Racing the house…

Deb here. Many of you know of my motto, “Don’t Race the House!” Well, yesterday Jim, Chris (who’s joined us on Holiday) and I partook in a very fun, white sails only, cruising division, charity pursuit race. The race instructions are very similar to Rob Moore’s Beer Can Racing rules, and written in local parlance, “na fly nothun down wind dat you cyan fly upwind, na use no pole, na even tink bout one second head sail”.

The highlights of the race were as follows…

• We pull up anchor, then rapidly deploy Chris into dinghy to dislodge the 100 lb coral head attached to anchor. (It was huge! I should have taken a photo, but I was kinda busy right then…)

• Raise the main, lower the main, untwist the halyard ,attach a reef line, raise the main.

• Before the start, Deb accidentally punches Chris in the eye while trying to grab him as he stumbles on a tack. Chris retires below for 5 min to make sure he doesn’t need to imitate Captain Ron for the rest of his life.

• Beautiful start, 2 lovely reaches. Only one mystery crashing sound below which turns out to be a ziplock of flour falling out of a locker in the galley. Zip lock does NOT break open, so disaster adverted.

• Round the leeward mark and start upwind for the finish. We are in a “tacking duel” with True, a very pretty J53 and are going to pass ahead of on the next crossing. Spirt of Juno, (with all 10 of their crew hiking nicely), a Farr 65 is going to be the next boat we are aiming for.

• BANG! The nylon webbing in the clew of the jib rips out, so we suddenly have no sheets attached to the jib.

•Roll up the jib, secure it with a sail tie, keep racing, 10 min later re secure the jib with an additional sail tie, radio the committee and call it a day.

• We were 1st to the awards ceremony, and won a bottle of rum for being last. They were very nice about it. They said we won it because we came the furthest for the race (they thought we came from SF. We didn’t correct them), but it was really because we were last. And True won the cruising division and Juno won over all. Guess what Jim was fixated on for the next couple hours…

All in all, it was a fun day.

P.S. No children were permanently hurt. Chris eye is fine. And there’s a sail loft right here in Falmouth Harbour to get the sail repaired, so no harm done. As Jim said, “At least it ripped here, in the daylight, with a sail repair shop right at hand, instead of at night in the middle of the Atlantic.”