The boat was a DB2, about 10m LOA, German built purely for
racing, there was no teak down below, no settee, no cushions or berths, nor
even any bulkheads, just a VHF radio, minimal instruments, hooks to hang sail
bags and struts that were placed in a way most likely to yield
concussions. It wasn’t even a nominally
functional cruising boat, it was made with a single purpose in mind.
The hull was a Kevlar-reinforced composite, sails were
Mylar/Kevlar, mast was high-tech carbon fiber, with running backstays and other
controls to make it bendy in multiple ways.
It had dual jib halyards and dual luff tracks up the forestay, and the
same redundant arrangement for the main.
It had three spinnaker halyards, the third being a spare in case one got
lost, stuck or tangled. Any sail could
be changed while underway without taking anything else down first. And the boom had adjustments we couldn’t even
put a name to. As a whole the rig made
it endlessly possible to shape the sails.
The difference between fast and slow was micro-fine. It was a challenge to sail well, to say the
least!
Bob K., the boat’s owner, took the helm and was de facto tactician
(although he rather sucked at the latter.)
Bobby R. was the jib trimmer, Joe H. was on foredeck, Steve W. trimmed
the main and running backstays, and would’ve been a great tactician if Bob had
listened to him more often than not. I
was in the pit, aka the sewer man, the hardest position I ever loved.
The start line was near Ballast Point, instructions were to
leave Coronado Del Sur to port and Sugarloaf to port, finish outside of Zuniga
-- about 65 nautical miles worth of race course. It was a popular race, there were a hundred+
boats in the fleet, out for a beautiful day on the water.
We had quite a bit of company rounding South Coronado, about
15 nm into the race when we left it astern, but only a handful of boats were in
sight when we rounded Sugarloaf and started the long beat home, against the
current. Around sunset the wind clocked
180 degrees, we hoisted a spinnaker and flew for half an hour or so. We were really in the groove most of the
race, paying no mind to the rest of the fleet.
As the wind backed around towards its predominant direction and died
down, we doused the chute and put up the #2 because it held its shape better in
light winds and a moderate swell.
Daylight was gone, we were still a long way from home.
This was before the GPS satellite system was deployed, SatNav
(precursor to GPS) was probably up but often it took hours for it to plot a
fix, so useless for short off-shore races.
We had Loran C on the boat that didn’t even give us geo coordinates,
just Loran lines of position. Seamless
electronic maps for civilians were still a long ways off, paper charts were the
standard of the day, but we weren’t even using those… And as usual the fathometer was off, because
it “burned too much battery” and because there “weren’t any shoals we needed to
worry about.” (Except for a little one
called “North America”.)
Bob the skipper was a senior pilot for American Airlines at
his day job, which he somehow figured gave him magical powers of
navigation. He disdainfully rejected
doing any ded-reconing. He said he knew which way was home, just sail the damn
boat, so we did, for a while. We were
all very familiar with the area, but it’s amazing how perceptions can distort
at night, the shoreline becomes indistinct and the lights become a puzzle. A responsible skipper plots a course and
takes bearings from prominent features on land to track and verify his position
as he goes. Old Bob figured all that
fussing was a waste of time.
Looking around, 12 hours into the race, we noticed that we
were miles ahead of the entire fleet!
The reason we got so lucky was that Bob the skipper was badly
disoriented, we were way closer to shore than any sane boaters would be. This gave us some current advantage and at
times better winds, but it put the boat at risk, and placed us on the wrong
side of the kelp beds.
Steve had suggested a tack 3-4 miles earlier and the rest of
the crew concurred, but Bob the skipper was having none of it, he was certain
we were 5+ miles from shore; he was wrong.
Bobby the jib trimmer and I were becoming quite concerned, especially as
we started to hear, and then could see breaking surf in the [not enough]
distance.
We urgently asked the skipper to tack, he argued. We demanded that he tack, he was convinced
we’d be sailing “180 degrees from the mark” if we tacked. Bobby the jib man says, “dude, at 100 yards
from shore I swim for it!” I tell him to cut the jib free and he does. Main
trimmer luffs his sail too, and I tell the skipper, “I’m dropping halyards in
10, 9, 8…” The skipper flips his lid and
starts yelling. “Tack the god damned
boat right the fuck now,” we shouted in unison, over top of him. Finally he did so.
