Racing Nica

The World ARC is really a sailboat rally. It’s not meant to be a race but several of the competitive skippers in the group make it so to make it interesting.  There are 30 boats in the ARC flotilla, but only a handful try to seriously compete. Our Charm is one of them. Since there are many different types of sailboats – mono hulls and catamarans, racers and cruisers, a handicap is assigned to each boat based on their model performance characteristics. There is also a penalty assessed for motoring. For those competing there is a desire to simply be the first to complete each leg of the rally. That usually means a lot more work – changing the head sail best suited for the prevalent winds and continuously trimming the head and main sails. The resulting improvement in speed can be 2 knots or more and that adds up quickly. The non-competing cruisers travel at a slower pace without fussing with their sails as much. A conservative sail configuration can also reduce risk when one gets caught in a sudden squall. We went through a few squalls but only once reefed our main – choosing speed over comfort.

The World ARC awards prizes for each leg of this trip. There are awards for first starter, first overall, first monohull, first multihull, most problems (really!!), etc. The awards themselves are nothing much – a bottle of rum, a T-shirt, cups, coasters, an old jacket – but the bragging rights are huge.

Now what surprised me most was the prize for first starter till I experienced first hand what was involved. The start line is typically a line from a fixed point on land to an ARC boat on the water.  There are three count downs from 10 down to 0, 10 minutes before start, 5 minutes before start and just before start. During these countdowns, boats slowly position themselves behind the line and adjust their sails for the sailoff. The goal is to be the first to cross the line after the countdown and not a moment sooner. Since the speed is dependent on the wind – this is much harder than it would appear. Joe’s expert sailing skills meant that we won this award on both legs I was on. Once the race starts, it is a spectacular sight to see all the boats with their colorful spinnakers up running with the wind.

Early in the Marquesas crossing, we challenge Nica to a race to make the long crossing interesting.  Now Nica is a fast racing Monohull and they were behind us some distance chasing us down. We sail this way until day 3 when they are within radio distance of us. To gain more speed we hoist our yellow asymmetrical Spinnaker, but due to an altercation with the spreaders on the mast, the yellow spinnaker had to be retired with a 20 foot rip. Then comes the mishap with the rainbow Spinnaker which tears while being hoisted. All this means that by Day 4  Nica has overtaken us.

On Day 5 John and Lara patch up the torn Rainbow Spinnaker and reinforce the stitches with tape,  but Joe is not sure if it will hold. By now, Nica is about 80 miles ahead of us. Do we have a realistic chance of catching up with them? Joe seems to think so. We only need to sail one knot faster than them to catch up and win. There is a referendum to decide if we want to continue sailing ‘pleasantly’ as we were doing over the last two days or try and use the torn and battered spinnaker to catch up with Nica. The diehards win and the decision is to get back into the race. Joe and John go over the patches and reinforce them with additional tape. Everything is ready to go but by now it is dark – and so Joe decides to postpone hoisting the Spinnaker until the morning.

In case you are thinking that all we do is race, I will digress and expound a bit on my other activities. We all have a 2 hour watch in the night. The nights can be as varied as the day. On clear nights with a new moon, the sky lights up with a million stars . There is intermittent sparkle in the water from the bio luminescence in the turbulence of the waves and the boat wake.  When the night sky is overcast you can barely see your hands in front of your face in the inky blackness.. If we turn on the deck light to change the head sail – I sometimes see a bird or two fly right up to the deck, possibly attracted to the light, before heading back out into the darkness.

I put out a fish lure in the evening before my watch. I test it frequently for a bite. Then during my watch with the sun low in the horizon, I hear a loud sound. When I looked back, the line is fluttering in the wind. Something big must have taken the lure. This is the one that got away…

Then of course there are the stormy nights when you get pelted with heavy winds and rain making it hard to stand in the cockpit. Those days we rely on the instruments inside and step out only to change the heading if needed. You can get soaked to the skin but this is not a big problem in the tropics as the water is warm. I heard it can be different in the Northern Pacific where the water is frigid.  There are some nights when the moon is out, the seas calm and the dolphins swim next to the boat. They glow as they breach the water. These are memories I will take back to land with me.

But getting back to our race which is the point of this story: The winds are light next day and our patched up spinnaker seems to be holding up adequately. The spinnaker is original to the boat and is definitely showing its age. Still it should get us to the Marquesas and possibly take the Grosjean’s to Australia where they hope to get a replacement at a good price due to the favorable exchange rate.

At the end of my watch, John takes over and I head straight to bed. You see 7 am Galapagos time  is more like 4:30 or 5 am local time out here in the pacific. I am a sound sleeper and have no trouble sleeping – oblivious to the rocking of the boat and the sounds of waves beating against the sides of the hull, the slapping of the sails in the wind, and the flexing of its rigging. I wake up to faint voices yelling in the distance and through the hatch above my cabin I can see Joe in a climbing harness high up at the top of the mast!

From their recounting of the events that followed my watch, I gathered that sometime during John’s watch, the spinnaker which had faithfully served the boat all these years just simply burst with a loud bang. Only a small piece at the top was left hanging and the rest just collapsed into the water. The tack  lines and sheets had to be untied to free the torn spinnaker and let it float away.  In case you are wondering, picking up a soaking wet sail is impossible due to its heavy weight and letting it drag behind the boat is doubly dangerous, as we soon found out.

They thought that they had released the Spinnaker into its watery grave, but a reluctant line from the Spinnaker entangled itself around one of the propeller shafts. The boat was dragging this giant sail in the water.  Joe tried to free it by running the propellers one way and then the other but to no avail. There was no other alternative but to get into the water and physically try to free the tangled line. This is not an easy task when anchored and it is doubly hard when the hull is heaving up and down in ocean waves. Joe put on a safety harness and was lowered into the water.  After much wrangling and coming up for air several times, he was able to finally free the lines and they watched the spinnaker finally float away.  Then Joe put on a climbing harness, tied it to a halyard and was raised to the top of the mast to disentangle the remnant of the Spinnaker at the top. For someone that owns a climbing gym this was just all in a day’s work.

Since that was the last of the spinnakers in our arsenal against Nica, we finally resigned ourselves to the fact that there was little hope of catching up with them. We are back on the Gennaker and sailing pleasantly to the Marquesas. Without the spinnaker we have to sail at an angle to the rhumb line and will need to gybe to get to Hiva Oa. This means more distance to travel and more time. We have Animal Jeopardy planned for the evening’s activities. I am teamed up with Marin and have spent the afternoon reading up on animal kingdom classifications. I am boning up on my knowledge of various animal species. John and Tully make up the other team. I do not intend to lose tonight…and  you thought this was all about racing.

FYI: (The following definitions are borrowed from Wikipedia)
A Spinnaker is a sail designed specifically for sailing downwind.  The Spinnaker fills with wind and balloons out in front of the boat when it is deployed, called flying. It is constructed of lightweight fabric, usually nylon, and is often brightly colored. It may be optimized for a particular range of wind angles, as either a reaching or a running Spinnaker, by the shaping of the panels and seam.
A Rhumb line is the course navigated by a vessel that maintains a uniform compass heading.