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IOD World Championship
Tuesday, September 11: The day starts out beautiful, unless, of course, you're on a sailboat. There's not a breeze anywhere on the water. We're the first ones off the mooring and, after drifting backwards a few hundred feet, eventually get a tow from the Race Committee out of the harbor. The fleet assembles in the Cord of the Bay and floats around for a few minutes; this isn't looking good. Then, gradually, the wind picks up. Enough wind eventually builds for a race, and we're off. Team San Francisco gets buried at the start, and we're playing catch up from the word go. We're the last ones to round the leeward mark. Our skipper, Jim Hennefer, makes some amazing tactical decisions, though, and we're in fifth around the windward mark, a position we'll keep to the end. For the second race, the wind continues to build…and build…and build. It's blowing about twenty knots by the time we start the second race. Things are getting interesting. The guys from San Fran are loving it; it's just like home. We get a better start this time, and we're up to the first windward mark in no time flat. We come in on port, which is a little dicey when you're dealing with this caliber of competition, but we pull it off and the spinnaker goes up without a hitch. And then the fun really starts. The spinnaker halyard, normally attached in a jam cleat on the mast, comes undone. I grab it, thinking I'll just pull it back down. As my boy Dick Vitale would say, "Not so fast, my friend." I'm floating…literally. The spinnaker is full, and pulling several hundred pounds of force. I'm holding on to the halyard for dear life and it's pulling me up, off the deck. I'm about three feet up when we get things righted and I manage to get the halyard back in the jam cleat and the spinnaker back up. Then the death rolls start. You've never lived until you've been sitting on the boom of an IOD in twenty-knot winds going downwind with the windward rail in the water. We foredeck guys live for this stuff. Half the fleet opts out of flying spinnakers, and we finally end up in sixth overall. Not a bad way to end the day. Now all I want is a shower and a towel. A big, dry towel. And a handful of Advil. Wednesday, September 12: Today is a scheduled lay day, so there's no sailing. I spend the day reading The Nantucket Independent and drying my clothes from yesterday. I'm still coming to grips with the fact that I'm square in the middle of this thing. I'm amazed at how good sailors these guys really are. The thing about the Nantucket IOD fleet is that all of the boats are as identical as it is possible to make them, so it really comes down to who is the best sailor out there. And the guys in the lead are fast, and consistently so. They do a million little things that all give them a nano-second's advantage, but you start adding them up and they turn into one big advantage. Only thing is it's tough to take notes while you're getting battered by waves and trying to squint through the fog to find the next mark. But I keep trying to learn, little by slowly. I'm just happy to be here. Thursday, September 13: People refer to sailing on days like this as "connect the dots" racing. There's no steady breeze anywhere on the course, so you go from little puff of wind to little puff of wind. This isn't the kind of wind we're used to out here. Nantucket's prevailing wind is southwest, usually pretty steady at about ten knots. So today was a challenge for local sailors, myself included. I'm sitting on the foredeck looking for puffs of wind on the water, seeing none. But we hang in there, and we're actually second around the windward mark in the first race. Downwind, though, the wind disappears on us, and boats that went left around the mark are making out like bandits. We're stuck in the doldrums, going nowhere fast. On a positive note, my shoulders are getting a little relief on the spinnaker halyard. We end up eighth overall, a finish that is tinged with a wee-bit of frustration. But what are you going to do? You pays your money and you takes your chances. We went right, which turned out to be wrong. Second race rolls around, and we're seeing the same sort of conditions, although there seems to be a building breeze on the left side of the course. So around the weather mark we go and set the spinnaker, only to discover that it's now hopelessly stuck behind the forestay. So we douse it quickly, but the damage is done. We're losing ground fast. We round the leeward mark behind the rest of the fleet and head right, hoping for more wind, but just enough to keep our current place. We're last across the line, last into the harbor and, just to add insult to injury, last to find a mooring ball, which turns into something like a water-bound Easter egg hunt - a very difficult, frustrating Easter egg hunt. Friday, September 14: This is it. If Team San Francisco is going to do it, today is it. I'm working on the math; it doesn't look pretty. We're basically pinning our hopes on some sort of freak natural