Hello Race Fans!!!
I am sending this report a day late because we did not find out the results of the regatta until late last night because there were a number of protests that had to be heard by the Protest Committee.
The day was going to be a challenging one. Arriving on the beach at 8:30 to help the Brazilian Grand Master team with whom we were switching off boats, the wind was alread blowing hard. It was cloudy, and the wind was still from the NE with a possibility of going more easterly as the day progressed.
The Masters and Grand Master teams left the beach, and I went back to the hotel to eat more food. Because Annie and I were only .7 kilos over minimum weight, there was still a possibility of another weigh-in. Which reminds me, at the end of our last race on Day 1, we hit the beach and immediately a gentleman from the Race Jury came up and asked that we please get weighed again. We had promised ourselves to be sure to drink a bottle of water each on the way back to the beach, but we forgot, and once you hit the beach, if they think you might be underweight, you get weighed immediately. If it turns out that you are underweight, all your races for that day are disqualified. So we went over to the high-tech scale, stripped down to our bathingsuits, and got weighed. Luckily we had gained a kilo...as I mentioned, we´ve been trying to eat as much as possible!
Race 1: After the somewhat chaotic exodus from the beach (due to the fact that they blow a horn and all of a sudden 60 boats want to leave out of a fairly small stretch of beach that is not near reefs), we headed out to the race course. Suddenly I was experiencing conditions heretofore never experienced by yours truly. The waves were massive. The wind was blowing about 17 knots which is a decent double-trapping breeze, but the waves made just staying on the boat difficult. At times when you are out on the trapeze, the boat would fly over a wave and both your feet would leave the boat!
Our start was good, and about half-way down the course we headed right which was windier the other two days. It was definately a crazier place to be with huge waves coming at all angles due to a very strong current running north. At the windward mark I believe we rounded in 5th place. The boat that actually won that race was about 100 feet in front of us. Downwind was a rollercoaster ride. The key is to try and surf the waves while making sure that you don´t dig in your bows which would result in the boat pitchpolling Annie is very experienced at surfing the waves on a Hobie, and it was an amazing learning experience for me. What a wild ride downwind!
At the gates we rounded the left one and headed up the right side of the course to big wind and big waves. Annie´s rudder did not go down all the way after the rounding (it is normal to raise your windward rudder going downwind) and so she had to get off the trapeze to get back onto the boat to fix it. Just as she was going in, a wave came and knocked her completely off the boat, so she was dragging behind it! At that point we started capsizing, and so I unhooked my trapeze line (so I wouldn´t get pulled under the boat if it turtled) and swam out of the way as the boat came down over me. We both swam to the other side of the boat to get up on the hulls so it wouldn´t turtle and so we could right it. Luckily with a lot of wind that is pretty easy to do if you have the mast pointing just off the wind. So it only took about 4 or 5 minutes to get sailing again, but we knew that was a lost race for us. But we caught a lot
of the fleet and ended up 7th in that race. A number of boats got out to the race course and simply decided not to race in those conditions.
Race 2: We had a less-than-perfect start, but not horrible, and all of a sudden the team from New Caladonia was port-tacking the entire fleet. All of a sudden there was mayhem, and people were screaming ¨starboard¨ Then people started yelling ¨Protest¨. I really thought someone was going to be hurt -- it was an incredibly crazy thing to do with the crazy wave-wind conditions we were sailing in.
But the rest of that race was uneventful and we finished in 5th place.
We sailied six races over the three days, and thus we were allowed to throw out our worst race. After throwing out one of our 7s, we finished the regatta in 6th place. There was an awards banquet last night, and the award went to the first 6 place finishers, so I have a wonderful plaque with a Mayan sculpture on it. I am thrilled!
My hands and feet are completely chewed up with blisters and cuts, but I have two days off until the Open World Championship begins on Monday. The cuts will certainly not heal, but my skipper/boyfriend, Bob Merrick is bringing me some new sailing gloves (which are actually gardening gloves apparently that all the Tornado sailors (I think) use. I will have to completely tape my hands and feet so that nothing gets worse.
I wish I could explain to you the comradrie between all the many countries who are here and the passion which they all feel for catamaran sailing. It is amazing.
Liza Cleveland
