IOD championships
Sailing with Team San Francisco
BY ANDREW SPENCER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Nantucket Sound this week will play host to the International One Design World Championships. Teams from as far away as Norway and Bermuda have come to test their skills here, racing against the best that IOD racing has to offer. Two island teams- Team Yankee and Team Sierra- qualified to represent Nantucket in this year's World Championships, and they will join former World Champions from Fisher's Island and Long Island Sound, as well as other distant locales. Long story short, this is a tough crowd to impress and a really tough crowd to beat. So it was with much trepidation and a whole lot of nervousness that I accepted an invitation to join the team from San Francisco as their foredeck person. This is pretty much how it all shook out:

Sunday, September 9: I get a message on my voice mail. Whitey Willauer tells me that the team from San Francisco is looking for somebody to do the foredeck position. Would I be interested in doing it? Hmmm. Let me think here. I've got the opportunity to sail in the company of the best IOD sailors in the world. Yep, no-brainer. But immediately after I say yes, the nerves are setting in. It dawns on me that I'm going to be smack-dab in the middle of the World Championships. Wow. This is big time.

Monday, September 10, First Day of Racing: We're sitting around the Yacht Club waiting for the fog to lift. The butterflies are doing jumping jacks in my stomach; I'm in the presence of IOD racing royalty, and I'm totally not worthy. The Race Committee finally decides that the fog has lifted enough to begin racing, so we head out to the boats. Soon we're off the mooring and heading for the Cord of the Bay, where the racing will be taking place this morning. The San Francisco people are psyched to have me aboard, because I've got local knowledge of the conditions. I play the demure card initially, all the while reveling in my own importance. I sagely offer that the fog will lift shortly and the wind will build to the southwest. In the end, the fog sticks around all day and the wind builds into the northeast. Clearly my "local knowledge" is useless at best.

We hold our own out there over the course of the day, and I might even go so far as to say that, once the nerves had settled down a little, I do a pretty adequate job on the foredeck. In the end, though, Day One watches us as we blindly grope our way through the fog towards distant marks that only become visible when we're nearly on top of them. Reminds me of the iceberg scene in Titantic. And though we hang tough with the best in the business, our results at the close of racing are less than stellar. But it's a long series and we're not throwing in the towel just yet.

Stay tuned. The stage is set for the Hollywood ending, as Team San

Francisco is poised to make its move. I