A Night To Remember – Raritan Yacht Club’s Liberty Navigator’s Distance Race.

This weekend was the first ever Raritan Yacht Club, Liberty Navigator’s Distance Race. This 74NM race ran from Perth Amboy past Sandy Hook out to the Barnegat Ambrose Channel separation marker, Southwest to the entrance to Shark River Inlet, North up the Shore, left round Sandy Hook and home again. The chart below shows the course in red.

I decided to enter Cadence and spent the last week rounding up crew and prepping the boat. My crew, sounded a bit like a Man Walks into a Bar joke with Eli, a  Yank, Albert, a Dutchman, Mike, a Welshman and yours truly, a Brit. A better bunch of guys I couldn’t imagine sailing with. All are competent sailors, have raced a lot and got on well.

 There were only four boats racing as the weather forecast was accurately bad and the prospect of 75NM sailing at night in rain, thunder and lightning is not everyone’s idea of a rocking Saturday night.

We were the rookies of the bunch facing up against Sinn Fein, a famous Cal 40 that won Newport-Bermuda overall twice and its division four times, Seafeather, a very well-sailed Morgan 44 and Short Bus (yup it’s a yellow boat), an Evelyn 26. To be honest, I was more worried about this small, light boat in the predicted conditions than I was about how we would do. I need not have worried, they were fine.

Cadence, our Sabre 38 had the lowest rating and while I had confidence in the crew, my offshore racing experience is limited. (OK, I never told the guys this, but actually this was the first time I have skippered in an offshore race).  Winning this race was a high bar.

If I might borrow a well-known soccer cliche, “It was a game of two halves, Brian.”

In the first half of the race, we performed well. The race started at 1800. We had the best start, although Short Bus luffed us and we stalled. It took us a while to get the boat moving. We had a nice close reach East to Sandy Hook where we kept up with with the other big boats. Short Bus fell a long way astern due to her shorter water-line. Sinn Fein showed why she was the better boat early on by heading South of the course into the shallower waters and less negative current and then got a sling-shot from the current North out of Sandy Hook Bay. By Sandy Hook, she was a half a mile ahead.

We had champagne sailing conditions from Sandy Hook to the Barnegat-Ambrose marker- close-hauled in 15kts out of the South with fairly flat seas, a full moon lighting the way. We hit 7.8 kts steady. We rounded the mark and headed Southwest towards Shark River. This mark was higher than we could sail directly to so we had to tack 6-8 times. The winds softened and we struggled to get into a good groove. This was also when we were hit with our first small squall. Like a good soldier we reefed the main. This probably lost us 5 minutes and we ended up shaking out the reef 15 minutes later. By the time we rounded Shark River Inlet, Sinn Fein was miles ahead, Short Bus and Seafeather were abeam of us. We owed a lot of time to both so a DFL was looking likely at this point.

With the wind behind us it was time for the asymmetrical spinnaker. I raised it in its sock but could not get the sock up. It hung there like a sad, white sausage. To top it all, I had been Mr Cautious and had the crew furl in the headsail whilst I faffed about on the foredeck with the Asym. After 10-15 minutes of this, we bailed on the asym and furled out the headsail, which of course jammed. By then we were toast and looking at the aft lights of the two boats with higher ratings.

To make matters worse, we lost power. The batteries had drained. I will spare you the gory detail but it was basically poor power management on my behalf. We had enough power for running lights, but other than that it was looking like we were in the 18th Century.

Fortunately, Eli had his hand-held GPS loaded with the course and had been using it throughout the race. To be honest this had bugged me throughout. No one likes being second-guessed but when we lost power, I could have kissed him.

This was when the weather got a little too exciting. For some time we had seen lightning on shore and in the moonlight we could make out some very ugly weather in the direction we were heading. The Coasties had issued a Securite that there would be dangerous storms in NY Harbor, which we were now entering. Oh goodie!

We had a pleasant and fast broad-reach towards G1, the first marker of the Sandy Hook Channel, then things got very ugly. The wind direction switched Northwest, and the wind was colder and much stronger. Then the squall hit.

The crew was awesome. All stayed calm. We talked through how we would reef, executed flawlessly and then sailed on in terrible visibility with a double-reefed main and shortened headsail. The winds were 20kts gusting to 25kts+ with heavy heavy rain and a very short chop.

In daylight this would be nerve-wracking but in the dark and poor visibility the conditions were as intimidating as I have ever experienced.

Of course where we needed to head was now directly into the wind. We tacked back and forth in what is commonly know the NY Harbor Approach (i.e. big ships, moving fast are the norm). We could make out large vessels in the distance, including a couple of cruise ships. These were fortunately anchored but as they were lit up like Christmas trees it took some time to be sure of that.

After a hair-raising hour we made it into the relatively safe waters of Raritan Bay. The winds were easing but the rain was still pounding us. We shook out our reefs and headed to the finish. The irony was that although we had been racing for 13 hours, we finsihed within 30 seconds of Short Bus. The other two boats had been on the mooring for an hour.

As we couldn’t start the engine (no power), we sailed to the mooring. The headsail furler jammed as we tried to bring the genoa in to make things more interesting. But thanks to great work by the crew we stopped the boat dead on the pick-up stick.

What did I learn?

1. Safety First: My safety preparations were appropriate for the race. We had jacklines. I insisted on clipping on after dark and lifejackets offshore. We ran a preventer all the way forward and back to the cockpit. We may have overcompensated by reefing the main early on when furling the headsail would have sufficed.

2. Crew: I decided to race 4-up. This was just enough for this race but it meant that no one got much if any sleep. One or two more would have been better. My feeling was that I would rather sail with a few sailors who were experienced in boat-handling, racing, had other skills (e.g. navigation). The key to me was chemistry and I made some decisions not to add others who I wasn’t sure would get on with the rest of the crew. In future, I would prepare a lot earlier and put together a crew of 6-7 making sure that the chemistry was good.

3. Prepare, Prepare, Prepare: I put a lot of work into preparation and got most things right with one huge notable exeception. I assumed (and we all know what that means) that the asym was going to be fine and we would have no problem setting it. This cost us any chance in the race. There were plenty of other mistakes but this was the biggest.

4. Practice: Before the start, we practiced an MOB-drill and reefing but we did not practice with the chute. Doubly bad as it would have fixed point 3 and we would have felt confident as a crew using the asym. We would also not have lost time with me screwing around on the foredeck as we would have gone directly from headsail to chute.

5. Power Management: The combination of radar (running all the time, agh!), chart plotter, instruments, running lights sucked the three batteries dry by the half way mark. It never occurred to me that this would happen. I think the batteries were too low to start with. Following the race, it took Mike and I a whole day to get the batteries charged up enough to start. In the winter I am taking a marine electrics course so I get smarter about batteries and then making appropriate improvements to the boat. While this did not affect our race performance, it unsettled me and became a big distraction.

6. Stuff Gets Broken: Nothing major got broken and fortunateky no one got hurt but I have to give some thought if I want to put my beautiful boat through this on a regular basis.

Overall, although we didn’t taste of victory, I am a lot richer for the experience.