
does little more than twitch as it skates across the flat water at the top of
the lake making a noise like tearing aluminium. These adrenalin stretched moments are where sailing,
poetry and art collide, this is as close to perfection as it is possible to get,
and perfection is fast.
We’re going nowhere near the right way though, ‘D’ looks
more likely than ‘C’ right now, and the further away from the wall we get, the
windier it is. So as we pass ‘B’ (but way downwind) doing mach 5, I dump the
kicker and the mainsheet and tentatively nudge the boat up a bit, and it still
feels good. But it’s not going to be good enough to lay ‘C’ and we know from
experience that this reach gets closer as you get near the water tower. Pete
has gone for his kite too, but there’s no proper wind up there by the wall and
his kite doesn’t look happy. A few hundred yards further on and it’s clear that
‘C’ is not going to happen without some help, so I pull a bit of mainsheet in
and trip the spinnaker halyard. Paul bangs the sheet in tight and the big mad red
kite goes for a quick lie down behind the jib, spread out flat by the wind. We
nudge our way cautiously up to ‘C’ where the wind is much lighter, and note
with some delight that Pete is now about three boat lengths behind us.
This is great, but there’s more to come. We bear off round ‘C’
for the run to ‘D’, the plan being that we continue on port tack to the far
shore while sorting the kite, then gybe and it should be a decent run down to
‘D’ from there. But I only get as far as
giving a quick heave on the kite halyard, and before it has any real effect
there’s a Flying Fifteen dead ahead which has just gybed onto starboard, and
it’s clear that going round it isn’t an option. I yell something unhappy at the
world in general and chuck the boat into a gybe. Crew does the thing with the
pole and the wind kicks in again, and now we’re hurtling towards ‘G’ on a run
with the kite still mostly horizontal, and I can’t pump it up because it’s so
damn windy that the force on the halyard when doubled by my 2:1 pump system is
more than I can cope with. So I resort to pulling directly on the halyard, but
the take-up restricts the amount I can pull to about 8 inches each time and I
am distracted by having to steer the boat and keep it upright and other minor
details like that as it crashes grumpily from one wave crest to the next. The
boat doesn’t like this, the kite is making scornful noises at me, and somewhere
behind us I can feel Pete catching up. And now we’re in danger of going past D,
so we sling in another gybe and incredibly still haven’t capsized when the dust
settles on that one. In a rare moment of inspiration I tell Paul to leave the
pole where it is (on the wrong side), thereby avoiding crew leaning over
foredeck on a dead run in big waves type issues, and now I find I can hoist the
kite up because it’s all tucked away behind the mainsail out of the wind. It
goes up, we get to ‘D’ and I look back and decide not to mention to Paul that the
Flying Fifteen we met earlier has just been blown flat behind us, as we go for
the gybe….
Which we survive. And since the pole is already set for the
reach to ‘S’, Paul bounds straight out on the wire and the big mad red kite
sets instantly and is laughing insanely (or maybe that was me) as we hurtle
past ‘D’ with the spray from our wake blowing off downwind. The waves are proper
big out here and the wind is full on, and although I dumped the mainsail after
the first five seconds, when we bear off in the gusts it fills anyway because
we’re not far off a run and we go even faster. The boat bounces gleefully over
the waves, atomising the water where it lands, and it’s still accelerating like
it wants to get to the scene of the accident nice and early. And this is sooooo
good, but even while I’m giving silent thanks that the Fireball is so manageable
in these conditions, I’m also aware that the near future does indeed hold the
probability of some kind of high speed unpleasantness and swimming.
Still, we get about three-quarters of the way along the leg
and are still roughly on course and mostly upright. Now at this point there is a
crew-boat interface problem, maybe wave related, maybe just the bouncing about,
and Paul disappears briefly. When he reappears he is lying along the side of
the boat with his legs near my ear and he’s dropped the spinnaker sheet. The
boat is still upright and still bouncing across the waves, but it’s slowing
down now, coming out of hyperspace, and the big red mad kite is making highly
disapproving noises and shedding £5 notes by the second. Some sort of telepathy
then occurs, where we both know that it’s time to quit while we're ahead (ie, still alive) and get the kite down, although
nobody actually says so. So we do and it comes back to its bag like a soppy old
rottweiler, tired but happy.
I risk a quick glance behind us, and Pete is now about a hundred
miles back but he’s coming down the reach encompassed in a ball of spray like
some sort of a wet doomsday machine, and you can just tell even from here that
he’s not at all happy about how those last few legs played out. So we nip round
‘S’, pull the sails in, adopt the position and sail a steady and uneventful
fetch up to J and OL and a very welcome finish.
We found out later that Pete had problems getting the pole
to go on the mast on the way to ‘C’ and then managed to put the spinnaker sheet
over the end of the boom, so our barnstorming victory was perhaps a little less
impressive than it originally looked. And after all that, we didn’t even win, 2nd
place was all that was on offer.
But in my head, that part of that race stays with me, tucked
away in my collection of sailing memories of times when we tested the limits of
what is possible, to the point where fantasy and reality briefly merged into
one. And it was all absolutely great.