Of course we ended up in irons the first try, starting the
turn with sails flapping. It’s such an odd
feeling to steer straight for destruction just to get enough momentum to avoid
it; a little bit terrifying when you don’t know exactly where that destruction
lies; a lot terrifying when you know it is very close!
It wasn’t long after that we could see reality sinking into
Bob’s expression. There’s no getting
around the fact you are indeed in breakers when you have to plough into
them. He didn’t have a lot to say as we
watched the fleet tack on their lay line (that we had so massively over-sailed)
and parade on past us.
For a sickening minute or two after tacking successfully we
weren’t even holding our position in the steeping swells. We felt the keel kiss the bottom a couple of
times as we slid into the trough behind a swell. We tried to get him to work the surf, bear
away as the wave lifted us, then head up as we went down the back side, the
skipper balked at every suggestion. We
were trying to save his boat; he was still racing, I guess he was just hell-bent
to point the boat at where he perceived the line to be.
Of course we hit kelp about 25 times and each time the
skipper argued about going head to, to clear it – I was starting to wonder if
he had suffered a stroke or a brain injury along the way. We were forced to re-assert that if not for
us his boat would be hard aground in pounding surf. We would’ve let him live it down, eventually,
but we were not about to let him pretend it didn’t happen. It may have been a little harsh, but the time
for allowing him to call the shots from inside his bag of delusions was
over. He was lucky we didn’t tie him up,
gag him and stuff him in a lazarette!
His bad judgment had almost left us hard aground, god damned if he was
going to pull his “my boat, my call” bullshit on us not even an hour
later!
We finally cleared the kelp, converged with the fleet
somewhere near its middle, and still took 2nd in our class after
corrections. If Bob had tacked when we
first suggested, we would’ve been first over the line by a substantial margin,
ahead of boats that had to give us a half a minute a mile. We might even have set a record and got our
pictures in the paper. Instead we were
off playing kelp cutter, .
We got back to the marina a little before 2:00 AM, long day
on the water. As we were putting the
boat away we realized that Bob the skipper was actually still pissed at us, he
made some off-handed comment about insubordinate crew tending to be replaced. Bobby the jib man lost his cool, “dude we
saved your ass, you’d be waving bye-bye to your boat from the beach!” He drew a breath to go chapter and verse but
I cut him off with, “I think that’s his
way of thanking us, ‘you are replaceable’ actually means, ‘so lucky to have you
on board.’” Bobby stopped long enough to
laugh, “in English we say ‘you’re welcome’,”
he said to the skipper, slowly and deliberately, as if he didn’t speak
it.
Then we went to Steve’s house and ranted and raved until the
sun came up! If we had bought that beachfront
real estate he would surely have considered us responsible for the destruction
of his boat, since we luffed the sails – the irony would’ve been
mind-blowing! And not even the positive
outcome detracted from his epic idiocy.
The events of that night never came up again while the
skipper was present, though we sailed a few more races with him. He seemed to harbor some resentment and the
atmosphere on the boat had changed. I
got involved in a one-design fleet of 22’ pocket cruisers, that was very competitive
and a lot of fun. Bobby the jib trimmer,
Steve the main trimmer and Joe the foredeck man found crew positions on bigger
boats. They wanted to move up the PHRF
food chain, I wanted to get back to basics and control my destiny.
One by one each of us moved away, we lost track of each other
after parting ways… but, in the immortal words of Metallica, the memory
remains, like a faded prima donna, yeah!
Addendum: There was one other crew member, who had never raced before, Christine S. Her job was to make sure the clew of the headsail made it clear around the mast when we tacked or gybed, as it tended to snag without some help. When we rounded Sugarloaf we switched to a following sea, which changes the motion of the boat substantially. Chris became more than a little seasick for the rest of the race, but that didn't stop her from doing her job. Each time we tacked she somehow got up, managed the sail, and then promptly hung over the leeward rail and fed the fish as quietly as she could, before going back to tortured semi-sleep. No whimpering, no whining, not a single complaint... As opposed to Bob the skipper, who sniveled like a bitch about something every god damned race!
