Race Day 1
Today marked day 1 of Antigua Sailing Week 2022. Our committee boat was at Windward and had a grand old day at the races!
Setup
Today marks the first day of racing at the ASW 2022. There had been some confusion about the positions of certain buoys and marks that mainly concerned the other fleet, so the other committee boat had to depart as early as possible in order to sort things out on the water. Since our committee boat was on the outside, we, too, had to depart in a timely manner. This meant that it was a bit busy and although we did get our lunches delivered the croissants meant for our boat went solely to the other one. We did get off the docks at 08:00 and motored to our mooring location Windward. There was what looked like a fishing boat circling around the mooring, and I’d had my final run to catch the pennant lined up when they shouted at us and all aboard thought that we might have mistaken a large fishing trap (perhaps for whales or other leviathans of the deep) for our mooring so I bore off. But evidently, they were just shouting that everything was OK – so we lined up for the second run. We got the pennant aboard and wanted to attach our two lines but there was no ring or place to attach, so in short order we got an alpine butterfly knot made up and got our bridle system made.
Races
The winds were light, and the ocean swell was not big, albeit a bit choppy. Rosie had a tough time of it as she’d not been out to sea before and was already dealing with an extensive sunburn. But despite being given difficult tasks like writing the boat numbers on the boards she held up. I know that in her shoes I would not have done as well.
We made our first calls on the VHF at 09:00 and the start of the race sequence was scheduled for 10:00. We did have to postpone the starts because Tosca managed to ignore our radio announcement and common sense and tried to pass between the powerboat and the start mark that it was towing behind it on a 100+ feet long line. But I’d seen that the rudders on that racing boat can be raised and that is probably how they managed to extricate themselves from their predicament so quickly.
Light winds and cloud cover didn’t make for the typical exciting and brilliants racing conditions that I’ve come to get used to at the Antigua Sailing Week. Nonetheless, the starts were quite competitive, and we had no racers over the line (OCS is the official term). I have just a few tasks aboard. I must get the boat between the dock and mooring safely. I get to take care of the non-race specified VHF traffic. And my final task is to raise the flag associated with infraction when it occurs. This means that I wasn’t particularly busy during the start sequences, but it also meant that I couldn’t take pictures during the starts.
We started all our classes twice except for the racing class, who managed to get in the 3 races. There were no glitches apart from one error on the finish boat regarding the use of flags and sound signals which ended up shortening the race for the big racing boats but fortunately didn’t invalidate the race completely.
Return
When our last competitor reached the finish boat or had retired from the day’s races, we got off station and returned home. This time we were first back, meaning that we had an inside position at the dock and could open our first cold beverage all the sooner. Our sister committee boat returned only 10 minutes after us and they, too, were soon reaping the rewards of the hard day’s work.
Our KH+P friends once again used the committee boat hull to post their signage and internal racing results and gave us their tribute of free rum punch which few on the committee boat were able to resist. Who says race officials can’t be bribed? We all have our price in this case it was in the form of ethanol.
After-action debriefing
This was a new one for me at ASW. Our senior race coordinator, Jamie Torres, came by the two committee boats and gathered up the drunken volunteers and we all congregated in the upstairs offices to discuss the day’s events and go through what had gone wrong with the aim of improving it going forward. While these sessions are important, this one lasted an hour and half and meandered through topics that evidently could not be solved or addressed in that session.
Dinner
We were all knackered from the day on the water and the prospect of heading out for dinner wasn’t appealing, so we had dinner downstairs at Bar B’s before returning to our respective accommodations for the night.