Its never the same with a condom

Wednesday evening we entered the Rumble I in Boston harbor. This is a race around the buoys in which three yacht clubs from different regions of the harbor come together to race one another. We were out near to Deer island and got delayed for about an hour awaiting the LNG tanker to come through. A security zone is set around this tanker because if there were a successful attempt to put a hole in the boat, the resulting explosion would, by all estimates, demolish downtown Boston.

As a slow boat in Fleet D we were off on the first start and had a course of two laps. There were about 30 boats in all fleets making for a lot of tight racing. We got an almost perfect start and headed off to the first mark. We rounded the mark in second place and quickly deployed the spinnaker using our new Pontos winches. Huge difference being able to use independent winches for the genoa and spinnaker sheet.

As we were getting ready to douse the spinnaker Joe went to pull on the lazy sheet and we had to remind him that the ATN sock needed to be pulled down – although we always refer to it as the condom. Later in the race one of the crew said “It’s never the same with the condom!”

Genoa deployed, spinnaker down and we rounded the mark. But some of the other fleets were still tacking for starting position as we rounded the pin end of the start line that also served as our leeward mark. At a distance it looked like chaos, but we were able to navigate our way through, do one short tack then tack over onto starboard tack and had a perfect course for the windward mark.

As we closed in on the mark and were within three boat lengths another boat (that will be nameless) was heading straight to us on a port tack (we had right of way). They tacked onto starboard, we had to head up to avoid their causing a collision and they barged us out of our course to the mark.  I called “protest” and raised the red protest flag. There was no response from this fast boat. I think they thought we were an annoyance.

We turned down wind deployed the spinnaker and headed for the finish line. All in all it was a great race. The team, Yolande, Joe and Morgan really worked well together and they have a developed a way of looking out for one another and are able to help out with any task. It was great to watch such good team work.

I decided not to file a formal protest. The other boat is part of our yacht club and I didn’t want to take these friendly Wednesday night races too seriously. But it was good practice for a serious race when it might be needed.