SA (or should it be SI) posted a picture of Christophe Bouvet on Sirma in the 1600 mile Cap Istanbul 2008. The brief post mentioned the challenging conditions facing the single-handed sailors. The Figaro Beneteau class (sweet boats) typically has interesting races with a large number of boats for single-handed ocean racing. The Cap Istanbul has... had 29. That was until this weekend. Fortunately, the 29th competitor will follow the other sailors to the finish... just not on his boat.
The internet is great for sailors in general. It's especially nice in the off season and when you live in an area or country where the mainstream media thinks covering bicycle racing is an exotic sport... So, I click on the link to the Cap Istanbul and load the race viewer. It's the beginning of the 330nm, second leg from Cagliari, Sardinia to Marzamemi, Sicily. Not long into it, many boats (whose track is traced out by the viewer) dramatically change directions. Well, this is strange. Everything looks very disorganized... Okay, more disorganized than a yacht race should... and then organization returns but all the boats are heading back to Cagliari... What's up with that... I wondered.
The information was still coming in... but it was apparent that something happened to Christophe Bouvet. Another sailor noticed something wasn't right with Sirma, Bouvet's boat.
Racing in the dark, it wasn't clear what was going on.
Fortunately, everyone acted quickly to use the boats tracking information to identify where to search from the missing sailor. After being in the water for two hours, he was found and rescued by Paul Meilhat. Everyone returned to Cagliari and by now have restarted the leg to Marzamemi. Quite a story... Ironic that Sirma's picture was used for the SA post about the Cap Istanbul.
Olin James Stephens II (April 13, 1908 – September 13, 2008)
photo from sailing.org
His first published design, a Six, appeared in the January 1928 Yachting with these comments by the young designer: “In any design the most important factors of speed seem to be long sailing lines and large sail area, with moderate displacement and small wetted surface. Then comes beauty, by which is meant clean, fair, pleasing lines. Though per se beauty is not a factor of speed, the easiest boats to look at seem the easiest to drive.” [from sail-world.com: Olin Stephens dead at 100 years old]
It's the "pleasing lines" of Olin Stephens J boats and those inspired by them that drew me to sailing when I was young. A legend passed away this weekend.
The EYC, Harvest Regatta was entirely a local fleet affair this year. Although the competition was familiar, the weekend provided plenty of good racing. Rounding the final leeward mark of one race in fourth we managed a second place finish by staying in more breeze than a couple boats in front of us. The finishes all weekend were pretty close.
Although we didn't have as much wind as last year, 10 to 18+ was plenty... and too much for some! We usually like these conditions but our old Genoa required more repair tape after day one. The carnage was mostly on Sunday. One poor Lido lost their mast before the start of the first race. Before the day was over, the remaining Lidos agreed to retire. In the Santana 20 fleet, several boats changed to blades for the last race. We're typically among the last boats to make such a sail change but I agreed with the call once I saw that some of the repair tape was AWOL. The jib is almost brand new.
The wind continued to build and the jib didn't seem to hurt us on the first beat. Soon into the run we were doing 10 plus on the speedo and then within seconds the spin sheet on the guy side pulled through the grommet as the knot failed. (Gordon likes stopper knots rather than a bowline.) We managed to get the kite (hardly an appropriate term for it at this point) down and everything else cleaned up in time to round the leeward mark. On the next beat I tried to unravel the twisted (ready to be rung out kind of twisted) spinnaker. What a mess!
It wasn't sorted out by the time we rounded the windward mark again. We quickly stuck the pole on the jib sheet and winged it out to try and keep up. As I worked on running the tape of the spinnaker, we noticed another 20 completely over on its side. Wow! An unusual site. It looked like someone was trying to walk the keel like a dingy. As quickly as she came up, she was running down wind and leaving a crew member behind. Apparently, walking the plank turned into a MOB exercise (with a good ending). We could see that other boats were also having trouble with the 20+ gusts. The chute was finally ready to go but I looked up and we were quickly approaching the mark. No sense in hoisting at that point. We were in fourth place and more importantly under control.
Loose Nuts avoided disaster on one run when they noticed their forestay pin missing. A replacement allowed then to and won the regatta. "Q", sailing with four all summer, sailed in control, flat and fast, took second. Both boats have been sailing very well all summer. Finishing in third was the 'infamous “H20 Boa”' (according to the report on the class website)... "Infamous"? Must be a reference to the Australian hairdresser's nightmare comment on SA.
