Days -2 through 0

I wrote this up for family and friends, but I thought I'd share it here as well. Please understand, it's more about my experience at the Worlds than it is about the Worlds itself, so if you don't know me, you might not be interested. For that matter, even if you do know me, you still might not be interested ;-) But in case you might enjoy reading it anyway, here it is... It's a couple days late, we just finished day 2 - but it just occurred to me to send it here. I'll follow up each day with the next installment unless people want me to just leave them alone and tell me to quit clogging their inboxes...

Ever wonder what organizing a world championship regatta is like? Well, it's probably not much like what I've been doing, but let's just say that it is.

The drive to CORK was the smoothest yet, although it stinks to do it alone. I got here in 7.5 hours, the fastest yet, and not with particularly high speeds, just good traffic. You know you are a dinghy racer when you can drive from home to Kinsgston, Ontario, without looking at a map ;-)

When I got here, I was disappointed to find that I left my suitcase at home. I'm happy to report that I made this discovery without a single four letter word or even a raised voice! My sailing clothes were in a different bag which I did have, so after a small panic and failed damage recovery effort, I got a friend who hadn't left yet to bring some spare clothes from his house, and as soon as I can get to a department store, I'll get to stop hand-washing my boxers every day.

Yesterday was I guess day -1, because it was registration and measurement. Today was the practice race, so that is what I'll call day zero. That makes the drive "day -2". The day before I drove up here, I finally found a crew, a guy from New Jersey. On the way up here, I got a call from the race organizers who also knew that I was looking for a crew, and they had a note from a Canadian youth who wanted to race, and was looking for a skipper with a boat. So I called my crew just to make sure he really wanted to do it, and let him know I had an alternative. He assured me that he absolutely wanted to do it, so I told the youth's parents I was all set. Then, at 11:30pm, after I got here, I got a call from him, informing me that he couldn't find his passport or birth certificate, and wouldn't be able to get into Canada (or back out). So, now I needed crew again. To bad I have to oversee regatta registration & measurement on day -1 and can't just spend the whole day looking for crew. So I ask him to see if he can get another copy of his birth certificate. Now I find out he's been expecting to get an interview for a new job all week, and yesterday he got it, and it is scheduled for Tuesday, the middle of the regatta. Well DS - if you're reading this, sorry to yank your chain in public but that would have been good to know *before* I told the other crew opportunity "no thanks!"

Anyway, the benefit of running measurement in this case is that I was in a position to pin down every boat that came through, find out what club they were from, and talk to their coach to find out if they had someone that could sail with me. Once I finally had the guts to actually do this, literally the first coach I asked had someone. Of course the guy didn't get here until 10pm, so I had to spend the whole day worried it was going to fall through. Other than that, of course there were a dozen decisions I had to make with problems that were uncovered as we measured boats & registered people, and many of boiled down to either breaking International Sailing Federation rules, or forcing about a hundred teenagers to spend a bunch of money for no other purpose than to satisfy those rules (We were able to work them all out to save the kids the money). Other than that, getting all the boats measured ("measuring" boats means simply making sure they are in compliance with all the rules), turned out to be a breeze thanks to a young guy who I've seen every year since I started coming up here - this year he emailed me and asked if he could help with anything, and I said "Yes, you can help with measurement." Well, Tom *really* stepped up to the plate, he took the instructions, and took charge, and left me completely free to deal with everything else, and for that matter to rig my own boat. So, registration & measurement went fine. I still need to sort out a problem with the trophies, and the T-shirts were not the color that we asked for. But Everything else is working so far.

I met my crew this morning, and he's a great kid. 17 years old, really good attitude, and about the same skill level of sailor as me. His name is Dan. It's nice that neither of us has high expectations that aren't getting satisfied. No, instead we both have relatively low expectations that aren't getting satisfied.

We had five or six practice starts before the actual practice race. (I'm actually the only person that knows this, everybody else thinks they were all legitimate starts that were recalled because there were too many boats over the line. This is something I worked out with the race organizers, because if people know a start isn't real, they don't care if they mess it up. I didn't even tell my Newport comrades ;-) Well, on every single one of them, as soon as we did start, most of the boats near us just slowly pulled away. For our lives we couldn't figure out what we were doing so drastically differently than so many other people. My performance today was much worse than last year at this regatta, and Dan is much more experienced than my crew last year.

Well, on land later on while I was helping somebody else rig his boat, I went to compare something to my boat - and I realized that my aft shrouds were rigged around my diamond shrouds - they were crossed, making each other too tight, and flexing the rig from the wrong angle. I'm very hopeful that this is a "big enough deal" that it will explain our absurdly poor boatspeed. Nevertheless, we had a tolerable finish. Only 36 boats crossed the finish line (out of 56 registered), and we were 16th place. However, that is misleading, because there is a superstition amongst top sailors that it is bad luck to finish a practice race. I think it comes from the notion that part of the purpose of a practice race is to stress your equipment so that if something is going to fail, you will find out before the real racing starts. So I think the idea is that if your going to fail to finish a race, you should make it the practice race. I may be wrong about the origin, but regardless, about 10 boats are known to have deliberately sailed around the finish line instead of through it. As a result, our score likely would have been more like 26 out of 46. Still about mid-fleet, still better than most of my finishes at the last Worlds. I can live with that. The fleet here is about 2/3 kids 14-18, about 1/6 19-25, and the rest spread out from 26 to over 50 years old.

Conditions were 18 gusting to 20, with *crazy* chop. This is great - the forcast said "Seas: 1-2m". That's a forecast? 3-6 foot waves? Could you vague that up a little for us? Along the way, Dan and I picked up enough water to fill an olympic size swimming pool. Kevin and Brandy sailed fantastically. Rumor has it that the were in approximately 7th place 3/4 of the way through the race, before their traveler exploded. So, they did not finish, and as I said above, that's as it should be - better things break when it doesn't count. Other practice race mishaps; Baron, from Tennessee (who came to the Newport regatta, his first), lost his main sheet, and did not finish. Matt and ryan lost their spinnaker sock, but *did* finish - without any spinnaker storage mechanism at all! (32nd place). And oh, the most tragic (but not too tragic) were Ellie and Elizabeth. Ellie is a sweet little 14 year old girl from Nyack, NY (if you call 5'8" little) , who's mom Elizabeth found her boat and my website, and brought her & a friend of hers to the Newport Regatta. Ellie did *great* in Newport, finishing 5th out of 14 boats, without a spinnaker - beating several spinnaker boats. This time, Elizabeth herself stepped up to the task of crewing for Ellie! Well on about the 4th practice start, there was a loud *boom* and my crew said "Oh no, somebody just lost there mast!" And I looked back and was sad to see that it was Ellie & Elizabeth sitting their with their rig in the water. But they are really troopers, and they handled it with aplomb. They didn't get discouraged at all. A safety boat towed them in, and they already had replacement shrouds and were working on installing them by the time we got to shore.

We all stayed in the yard until 9pm tonight taking turns between relaxing and helping each other fix all the problems we discovered or created on the water. Ellie/Elizabeth, and Baron & his crew probably have learned more about boats in the last 48 hours than in a couple of average years of being a sailor. We helped them fine-tune their rig tensions & line lengths, set up alternative spinnaker-pole riggings, and tested it all on land - definitely a crash course - or hopefully (I have to say it...) a "don't crash" course.

-Avram
USA 10166
'Maximum Verbosity'
Day 1