Published September 2015 in Freshwater News

I believe it was Winston Churchill who once said, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”  Or something like that.  Now, as far as a literal interpretation of that quote, I simply wouldn’t know, since I’ve never REALLY been shot at.  There was that incident on a golf course in Pullman, Washington a number of years ago, but that doesn’t really count, because I’m pretty sure the shooter wasn’t actually aiming at us, exciting though it was.  I have however, been on the business end of the sailing equivalent, the round-up or knockdown or whatever you’d like to refer to it as.

I’ve done it on my boat on a couple of occasions, most notably around midnight in the Strait of Juan de Fuca during an Oregon Offshore.  I’ve also been on board a few other folks’ boats when everything conspired to lay us on our side.  Trust me, you haven’t fully lived until you’ve been on board one of my favorite boats, Rage, when she’s going off the rails.  Trust me Mr. Churchill, THAT’S exhilarating.

The gold medal however (at least of the ones that I’ve personally experienced) just might have to go to Jerry Barnes’ New York 36 Desperado, early in the 2015 Columbia River racing season, or more specifically the PYC-SYSCO Opening Day Regatta.  You know, one of the first regattas of the official, “we’re actually keeping score here” season, so everyone was fairly serious, if a little rusty after a largely dormant winter.  And wouldn’t you know it, we got a day where the winds were fresh, to put it mildly.

Even with the aforementioned rust, we were still having a decent day, not lighting the world on fire but hanging with the pack.  We’d had a decent couple of weather legs, and while our spinnaker work wasn’t quite as crisp as we might have liked, we were keeping the boat moving and the keel under us.

Right up until our approach to the final downwind mark.

With the wind snorting like it was, we were coming in to the turn fairly hot, with boats on either side of us.  Unfortunately, we didn’t have rights on our neighbor to port, Still En d’nile, and with our converging courses, it was clear that on board Desperado, we were going to have to dip d’nile’s stern.  Disappointing, but that’s racing.

Meanwhile, our foredeck crew of Evan Sekulic and Jenn Thompson started getting the blade fed and partially hoisted.  Unfortunately, somewhere in all of this, that headsail fouled and wasn’t going anywhere, up OR down.

Now, this is where it gets fun.

Jerry started to bring Desperado up to clear d’nile.  Meanwhile, I started easing the spinnaker pole, the foredeck crew was doing…whatever foredeck crews do for entertainment, and about that time, we got what I’ll guess was a seventy or eighty degree wind shift to the north, coupled with a charming little microburst of breeze.

And that was all it took.  I don’t think you could call our move a true “Chinese gybe” since we didn’t actually round down and perform a crash gybe.  We’re mostly talking semantics however, because nevertheless, within a few short, very exciting seconds, we went from upright (more or less) to very definitely NOT upright.  Desperado rounded up in spectacular fashion, and everyone on board went from sailing the boat to pretty much just hanging on to the boat.

Personally, for about five seconds or so, I wasn’t concentrating on trimming the spinnaker pole.  No, instead I was hanging onto…I don’t know…something, desperately trying to keep from falling into the Columbia River, drowning on the spot and ruining the ENTIRE race season before it got started (I had a lifejacket on, but you get the general idea).  And how everyone else managed to stay out of the drink, I’ll never know.

Here’s what I do know.  By the time I’d recovered personally, and Desperado had at least started to recover, I looked forward to see a once-perfectly straight spinnaker pole now bent at a near-perfect 90 degree angle.  I asked a mostly rhetorical question about how THAT had happened, and didn’t get an answer.  Probably because, well, none of us at that particular moment had any idea how you do something like that.

We finally recovered, got the chute down and bagged (amazingly in one piece) and actually managed to finish that particular race.  However, possessing on board a spinnaker pole that now looked more or less like a really big crab fork, we decided that we’d had just about enough excitement for the day, and headed to the dock for what turned out to be the first of many post mortems, figuring out what we’d done right and what we’d done wrong.  Over a few cold beverages, of course.  That very definitely was right.