2021 Summer Racing Season Starts
Yes, it’s awfully late to be starting our summer racing. Our excuse is that almost all of our favorite regattas have been cancelled or delayed. Things are looking up for the fall with the St. Francis YC Jessica Cup and Rolex Big Boat Series still on the Calendar. Sadly, the Belvedere Cup and San Francisco Bay Leukemia Cup have fallen overboard. The first due to well justified fears of holding the regatta while COVID/Delta-Variant cases are climbing rapidly, the second as the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society has decided that the the return on investment isn’t high enough. Sigh… San Francisco was the #1 fund raiser in the national Leukemia Cup for over a decade. But, it’s not our rodeo to run. Back to racing!
Big Brother Big Sister Regatta
Each year the local sailors pour out of the Santa Cruz Yacht Club to race in the Big Brother Big Sister of Santa Cruz Regatta. Like many fun and fund-raising events, it was run as a Pursuit Race. This means that the slowest boat starts first and the rest start at a delay from that first boat equal to the handicap. With our fleet, the first boat was a beautiful 30' cutter that is a wonderful cruising sloop but pretty slow, the last boat was a Santa Cruz 70 that just took second place in the Transpac Race to Hawaii, and we had everything in between including MAYAN, rated second-from-slowest.
Having the entire starting line to ourselves, we rumbled slowly across squinting into the extremely light wind with the hope of spotting a puff of wind. The crew, good sailors all, sat to leeward and tried to get MAYAN to heel. It didn’t work. She slowly picked up speed in the 7 knot zephyrs until she was moving ponderously at 4–5 knots. Like most of the other boats, MAYAN’s crew was larger than it needed to be, as each crew member contributes to funding the Big Brother Big Sister organization. We got a chuckle out of the simple fact that more crew weight means a slower boat in light winds, and sat back to enjoy the view.
Watching The World Go By
By the time we reached the windward turning mark, four or five boats had passed us. While we held on for the downwind leg to the next mark, the faster boats were chatching up quickly. It’s always beautiful to see the fleet from this point of view. However, they are all faster than MAYAN, especially in these light winds.
We were entered in the Jib & Main class, although one competitor pointed out that we were really in the Jib & Staysail & Staysail & Staysail & Main class! That’s why our lovely spinnaker and gollywobbler were in the bag below deck.
It’s always fun to see a LOT of boats trying to turn around a mark at the same time. There were so many that the photographer couldn’t get them all in the picture below. This is also typical of the pursuit race format, they all start to catch up.
In sailboat racing the rules describe who gets to turn inside of whom and who has to go around the outside. Often there’s a bit of “discussion” about exactly who has the rights to go where; but for this regatta that was left for another day and the larger faster racing boats sailed around the pack and took off trying to catch MAYAN.
As each fast boat comes up behind the boats already around the mark, they are faced with a choice: Sail close to the wind and try to pass to windward of the boat ahead, as 18038 is doing on the left, or go off the wind faster and trying and break through the disturbed air caused by all these boats, as the boat on the far right is doing. For a large fast boat like OCTAVIA on the right above, it’s always better to go low and fast for a short time to get past the pack. Aboard MAYAN we all breathed a sigh of relief that we weren’t involved in that pack of boats. Light winds like this aren’t MAYAN’s strong suite and we would have become an obstacle to everyone if were parked in a group of boats.
Fortunately, for us we didn’t need to tack on the leg back to the finish-line. MAYAN was able to hold off the other competitors in the Jib & Main class, and win her class by only 45 seconds! She also placed 5th overall for the short course, including the Spinnaker class. She trailed by 9 minutes and 12 seconds behind the winner: KASATKA. In the picture to the left, you can see the skipper Rachael Voropayev at the helm. She and her husband are expecting a child any day now, but that didn’t keep Rachael from clobbering a number of extremely well sailed boats for first place. WELL DONE!!
With MAYAN tucked back into her slip and her decks cleared away, the crew enjoyed snacks and a well deserved libation before heading up to the prize giving and a lovely buffet.
If you’ve enjoyed the photography, high resolution versions of these photos are available HERE. Thanks to Lily Dance for some great work!
