We left Everett at Fucking Dark Thirty on Thursday to motor slog for 11 hours up to Victoria (official slogan: “Come to Victoria and Shit Directly into the Ocean”). The Colleague jumped aboard the Victoria Clipper to meet us up north where even the crosswalk signs are jaunty and everyone is, frankly, too fucking nice for their own good…
THE SCENE
The Inner Harbor is jammed with racing boats and testosterone. Beer everywhere and a lot of posturing and story-telling already. The usual suspects are here: Icon and Braveheart from Seattle (the favorites for the line honors and overall titles). And there is an assortment of hot race boats from around Washington and British Columbia.
And beer. Lots of beer.
I will admit to being taken by the scene. Hundreds of boats jammed together, flags flying, music playing, sun out…It was cool, and the photos don’t do it justice.
GO WEST
After some bellyaching the night before about the potential for no wind, we are greeted at the start with a nice 15 knot westerly breeze. It’s cold and cloudy, but with the building breeze and 97 boats in our start alone, it was quite a scene. The plan (stolen from conventional wisdom and past races, not from any sort of real planning…more on this later) is to sail to windward on the Canadian side well past Race Rocks before tacking across the Straits of Juan de Fuca to the Washington side and rounding the windward mark in Neah Bay. Cap’n Ron expresses some concern that according to his GPS, the windward mark’s coordinates are actually on land. This is unnerving to those of us who realize that boats are supposed to float on water. Still, we know that the mark is somewhere east of Tatoosh Island. So there’s that…
The upwind leg is a pounding. Fast and wet. The true wind ranges from 15-25 knots, and under the small #3 jib we do ok in all but the biggest gusts. I take two runs at the helm as we hug the Canadian shoreline. Twice I note to Skipper Funnybone that when we get within a few hundred yards of the shore the wind gets gusty and turns into a nasty header, pushing our track lower and hurting our windward progress. Also, the waves get confused in close and it makes driving the boat more difficult. Driving the boat through the gusts and lulls is a pain in the ass, and Skipper Funnybone takes our changing course to mean that I am driving poorly. “Head up,” he says more than once. “I’m up. There is no more up. The wind is shifting,” I say…What I don’t say is “Shut the fuck up and let me drive or take the helm yourself.”
“Let’s get ready to come about,” I say instead, seeing that we are headed back into the weirdness near shore.
“No,” says Funnybone. “We can go right up on shore here. It’s plenty deep.”
“Hey asshole,” I don’t say, “it isn’t about the depth of the water. There is no good reason to be in here. We need to be out in the steadier breeze.”
Before I can finish my internal tirade, Funnybone says, “Let’s get ready to tack.”
No shit. And so it goes. We drive on upwind. Hours of this. We’re all happy to make one last tack before heading to the US side of the Straits, but the fatigue is showing. And Cap’n Ron’s hair is a wreck…
SKIPPER TIP #1: Don’t be a dick if you want good people to sail on your boat. Yell all you want, but you better be damn sure you know what you are yelling about. In fact, here is the already revised TIP #1: Only yell clear instructions. Otherwise shut the fuck up .
WINDWARD MARK
It’s dark when we get to Neah Bay. I’m still driving as we make our last tack onto starboard and head into the bay where a ketch with a flashing yellow strobe light serves as the windward mark. It’s a landmark moment in the race - the halfway point in terms of distance – and everyone is on deck for the rounding. Skipper Funnybone takes the helm for the turn and the coming spinnaker hoist.
Spinnaker work is a pain in the ass. Can I be more clear than that? Crews HATE spinnaker runs. We’d rather beat upwind all day than have to fight the madness of spinnaker rigging. And all of the rigging is one thing, but the fact that it takes 5 crew just to get the thing off the deck and flying is the real problem. Someone has to be driving the boat about 15 degrees above dead-downwind. Someone has to be on the bow feeding the chute out of its bag. Someone has to be hoisting on the halyard. Someone has to be raising and adjusting the spinnaker pole. Someone has to be running the sheets. Someone has to be running the guy. It’s all a real fiasco. In calm weather two people can do it all. In a rising 18 knot breeze in big seas? It takes a few more. There was yelling involved…
SURF’S UP
After rounding the windward mark in Neah Bay, just spitting distance from open ocean, we hoist the spinnaker in about 18 knots of wind and 6 foot seas. Out here at the mouth of the Straits, the swells are more like the true ocean swells you get when offshore: long, rolling waves that the boat climbs over and races down. There isn’t any pounding, and the rolling motion is dampened by the helmsman’s ability to drive at an angle down each wave. When a 37 foot boat starts surfing down the face of a wave you are right on that edge of control that is awesome no matter the outcome. The closest I can get to explaining it is a long downhill run on a bike: you reach a sort of terminal velocity where everything is right on its practical and engineered edge, and one piece of bad luck can bring it all crashing down in a bad, bad way. Still, speed is addictive, and we had a lot of it. I won’t try to be poetic and descriptive here, but when we were driving downwind in 12 foot seas with 30 knots of wind on the port quarter, phosphorescence trailing behind us, knot meter hitting 12 on the downhill sides of the wave? Awesome. Pure power. The sound the boat makes at that speed can make a grown man weep. Well, not really. But it’s cool as shit.
WIPEOUT
Surfing downwind, averaging 10 knots through the water, is a great way to spend a sleepless night. But…well, why rewrite what’s already been written.
