Tag Archives: race

April 22, 2011 · 11:15 pm

The Matey’s Log: A Birthday Voyage. Newport to Ensenada 2011…

I spent my birthday this year sailing southward along the Pacific coastline to Mexico in the annual Newport to Ensenada Race. It was the third time I’d been honored to be a part of this grand 125-mile overnight adventure – and what follows is a photo essay of the experience. The photos were taken by my good friend and fellow crewman, Brad Hall. Somehow, Brad managed to snap great shots at all angles and stay on board the boat.

Brad and I drove down to Newport on Thursday, April 14, to meet the rest of the crew and get another good look at our boat, Misfit – a sleek 1D35 Racing Sailboat. Brad and I had yet to sail aboard Misfit, which had only recently been acquired and modified by our Captain George Moll and the ship’s Master, Eric Schlageter. I’m no shipwright (I’m barely a sailorman) and I cannot describe everything that George and Eric did to re-build and re-design Misft (which is all really cool if you understand these things)– but you can find out by clicking here.

Misfit under construction. It was like the Manhattan Project, only more expensive.

By 4:00 pm, the Misfits (as we would be known in Royal Navy parlance) had gathered at Newport’s Bahia Corinthian Yacht Club for the “Send-Off Fiesta” – a bayside Bacchanal at which…

Then again, you had to be there.

Next morning, we were all at the dock to prepare Misfit for the race to Mexico. Off the back rail, we flew “The Jolly Claude” flag in tribute to our mighty master of the foc’s’le, Claude Dubreuil, who could not voyage with us that weekend. With Claude in our hearts though not on deck, our sturdy crew of eight was a foursome of matched pairs. (It was easier for me to group us this way while counting heads over the next 24 hours: kind of an unofficial buddy system. You don’t want to find out too late that someone went overboard. Especially at night.)

Captain George Moll and Tom Webber. Misfit is George’s boat, but I’m used to George and Tom being co-Captains. These guys are a classic odd couple. From the moment we hit the water, George is giving Tom grief and Tom is looking for a sandwich. But don’t let their Laurel & Hardy act fool you. These guys are real sailormen.

Joe and Eric Schlageter. Joe is Eric’s dad. They are two of the saltiest guys you’ll ever meet. I’d sailed with Eric many times, but I’d never met Joe until this race. Eric has forgotten more about sailing than I’ll ever know – and Joe knows even more. This is why I love sailing: the opportunity to get to know great characters like Joe and Eric.

Shaun Plomteaux and Geno Beville. The youngsters. The hotshots. They were born in water, of course, but appear to have slid right out of their mothers’ wombs into the Pacific Ocean. Watching them on this race would be a revelation. As hard as they worked, I think Captain George should move them up from midshipmen. Provided their sextant readings were correct.

Brad and Paul. A surfing Santa Barbara boy, Brad’s at home on the ocean, and has been sailing since his youth. As for me, I was born on the west side of Cleveland, and as a kid I built some model boats. We’ve shared many adventures together – and this would be another great one.

As Misfit pulls out of its berth at the Bahia Corinthian Yacht Club and sails out of Newport Harbor, Eric checks in with the race committee boat. “Sail number 35010 checking in!”

As we motored past the harbor breakwater, we caught our first sighting of that wacky photographer in his crazy taxi boat — the most unseaworthy-looking craft I’ve ever seen on the water.

Eric at the tiller negotiates our course at the start of the race. We got off to a very good start. Only one boat in our class got off to a better start. But there was a long race ahead.

The boys and me are on the rail early in the race. A sailboat like Misfit needs a lot of human ballast to keep her balanced as she slices through the water. I, for one, am especially suited to the “rail meat” role.

Shaun, Geno and Eric are in control in the cockpit early in race. Eric is steering with the tiller. At this point, you can clearly see that most of our competition is behind us.

Captain George relaxes against the lifelines as the sun starts to set. We were making a steady 6-8 knots in light wind – and our hearts were full of hope. Misfit was proving to be very nimble boat.

