First lesson in Solent sailing: you don’t dock double-handed. We were assigned a spot in the marina, but it was taken, so we tried a small spot to starboard going backwards behind Tp52 Bear of Britain. I chickened out and slowed down too early, the puff over 25kt hit, the 4kt current finished the job with the help of my shaky hand on the throttle, and the carbon splinters went flying. At this point we were moving sideways rather quickly, perpendicular to the channel. I went full forward to regain steerage and the bow went straight into the big old Swan at the opposite pontoon. Dave was performing some Cirque de Solei acts to fend off the direct impact, but we hooked the Swan’s anchor on our first stanchion, and second, and the shroud, and the next stanchion and the next. We swooned around his bow and hit the cement dock. We were finally free, but scrubbed of all our port stanchions and my entire dignity.
That should be the opening sequence for Jack Ass III the movie, in front of a huge audience of people that I look up to. The wound on my mojo was large and bleeding. Some people have run to offer salt and acid, which don’t usually help quick healing, but I deserved it all.
Kick me in the face Chris Larson.
The incident would go down in the history books if not for the fact that we are in a period of wartime.
The smoking ban took effect in England and Gordon brown succeeded Tony Blair in the June 30th elections. It went from ugly to nasty, carnage and more carnage. Boats going out for practice and ambulances waiting for them at the dock and it remained like that for another 10 days; broken masts, broken boats, lots of halyards, sails and egos.
Thank God I did not have to drive any more, the rest of the crew arrived to my rescue.
A full set of Rojeks, Chris Zaleski with the whole family, Waldek, Britt Hughes, Brendan Shattuck and our hero chef Diane. Later on the British contingent from the Pocket Battleship team joined in; Marc Gilett, Katie with baby Emma, our navigator Ian Harrison and Andrew Button.
Our accommodations were of royal standard, except for a couple bathrooms with drainage problem. In exchange, the bathroom I shared with Britt came equipped with a time capsule. We didn’t figure out the operational procedure since the manual was missing, but there was some kind of rrare rradiation or ultra vibrration that caused Britt to snore a little.
The parlor was truly grand, with an internet room, an oversized TV in the living room, a terrace in the back for drying ripped sails in the rain, a table large enough to sit us all for dinner and a proper professional kitchen with a butlers room and pantry. Diane used the facility to its full capacity, constantly running three or four ovens, blenders, grinders, washers and dryer.
Just one small and very slow dryer? I don’t understand those people.
She was up before me almost every single day, feeding and cheering us up. Now from this perspective I can’t remember why anybody would leave that house. We had Diane and all necessary supplies and even if we ran out of wine, Kuba could drive to the market and buy more.
Just kidding. Our objective was to fight for a trophy awarded by the famous Royal Yacht Squadron of Great Britain to the winner of this international competition held among the teams of sailing yachts (Teams built of yachting enthusiasts from across the world).
There was a dilemma; go practice and risk everything, or don’t practice and risk entering the regatta rusty and uncoordinated.
Andrzej and Chris wisely chose the middle ground. We went out and sailed, hoisting the shoot only when our magnums would register a consistent drop below 25kt and we did not race in the preworld’s regatta, which turned into a demolishin derby for most of the Swans that used it as practice.
Mike Urwing didn’t give us too much grief this time, concentrating mainly on safety issues. He found some of our life vests to be out of compliance with British laws and our medical manual outdated by 2 months (they rewrote the section on hypothermia, moving it to the mental disorders chapter), we were ready to go.
One of my responsibilities on the boat is shopping for cool stuff to make sure that there is always a secured stash of things that any body might find helpful for improving their performance in the races. This including navigation tools such as charts, tide tables and new hot gadgets. I went shopping for solent special magic fedders online back in December to have a special motivational Christmas stocking stuffer for Chris. There was a list of books and multimedia publications with intimidating titles like “Hazards of Solent”, “How to Survive the Solent”, “Win Races in the Solent Everyday”, I picked one and decided to get charts locally.
Good intuitive decision.
The main business in southern England is theory on the Solent; publishing, manufacturing and selling all kinds of hocus pocus. They have a college of Solent in Southampton and the University of Oxford produces eight Solent PHD’s per annum. I had some hard choices, but I have spent Andrzej’s pounds well I believe. We used most of the stuff that I got, except the Solent sun deflectors for the compass and the 400meters of anchor chain that I was supposed to carry in case of light breeze.
It was blowing a consistent 25 to 30 from the southwest for most of the week, so we were sailing east of the Medina River in the shadows of Osbourne hill with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s royal palace on it. The waters of the Solent run on their own; there are very strong currents caused by Atlantic waters pushing into that narrow channel from one side or another changing every six hours. The waves are not tall since it is a protected sound, but they are strong and confused and they frequently change. We had fewer problems dealing with the conditions than most of the fleet. Marcin did well and we only broached once and only because Atlantica wiped out next to us forcing Marcin to come up.
We did not experience any problems. Just a broken jib halyard, windex, 1st stanchion, broken winch, rips in several sails, a few busted clutches, broken vang, bent pulpit, busted backstay ram, 3rd stanchion, second, a couple of exploded blocks, a spin sheet, the inhauler. Having good friends around, mainly Peter McCloskey and Roger Marino, we managed to keep the boat afloat through the regatta. Although neither Dave, Kuba nor I had much time for the social events, I hear we did not miss much.
The first race was good, we finished 9th. On the second start we had a situation with Jeroboam and we lost the protest, which was a blow to our confidence and motivation.
If you google the worlds “JEROBOAM CA’ NOVA protest” you will get nine pages of results. In Cowes they had 7 and they never lost one!
But I must say that after a few months of yachting and socializing with them, they did not lie about the weather once! Real gentleman.
We had our own set of problems, mostly mental. From my perspective, we had a hard time getting off the line with speed and for that kind of catch up game we were a little to slow in changing gears and indecisive. With the tricky narrow wind and current lines, picking a side and staying there is crucial and we almost never had an opportunity to execute our plan, being pushed by the boats ahead. Crew frustration had a toll on Chris’s confidence. There was too much daunting him and it did not feel like we were a team. It is always dangerous when you hesitate calling your teammate’s name, because you are not sure. Boat handling and coordination were great, though there was one slow recovery after the broach when the downhaul got loose and we couldn’t get the pole down for a very long time.
For a number of teams including Belicossa and Goombay Smash, this was a sad last event in the class. We will never see those boats under those names again.
The last day after the races felt like a graduation day on campus, beer and tears everywhere, moms and dads loading minivans, hugging and garage sales everywhere. We picked up some hot items from Massimo’s stash, including a bunch of slightly bent stanchions and the dock box, desired by every boat captain. Plenty’s Mat offered us the winning trophy in exchange, but we declined. Thank you Peter, the trophy we can win next year.
We had two more of Diane’s masterpiece meals, checked our e-mails free of charge for the last time, loaded all the wet stinky stuff into the van and went back to Hamble to convert into cruising mode.