"I came across the “Intro to Racing” course on Sailing Logic’s website when I was looking for something else, but I was intrigued and the thought of it kept coming back to me… A little while later, I was given some money for my birthday and that was the final push.
Several of my friends race and I thought it would be nice to understand more about racing and to get some more confidence in my sailing generally – surely a more extreme form of sailing, but undertaken in a safe environment, would make me feel more self-assured when I went back to cruising?
The first weekend we trained on the Saturday, a few people came with ideas about positions they would like to try, all of which were different, and the rest of us slotted in until all places were full. The first thing to notice compared with my normal sailing with just two people on board, was how many people it takes to fully crew a race boat – even with 8 of us, there didn’t always seem to be quite enough pairs of hands.
After a very pleasant evening bonding over food and wine, the more hardy among us found our bunks on the boat and before we knew it, daylight had arrived and it was time to get up and out towards the race course. On the first race our helm Mike took things fairly cautiously and we kept out of the thick of the fray. We did nothing seriously wrong and ended up in 8th place out of 11, just by creeping up the fleet as others made mistakes. Not that we were perfect, of course, but Mike remained super-calm throughout, even when he had to say “ease the mainsheet” 3 times as we approached very close (well, it felt close to our inexperienced eyes, anyway) to other boats on the start line, his tone only increased slightly in firmness!
We were pretty chuffed with our performance – to me the biggest learning of the first weekend was how focused you need to be. Having recently completed my Day Skipper, where it was drummed into us to keep awareness of the whole boat and everyone on it, keeping intensely focussed on the edge of the spinnaker for a 20 minute race leg was a big contrast.
The second weekend, I was pleasantly surprised at how much we felt like a team as soon as we met up again. Although we decided that we’d largely keep the same positions for racing (a certain degree of competitive instinct kicking in, perhaps), it was great to try out different places on the boat on the training day. For me, that meant a trip to the foredeck. With Sara, the ship’s mate, keeping a watch over it all, I have a feeling that things were immensely more under control then they would have been otherwise, but it was still pretty exciting and very instructive to see how our actions at the back would impact the guys up front.
Race day came with a delay due to lack of wind, but fortunately we did get a race in the end. Again we put in a respectable performance, including a succession of pretty neat spinnaker gybes – if we say so ourselves.
Overall a great two weekends, which has definitely boosted my enthusiasm for sailing, racing and otherwise."
- Elisabeth Else (course participant)
Photos provided by WB-photo.com