Instead I’ll offer you this gem from Dallas Murphy’s great book Rounding the Horn:
But there (is) a price to pay for this downwind delight…It usually comes up when racing sailors congregate, and as the evening wears on, the pisco flows immoderately, the begin to tell war stories that end up focusing on knockdowns, savage round-ups, and mast-in-the-water broaches. These terms describe basically the same completely avoidable event, that is, the loss of control while running before the wind. The boat heels too far, the keel and rudder lose their grip on the water, the boat spins out sideways to the wind, and over she goes. The cause is too much sail.
And what is the cause of too much sail? Oh, that’s right, the skipper.
We run downwind for hours in the dark. I catch 15 minutes of sleep below before being called back on deck. We have to jibe to head into Race Rocks and make our way to the finish line. At this rate we’ll be in the harbor by 4:00 am, a brilliantly fast run. I start thinking about our finish place. Who could be ahead of us in our class? Are we first? Second? Then I start thinking about waking The Colleague with a celebratory phone call (she’s back at the Castle by now, no doubt in the midst of 3 hours of sleep after being out with Little Brother all night while we were out getting our brains beaten in by the sea).
The jibe goes fine, eventually. Hauling the spinnaker around the headstay in this much wind takes a sort of precision and power that we simply don’t have. We, to quote someone from some movie I’ve seen a million times, look “like a monkey fucking a football” out there. But we get the sail around and turned to a port jibe, which we should be able to hold until we get to the finish line.
A mile short of Race Rocks things go very, very wrong (for those who don’t have their nautical charts in front of them, Race Rocks are a nasty outcropping of islets and islands about 10 miles west/southwest of Victoria. If you listen to NOAA weather radio in the Puget Sound you get up to the minute reports from the lighthouse there, and numbers above 30 are very common. I’ve been lazily sailing around the San Juans before and heard “Race Rocks: Winds west at 60 knots, gusts to 70. Seas 15 feet.” No lie.)
Anyway, we are just about to shoot through the small gap between shore and Race Rocks (why are we going through Race Rocks again? Oh, that’s right…no good reason) when we suffer the first knockdown. Funnybone is at the helm, I am on the leeward side trimming the spinnaker. Cap’n Ron and several others are on the windward rail. We get a big wave and a nice gust (30 knots apparent, which means it was at least 35 if not more) that rounds us up HARD. Before I have time to think, the leeward rail (where I am stationed, remember) goes well under water.
Here’s the picture as I remember it. I am facing outboard at the winch on the leeward side of the boat. The boat rounds up and spins out, and suddenly the cockpit is perpendicular to the waterline. Cap’n Ron and the rest are directly above me, but I don’t really know this because I am UNDER WATER. The round up tosses me toward the rail, and by the time I get a push-up stance on the toe rail, the top third of my body is in the water. I have no tether on, and if I go in, I’m done for. There is no way that boat can come back and get me, and my inflatable life vest will just make me a more buoyant corpse after a couple of minutes in this water. The good German Software Engineer, at Cap’n Ron’s polite request, grabs my harness and helps keep me from swimming. Thanks.
When I come up for air, the boat is still on her ear. Both sails are in the water, the boom is dragging through the waves and pulling us deeper into the broach. And no one can move. I can’t climb straight up the cockpit. Cap’n and the rest can’t let go of the lifelines on the high side unless they want to plunge into the sea…It’s a scene. My most vivid memory of the moment is watching as the masthead slammed into the water. Whether a wave came up and got it or the boat rolled farther over I have no idea, but I DO know that masts are not supposed to be in the water. Ever.
After an epic battle of man versus nylon canvas, we manage to drag the spinnaker on deck. There are halyards and sheets everywhere, and we are still knocked over with a full mainsail bashing us about. With the chute down and at least 3 feet between us and Race Rocks, things feel manageable again. We’ll just sail into the finish under main and jib. No problem.
Problem.
We have no jib hoisted and we are still on our side.
With just the main we can’t get the boat moving and so we are at the mercy of the waves. And I mean waves. All throughout the race the crew would call out extra large waves to the helmsman so he could drive around or through them. “Wave!” was the call. Easy. I distinctly remember the following from Cap’n Ron as we were wallowing around Race Rocks under main alone:
“Wave! No. I mean it! Big fucking wave!”
And when it hit us, we got wet. The boat spun around again, the main filled with air and we were on our ear again. And Again. I counted 3 full knockdowns.
Fast forward: we limped into the finish at 5:40 a.m. with a busted spinnaker pole, a torn chute, a foredeck man with 2 broken teeth, and several wasted crew members.
AT THE DOCKS
Lots of wind for the 2007 Swiftsure resulted in lots of gear failure. Many boats limped back and several are tied up at the Inspection dock with various ailments. Icon has a sheet wrapped around her prop, Rubato is stopped with engine failure and Blade Runner has a bent spinnaker pole. Wind plus keen sailing equal broken bits on boats, and the Inspection dock is getting smaller as they all moor alongside.
Let the war stories begin. Back at the docks all of the crews were bragging about broken gear and harrowing downwind moments.
Cap’n Ron and I crashed out for a few hours, had some lunch and brew, crashed out for a while longer, had some sushi and many, many Asahis, and crashed out again.
Blade Runner was 5th in class. Would have been 3rd except for the Race Rocks epic. All said we probably did 2k worth of damage to Blade Runner, which is officially not my problem.
EPILOGUE
We ended our weekend with The Colleague picking us up in Port Townsend after clearing customs. Then? The Colleague and I spent a couple days with my parents. Yep. Weird.
