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BVI Spring Regatta Wrap-Up »
April 4, 2011
An interesting aspect of several of the Caribbean regattas is the healthy mix of both racing and cruising classes. After spending the middle part of the week cruising the BVI’s, being a cruiser may be the way to go in the future. Unfurl the main and jib, trim both sails to an average setting and make the driver sail to them, kick back with some reggae music, make sandwiches, snack on cheese and crackers and sip unlimited frosty beverages. On the “racing” course, we sweat it out for 1.5-2 hrs and then are rewarded with some warm waters and soggy turkey sandwiches, and if we are lucky, there might be some melted chocolate at the bottom of the food bag.
Don’t get me wrong, the cruisers still race, just at a much more refined, casual pace. Even Richard Branson himself entered his 104 ft Catamaran Necker Belle in the Spring Regatta and put his cruising skills to test against some very relaxed, rum-filled teams from the Netherlands fully decked out in eclectic, matching team gear. Miss a shift, get a bad start, sails are luffing…who cares, you’re cruising! Apparently the Necker Belle was allowed to turn its engines on when tacking to help get the giant cat through the wind. Why set down your beer when you can just turn on your engines to complete a tack?
Meanwhile, in the sweatshop on the racing course, we set out for the final day with a comfortable lead on 2nd place. The starting order was reversed from the previous day, so the classes who were rated slower, started first, and the bigger, faster boats started last which made for a very interesting, obstacle filled first upwind leg from Road Town to Salt Island. Our goal was protect the right, and we had done a good job of this until it seemed like our lane was closed off 4-5 times by slow cruising boats crossing our course and slower racing boats in front of us. At one point, a non-racing 50 ft cruising boat fresh from their charter briefing at the Moorings base was headed across our bow on a slightly lower angle and camped on our breeze for a good 2-3 minutes. Our tactician Peter Holmberg, who is a native of the Caribbean and slightly resembles Captain Morgan himself, vehemently tried to get the cruising boats’ attention to get them out of the way. We could only imagine the reaction of the family aboard the cruising boat having just spotted what appeared to be Captain Morgan on their vacation and finding out that he is not very nice.
After getting bounced left repeatedly, our main competition on Jurakan was able to right of us as we approached Salt Island, and for the first time all weekend, we were well off the lead. Credit to our team though, we kept plugging away, and by the time we passed Salt Island and set our spinnaker, we were able to find some nice pressure and soaked low of Jurakan who like us on the previous upwind, had become tangled with a few tankers down wind and could not go where they wanted. Once we converged halfway down the 3 mile downwind, we were a few boatlengths behind and this is where it is nice to have an America’s Cup tactician/helmsman on your boat.
When Jurakan approached on port gybe, we sailed our normal VMG angle, forced them to gybe and when Jurakan started their manuvuer, we sailed hot above a slow Jurakan who was trying to fill their kite, and were able to eventually get in front of them. From here Jurakan did their best to soak low and prevent us from gybing, but once to the pin-end layline of the finish, we found a nice wave, pulled off a well executed “no-look” gybe and made our way to the finish. Jurakan gybed a few moments later and we crossed the line 1 second in front of them. Even though we had posted all bullets up to this point, this race was definitely the most satisfying for our team as we fought back from a huge deficit to nip them at the finish.
Now the next part is something I struggled to figure out at both the St. Thomas and BVI events. Under Caribbean Sailing Association rules, even though we had 2 identical boats with very similar sail shapes, Jurakan rated 1 thousandth higher than us, which meant over an hour long race, we would owe them .6 seconds. After two hours of racing and beating them boat for boat, we lost on corrected time since we only beat them by 1 second, not 1.2 seconds. It was still a hard fought moral victory for our team, but a bit of a head-scratcher.
Once back to the Nanny Cay Marina, we had a well earned team celebration and prepped for the awards at our owner’s home venue. We accepted our overall division award, and at the conclusion of the awards ceremony, Team INTAC was called back to the stage to take home the Best Overall Performance for the BVI Spring Regatta and we all got to shake the hand of the Premier of the Island of Tortola (Tortola’s Version of Obama). Hand shakes and hugs were given on our team, and once the celebration died down, myself, Athony and Thomas Barrows (2010 College Sailor of the Year and winner of the IC 24 class at both Rolex and BVI Spring Regatta) raised the main on our Melges 32, headed out under a pitch black sky void of any moon, set the spinnaker and delivered the 32 back to St. Thomas doing 12-13 kts with some cold rum and Tings.
The boat arrived on its mooring shortly after midnight, and it is now back to Minneapolis for some much needed family time after what seemed like an eternity away from home. Thanks to Mark Plaxton and the Team on INTAC for another awesome, hilarious, and victorious couple of weeks.
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