Getting the Racing Bug

As a sailing couple, Alice and I have toyed with racing but never been hooked. I race on others boats and enjoy it but have never made the commitment to race my own boat. That changed last night.

Raritan Yacht Club, like many clubs does a weekly "Round The Cans" on Wednesday nights. Wharf Rat, the J 24 I crew on, was not racing so with two of the WR crew, a couple of other friends, Alice and I entered Cadence in the non-spinnaker race.This was our third race on Cadence. In our first race, a 25 mile Lighthouse race we finished in the bottom-half but then had to withdraw as we had crossed into a forbidden zone and would have been DSQ'd. In our second race on Father's day we came last.

The conditions last night were frisky - 15-18 kts, gusty and a lot of chop. There were 11 boats in our division. A couple of the crew had never raced before and had limited sailing experience but were very willing. The WR guys were critical in helping us figure out how to race Cadence.

Alice and I do a non-traditional thing where Alice helms and I act as tactician and general supervisor. It works for us. Firstly, I don't get why you have a Y chromosome to steer. Alice is as good at helming as I am and as we had inexperienced people on-board it worked best for me to focus on the boat-handling.

I am damn proud of the missus. Out of 29 boats racing last night she was the only woman helming (I think?) and the conditions were a little more than exciting.

We had a great start and we were up with the best of them for a lot of the race. The biggest issue we had was main-trim. As they say, racing is where you figure things out. We have sailed in conditions like this but never made much effort to point as high as we should have. Racing forced us to point much higher and in these conditions we struggled to find the right balance between over-trimming the main resulting in too much weather helm and letting the main get excessively backwwinded. We played around with the traveler and mainsheet but never quite found a satisfactory set-up.

By the time we rounded the weather mark and headed towards the reaching mark, we were in the middle of the pack but still in with a shout. We rounded the reaching mark to head downwind. Again this became a time of experimentation. We ran wing-on-wing with the pole out. It took us a long time to set this up and the boat was too slow. Boats that sailed on on a broad reach sailed much faster and extended their leads significantly. I knew this was the wrong thing to do but my instinct was to sail the shortest course. Not doing that again.

We crossed the line and then dodged a boat from a spinnaker division, rounding up around the pin that was also their leeward mark. The obvious thing to get out of their way was to tack back across the line but we were pinned by another boat in our fleet above us that was struggling to take down their pole.

Overall we placed 9th out of 11th. Progress from last place but a long way from perfection. Best of all, Alice and I just got the racing bug!