disaster to ensure our top-five finish. Our goal is clear today: avoid getting "The Book." There is a tradition at the IOD Worlds that dictates that the skipper whose boat finishes last overall in the fleet gets a copy of Arthur Knapp's "Race Your Boat Right." The suggestion is that the last-place finisher should bone up on his or her skills prior to next year's Worlds. So we're fighting to avoid getting the book. The first race, things look good as we take advantage of more-or-less normal conditions for Nantucket waters and keep the boat going fast. Our upwind beats are clearly our strength, so we find ourselves hanging on to what gains we can when we turn and go downwind, making up ground when we can. Due to some great tactical moves from the back-of-the-boat guys, we round up around in eighth. And then things get interesting. One of the Marblehead boats rounds in front of us to windward and, upon clearing the mark, proceeds to head down onto us. That's a no-no. I'm screaming at them to head up, head up, head up, for crying out loud, head up. They don't. We alter course and immediately fly a protest flag. We end up chasing the boys from Marblehead around the course, finishing directly behind them, maintaining our hold on eighth. Things are looking okay for our avoiding the book, so we forego the formal protest and let it slide. The final race of the 2007 IOD World Championships is, from a spectator's point of view, perfect. The weather is ideal, the sky is crystal-clear, the sailing is tough from start to finish. Nantucket sailor Colin Sykes starts just to windward of us at the line, and he's close enough for me to hear him encouraging his crew that it's a "beautiful start." Overlooked in this whole thing, though, is Team San Fran, sailing what is clearly the slowest boat in the fleet (as attested to by Charlie van Voorhis, who had sailed her the race before). Notice the part there about starting right next to Colin. We watch as he points higher and sails faster, despite being to leeward, thus defying all laws of physics. He passes us with ease. As does the rest of the fleet. We're stuck tacking back and forth, looking for clear air and something resembling boat speed. We finish in twelfth, now increasingly afraid of getting the book. Overshadowing our fears, though, is what can only be called a scene-stealing moment: Colin Sykes crosses the finish line in first place, winning the eighth and final race of the championship regatta. One can only imagine the smile on Dick Sykes' face watching from above as his son blows past the best in the world in the sailboats he loved so dearly. In that brief moment, all Nantucket sailors are proud of their membership in that solemn and great fraternity. And so I get my Hollywood ending after all. Saturday, September 15, The Day After: Well, the Worlds are behind us now and all I have are my memories. We finished in tenth overall, lower than we'd hoped, but still respectable in my book when I think about the skills of the sailors in the competition. We faced just about every weather condition you could ever expect on the water, and it's only appropriate that it should be that way, as we've crowned the IOD World Champion. If you can handle all of these conditions as well as Charlie van Voorhis did, you deserve the title he won. It sounds somewhat melodramatic, but I'm stuck with a sort of post-partem depression at this point. The thing that strikes me the most, as I look back on it, isn't so much the quality of the competition. God only knows the sailors at this thing are the best in the game. They all compete ferociously and they sail their guts out on every leg. They strategize and they plot and they yell and they gnash their teeth and they scream at the heavens, but when it's all over, there's a camaraderie, a community, a sense of connection and mutual respect that is not to be duplicated anywhere I've ever been or seen. The folks from Team San Francisco haven't even left the island as I write this and I miss them already. We're making plans to meet up this winter and hopefully sail again together next year. And I've got invitations to visit new friends in Bermuda, Norway and Marblehead. When you slice it and dice it and dissect it and boil it down to the essence, the 2007 World Championship was about more than just sailing. It was also about a lot of great friends - both old and new - getting together and sailing like hell against each other by day and laughing like hell together by night. Old rivalries were continued, new rivalries were begun. All I can say is thank you to all the sailors for allowing me to be a part of it. And by the way, next year's World Championship will be in San Francisco. I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I'd have to say smart money is on "local knowledge" carrying the day. Especially if they make the right decision on their foredeck guy. Make me proud Jim, Marcia and Paul. Sail fast. Until we meet again, friends. Home is the sailor, home from the sea. I - Andrew Spencer |
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