With writer's block behind and a heavy dose of mother nature handed us aboard Swale this week, let's talk sailing! Anticipating, fretting, anxiety ridden all afternoon as the weather radar clearly showed the western side of a rotating system bearing down hard on Dallas from Oklahoma, I was NOT looking forward to this particular race. You know, I kinda like sailing in the fair weather. And fair weather we were not to be blessed with on this occasion. But as the famous captain so profoundly stated, if it's going to happen, it's going to happen out there. And so we go.
With sustained winds in the lower 20's and gusting north of 25, we might have wanted to consider reefing the main. And for those who DON'T know the term, reefing means reducing the sail area considerably. But that would just slow us down on the downwind leg now, wouldn't it? So we'll just take our punches upwind in exchange for the favorable speed as we run downwind. Hell, might we even deploy the spinnaker and really gain some speed? It's rigged, why not? Okay, this is where logic and rationale finally prevailed just seconds before the starting horn was sounded for our atypical downwind start. But our foredeck can pole out the jib for a wing-on-wing setup. And we were set. And we FLEW!! 9 knots proudly displayed on the gps, and life for us Swalians could not be any better. Too bad for our competition that the same wasn't true for them...turns out the chute was a little much afterall for some crews:
Rounding the leeward mark, the natural question arose, "Why again didn't someone think to put a reef in the main?!" I can't think of a time in all of Swale's past that the spray has EVER launched across the bow all the way back to the helm...and for the full mile-long leg, the spray not once relented for more than three seconds! Such is the game sometime. At any rate, the decision to tack to the port side of the course following the first leeward mark would come back to reward Swale at the end, for not a single one of the three nearest competitors remained within three minutes of the Great White Northern Horse at the end of this fabled leg. With but one final run down and another couple of tacks back up, Swale galloped purposely across the foam-tipped whitecaps that harkened their fury toward her muscular hull with each thunderous collision, to take the rewarding line honours among the fleet.
Congratulations are deserved for the flawless crew work!
