Racing!

As you might recall, one reason for staying in Martha's Vineyard a little longer was to go racing with my friend, Fred, who lives there and has a twenty-six foot boat. Now racing takes many forms, from casual to professional, but it is universally true that where two or more sailboats travel in the same direction, the skippers will be, quietly or aggressively, working to get ahead of each other. It is also true that the smaller the stakes, the more heated the contest.

The Moffat Cup, on Martha's Vineyard, is a long standing end of the season race for the supposedly un-serious end of the spectrum, ho hum. Boats of all shapes and sizes compete, from little twenty foot day boats to magnificent hundred foot wooden schooners. A handicap system is applied to estimate how fast each boat should be, and change their time to sail the course into a 'corrected' time that should show who sailed it better or worse.

Or, of course, who has the more favourable handicap. In this case, handicap numbers were arrived it in a somewhat, nay, totally, obscure manner by the secret assessment of the handicap officer.

But why am I going on about this? Well, you might have guessed but we didn't exactly win. If you turn the results sheet upside down, we did come second. Of course, we sailed a perfect race, it was the bizarre handicap we were given that did it. There's some truth in that, we did sail well, first at the start line, drove the boat well, made no silly errors and generally could have gone a little, but not much, faster. The handicap number implied that we, a 26 foot cruising boat with a stumpy 4 foot keel, should have been 10% faster than the winner, a 34 foot deep keeled cruiser racer. It's clear that the secret handicap formula makes sure that the trophy won't be won by anyone who's been here a mere ten years....

Anyway, it was fun. The weather was pretty crumby - Tropical Storm Hanna was due that evening and pushed a lot of rain and cloud in front of it. No-one would sail for pleasure on
a day like that, so racing was a good thing to do. It was especially fun to sail with Fred, after five years of talking about when we would sail together, we finally did so.

There's a lot of racing around here, so close to New York, Providence and other major cities, so it was no surprise to be heading towards Long Island and see a string of about
two hundred yachts making their was towards us. Fortunately we had space to keep a little out of their way, and to see that our house isn't a complete slouch alongside most of the forty foot racing boats in this particular fleet! We got some good photos and managed to cross their racetrack safely before tackling the narrow and shallow entry into Shelter Island's Coccles Harbor.

I look forward to racing, hopefully with the kids one day, once we are settled in Canada. One thing is for sure, I'm going to race some smallish, fast boat that everyone else is sailing too, so we can race boat for boat without any tedious handicap issues!