Winter Winds

December 7, 2011

There was an eerily warm north-easterly blowing over the mountains and into San Francisco. The air turned dry while whitecaps rose and broke across the Bay; the conundrum of living in a place with ocean in one direction, and desert in the other. On the street, people wore t-shirts and carried winter coats. Dressing is always a challenge when it’s 65 degrees despite the calendar’s insistence that it’s December 1st.

The weekend rolled around, but the wind did not dissipate. I headed over to Pier 40 early to help thread a new topping lift for the new spinnaker pole on Akyla. I was strapped into a bosun’s chair and hoisted up to the top of the mast where I had to find the end of a tiny white pilot line that I had previously sewn to the end of the bright red line laying in a tangled heap on the deck and use it to pull the topping lift up through the mast. It sounds a lot more complicated than it was. The whole thing took only a few minutes; the bulk of the chore was hauling me up the mast. (I made a mental note to get more aggressive with my diet!)

When the boat was rigged and ready to go, we motored out of the South Beach Harbor, following the Embarcadero around the city to the start of the Golden Gate Yacht Club’s Seaweed Soup Regatta. I was driving, and did my best to steer our way through the chop. It was a rough ride, with what looked to me like four-foot swells—though I’ve never understood how to measure waves. Suffice it to say, we were getting pretty thrown around.

The waves lessened as we rounded Pier 39 and got in the shadow of Angel Island where the race would take place. I was in the midships position, in control of the halyards and the vang. We raised the main, took out the motor, and prepared to raise a headsail. In disbelief of the twenty-one knots of wind, we raised the #2 jib (the smaller the number, the bigger the sail). Most of the winter, we had been sailing with a #1 (which was also below, just in case), but this wind would have shredded that fragile sail to pieces probably with us all ending up in the water. Even the #2 was too big; we kept it up there for all of about ten seconds before dousing it and hoisting the #3. Once the sails were chosen, we could concentrate on the course. We took a position of the starting line on our GPS, and watched for the course flags. A white flag with a red sun, and a red flag with a white cross: course fourteen. At 11:40 we were in sequence. At 11:44 we were ready to head back to the line to start with speed. The only problem was, we were looking at the wrong starting line. Somewhere in the chaos of the start, with over a hundred boats sailing around us, and winds we were not at all prepared for, we stopped looking at the GGYC’s starting line, and started looking at the St. Francis Yacht Club’s buoy right next door. So while we did come across the start line with speed, we started three minutes behind the rest of our fleet.

We actually made up nearly all that time on the short first leg, and rounded the mark at the tail end of our fleet, ready to head up wind. The fleet went one way, we went another. Akyla doesn’t point as well as some of the other boats in our fleet, so in an attempt to keep our speed up and outsmart everyone else, we sailed wide and then back down to the mark. It didn’t help us. When most of the fleet already had their spinnaker up, we weren’t even on our final tack. To make things even more difficult for ourselves, we tacked early, were unable to make the mark, and had to throw in two extra tacks to get around. Now the real fun could start.

We had planned to use the fractional kite, but in the middle of our upwind leg, the wind calmed just enough to need to make a sail change. A test of our new foredeck guy, he had to scramble down below and haul out the J105 kite stuffed way underneath the #2 and #1 jibs (this made for a fun mess for me to clean up once we were underway). He did a great job and the sail went up without any problems. Once I got the cabin cleaned up, the halyards cleared and properly stowed, I climbed up on the rail to take my position on the vang. The wind was gusty, and the vang would prove to be an important tool for keeping us afloat. When the wind was lighter and steady, we would take in the vang to give shape to our main sail. But if a gust came down on us, we had to let the vang out, or even blow it completely while the kite trimmer let out the spinnaker to avoid rounding up. This is something I’m still learning, but I think after this windy day, I finally understand its true function, and next time I’ll hopefully even be able to anticipate the skipper’s commands. The first spinnaker leg was successful enough, and we made it to the third mark.

The crew was definitely unprepared when the skipper called for the jib to be hoisted. The trimmer threw the jib sheet on the secondary winch on the cabin top while I tailed the jib halyard. When I turned to drop the spinnaker I realized that the halyard was somehow wrapped around the winch with the jib sheet. I had no choice to blow the jib sheet to get the halyard free, which I did mistakenly with one hand, unable to control it (or maybe I did have a choice, but this entire sequence happened in the span of about thirty seconds, and I wasn’t going to sit around and weigh my options while voices all around me yelled, “Just get the f*%@ing kite down!”). Somehow we managed to hang on to the sheet and I dropped the kite. We were sailing again, but it had not been pretty.

In the chaos of that sequence of maneuvers, we neglected to confirm the course instructions, and rather than heading straight out to the fourth mark, we sailed an extra quarter-mile back to the first mark, meaning we sailed two triangles, when the rest of the fleet sailed one triangle and one sausage (a windward-leeward course). The second windward leg—when we finally started to head upwind—was perhaps a little better than the first. But we repeated the same mistake of tacking to early to round the mark, forcing two more tacks. Again. At this point, we were just trying to get to the finish.

The second spinnaker set was not as pretty as the first: The tape was not run after being stuffed in the hatch and went up with a perfect hourglass twist. Again we recovered, but the mistakes were really starting to count against us. Back up on the rail, I had two hands on the vang, but that was not enough when we got hit with a particularly strong gust. We rounded up as the boat rocked violently. The chute collapsed; we were lucky the boom didn’t come swinging across. We recovered and no one got thrown off the boat, but I’ll tell you, you only have to experience that once to understand how potentially bad it could be.

We put the jib up to round the fifth mark. I made sure to keep the sheet away from the spin halyard. Unfortunately, I had not made sure to get the spin halyard out of the cleat on the mast, and it took an extra few seconds and some help from a crew mate to drop the thing. We sailed through the finish (somehow we actually weren’t last) and straight on home. The boat was as quiet and eery as that warm winter wind.

I only have one more race on Akyla before the end of the year. What I’ve learned these last few months is that sailboat racing is all about communication, anticipation, and cooperation. If one of those three things fails, you loose the race. If more than one fails, you’re probably lucky if you don’t end up in the water. It’s always fun to sail, and you can’t always win; just like ski racing, most of the time you lose. But it’s never fun to lose not because the other boats were better of faster, but because we were so out of sync that we never even gave ourselves a chance. I’ve been on Akyla with the same crew in the same positions and we sailed really, really well. Going into 2012, I look forward to a lot more of those days, and a lot less of these ones.

Filed under: California,Daily Life,Sailing,USA

Tags: Akyla, one way ticket, one way tkt, onewayticket, onewaytkt, sailing, San Francisco Bay, winter