Working on a Race

Posted on: Thu, 2022/02/24 - 11:23 By: kevin.klop

Boarded Santiago last evening. She's a Beneteau 423 for whom the owner takes great pride.

Today we'll be transporting her to a marina in the vicinity of the starting line for tomorrow's race start. After that it's a near-shore race for 2 days as we take a crew of 5 (including me) on an afternoon, night, morning, and afternoon race. We aren't really going to be all that competitive. In fact, the owner has only one other boat that he wants to beat, so this is going to be an interesting combination of racing and cruising. I will need to push them hard enough so that we "raced" but not treat this as a hard-core, extract every 10th or 100th of a knot from the boat, race. It will be an interesting line to try to walk, as I can get somewhat mission focused.

It's going to be light wind sailing. Likely the highest winds we'll see are 10-14 knots.

The boat is certainly a lot more luxurious than Opus, which is to be expected from their differing goals. Opus' pedigree is racing, Santiago's is comfortable cruising. However, any boat can be a race boat if there is an equalizing handicap.

We'll have 5 people aboard. It was supposed to be 6, but one of them was injured this week, so we'll run with 5 rather than picking up an unknown dock rat. Still, it's going to be a challenge allowing all the crew enough rest. Likely what we'll try to do is schedule in 3 hour rest period. 2 crew will go below for rest, leaving 3 on duty. When they come up, we let 2 more go down. Finally one more crew member goes for rest. Now they've all had three hours rest and we're back up to 5 crew, though the first two have been back on duty for 6 hours. At that point, we'll schedule them as they fatigue, I think.

It's going to be fun!