Icicle Pursuit

Apologies to all the non-sailors, but I decided to do a short sailing blog today, given that the Baltic Wharf Sailing Club has now started up its racing season. March and April Saturday races are called the Icicle Pursuit series... they then transition to the spring racing series. I crewed in yesterday’s race and therefore have a story but no photos - have dug out some sailing photos from last fall instead!

First - what is a pursuit race? The usual sailing race has all the boats (or at least all the boats in a designated group) starting at the same time. This can create a rather intimidating situation (for some of us) in that there are lots of boats going different speeds (if there are boats of different classes) all maneuvering to cross the starting line at once. The race then involves sailing around a set course a given number of times. A pursuit race is run differently. Boats start at different times, with the start time determined by the official handicap of the specific class of boat... thus the slowest boats start first and the fastest boats start last. The race then runs for an hour, with everyone doing as many circuits of the course as they can in the hour. In theory, if all else were equal, everyone should cross the finish line at the end of the hour at the same time. This makes for a much less hair-raising start and means that at least the fast boats don’t get out in front of the pack right away! The other twist to the race was that it included a “gate mark”. Which is exactly what it sounds like - instead of a single buoy that you leave to either port (left) or starboard (right), it’s two buoys and you can choose whether you want to leave the lefthand buoy to port or the righthand buoy to starboard. [for the sailors - the set-up was clever: the gate mark was the end of the downwind leg, and was set up so that you could either jibe around the port mark and end up on a starboard tack or tack around the starboard mark and end up on a port tack ...  clearly the jibing option was preferable strategically EXCEPT by the last couple of times around the course the wind had picked up to the extent that jibing was scary, so many of us were choosing the tacking option].

Second - a story about boats and epic boat journeys... I was crewing in a boat called a Wanderer (sail symbol is a blue circle inscribed with a white W....visible to the far left of the first photo), 14 ft long and very cleverly designed in many ways, so that it can easily be sailed alone but it’s also fun with two people (and yesterday was a day when two people were preferable because the wind was sufficiently strong). But it turns out that the Wanderer has an interesting history, which starts with a boat called a Wayfarer (sail symbol is a red script W - see photo above). The Wayfarer is slightly larger (16 ft.) than a Wanderer and is popular as cruising boat, a family boat, and a teaching boat as well as a racing dinghy. The Baltic Wharf Sailing Club has a couple of Wayfarers for teaching - I did my sailing classes in a Wayfarer. Well it turns out that there is a folk hero named Frank Dye, who, in the 1960s, made some epic small boat journeys in his Wayfarer class boat named Wanderer. The first was a 650 mile journey across the North Atlantic from Scotland to Iceland (!!!)... it took him 11 days. Another involved crossing the Norwegian Sea from Scotland to Norway, during which he and his crew survived four capsizes during a Force 9 storm (and broke the mast). Interestingly, these two journeys spawned a book with the rather mundane title of Ocean Crossing Wayfarer: To Iceland and Norway in a 16ft Boat, while his six-year (!) trip along the eastern seaboard of the US and into the Great Lakes inspired a book with the much more graphic title Sailing to the Edge of Fear.  A quotation from Frank Dye that I found on-line: 

Offshore cruising in an open boat can be hard, cold, wet, lonely and occasionally miserable, but it is exhilarating too. To take an open dinghy across a hundred miles of sea, taking weather as it comes; to know that you have only yourself and your mate to rely on in an emergency; to see the beauty of dawn creep across the ever restless and dangerous ocean; to make a safe landfall - is wonderful and all of these things develop a self-reliance that is missing from the modern, mechanical, safety-conscious civilised world.

Back to the Wanderer. According to Richard, for whom I was crewing, Frank’s wife Margaret went with him on part of the North American adventure, but felt that she was slowing him down. So she decided that she needed her own boat, which eventually became the Wanderer class boat that I sailed in yesterday. And who would have thought that I could get such a great story for my blog simply by volunteering to crew in the Icicle Pursuit?