This has been a week chock-a-block full of sailing!
First of all we had my nephew visiting from Pennsylvania, who had never been sailing. One of the goals of his visit was to get out on a boat, so last Saturday, Carter and I took him out for a sail on the J24 (24 foot sailboat) AL. It was blowing about 20 knots with gusts up to 30 and my nephew drove and trimmed the main with a little be of guidance from use. He was a natural!
On Saturday, our J 24 fleet hosted its "
Doublehanded Regatta," where teams of two people race the boat through a series of races. My husband and I had won the regatta the year before (and stayed married), so there was a little bit of pressure for a repeat performance. We had 8 boats in our fleet, an increase from the 5 we had the year before. Friends of the fleet race Race Committee and sent us on three races (windward/leeward twice around.) It was a beautiful day on the bay with winds at about 15 knots. With a lot of hard work, Carter and I took first place in all three races, so we were pretty happy.
After a birthday dinner out with the family, it was home to pack for our next sailing adventure, the New York Yacht Club cruise on "Apparition" a Swan 42. Carter and I got up at 6:00 am Sunday morning and headed "
downeast" to Camden, Maine where we met up with "Apparition" and her crew. Now for those of you that think "cruise" means relaxing-not quite it is actually a week of racing sailboats-usually really nice ones. We sailed out the harbor to meet the
NYYC Race Committee and all the beautiful boats preparing to compete in the Queen's Cup Race. Apparently the winner of the Queen's Cup Race actually gets a letter from the Queen. I will never know because we came in 3rd.
When we finished the race we headed over to Seal Cove and were hosted by friend's of one of our crew at their beautiful home, complete with an eight bedroom guest house and heated salt water pool. After a long day of sailing, it was heaven!
The next morning we set out on the boat again for Swan's Island by way of a destination race, meaning the race course actually gets you somewhere. The scenery up there is supposed to be very beautiful but I wouldn't know because all we saw was fog and loads of lobster pots! They are a great hazard to sailboats because when the buoy gets catch on your boat, it stops you in the water and is a pain to get off. We were actually one of very few boats that didn't catch a lobster pot. Between that and our excellent navigator, we pulled off a first place finish by a lot. To celebrate we anchored in a cove at Swan's Island and enjoyed cocktails and apps.
The final day of racing took us on another destination race over to Southwest Harbor on Mount Desert Island. The race started out close but then some of our competition decided to go outside the islands, where we had decided to cut through. The wind died at our location and we were bummed to see our competition zoom away in their own breeze. Frustrated but also patient, we waited for the wind to come back, and when it did we made it through the islands. As we came out the other side we were excited to see that the other boats had not made it around the islands yet! We had a pretty solid lead! We were able to hold that lead for 7 more miles to win racing for the second day in a row.
Unfortunately there wasn't much time to celebrate, we said our good-byes and climbed into a cab back to Camden and our cars. It was a fun but exhausting week of sailing.
Stay tuned for next week when I cover this weekend's 76th Monhegan Island Race-Maine's 130 mile mini-ocean race.