As the sun continues to drop down toward the horizon, the Matey shows off his brand new Newport to Ensenada hat. We’ve been sailing for about 7 hours, and we’re less than a third of the way to our destination.

Young Geno takes a turn at the tiller, steering the boat while sipping a Bloody Mary in an improvised cup. Oh yeah, the cups. Tom forgot the cups. Actually, I was one of the guys who made the run for sandwiches, vodka and Bloody Mary mix before the race. But nobody told me about cups. (George insisted that he reminded Tom about the cups.) Finally, someone got the idea to make cups out of empty water bottles. It would not be the last instance of MacGyver-like ingenuity on this voyage.

Several Bloody Marys later, Geno is still at the tiller as sun has just about set.

In the waning moments of sunlight, Shaun trims the headsail. At this point we were flying a spinnaker, still averaging 6 knots in light winds. As far as we knew, we were among the leaders.

Gorgeous colors paint the water as the sun starts to dip below the horizon. This is the kind of scene that makes sailing so addictive. The beauty and the constantly changing color and character of the water are indescribable.

As the sun comes up next morning, it’s clear what gets some sailors through the night: Red Bull and energy drinks.

Joe, “The Ancient Mariner”, greets the morning light, still snug in his foul weather gear. It was a cold, damp night – and once you get cold, you’ll never warm up again. So, foul weather gear at night is a must. You don’t take your “foulies” off until the sun comes up — and you start to sweat.

It’s clear that Tom got some sleep during the night, since he looks about as good as Tom can look.

Taking a nap on the deck, it’s clear that Captain George didn’t get much sleep during the night. But George’s nap posture is nowhere near as uncomfortable-looking as Geno’s was at one point during the night when he was out cold, face down, lying in front of the companiomway. (Red Bull can only get you so far.)

The Matey celebrates the morning of his birthday, April 16^th, dressed in his groovy hippy hoodie. The hoodie went on sometime during the night as another layer under my foul weather gear, At that point, I was wearing two t-shirts, the hoodie, and my foulies. I was still a bit cold.

The Matey scans the Mexican shoreline as Misfit sails toward the finish line, coming into Ensenada.

Eric is at the helm as we approach the finish line. At this point, it was hard to tell how we’d finished. There weren’t many boats ahead of us – and a half-dozen could be seen behind us. Hope springs eternal.

Brad and Tom celebrate surviving the long, cold night and arriving at the finish line in fine, seamanlike style. A hot shower was now just an hour or so away!

At this point, a marlinspike was all that held the boom vang to the boom. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, as the winds died and our boat speed slowed to 2 knots and less, the fluttering of the mainsail caused the boom to bang back and forth – and the bolt that held the boom vang in place was lost. This was the second MacGyver-like bit of ingenuity. (Claude would have been proud.)

On the Sunday return trip, as we motored north to San Diego, Shaun was all about tending to the cordage. It was like something out of a Patrick O’Brian seafaring novel to see Shaun fixing, splicing and braiding the frayed ends of every bit of rope on board.

Eric caught the cordage bug from Shaun and started splicing and sewing, too. I was too busy enjoying the ride to San Diego. Besides, as rail meat, such refined maritime skills are way above my pay grade.

Shaun’s handiwork. I didn’t think anybody did this kind of work since the days of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic wars. Someone should introduce Shaun to scrimshaw. Then again, better to save the whales.

Captain George relaxes as we arrive in U.S. waters. Misfit can motor at between 6-7 knots – and we were lucky enough to have a “following sea” the whole way. (That means we were moving in the direction of the swell.) If we’d been motoring into the waves, it would have been a very wet and bumpy ride.

Joe also relaxes, enjoying our smooth ride home. Note Joe’s bare feet. He and Tom rarely wear shoes on board. I find that amazing. These guys are really salty.

Since U.S. Customs won’t allow us to bring fruit back into the country from Mexico, George helps out by eating his share of the contraband apples.

The Matey looks a bit weathered and grizzled as Misfit makes her way into San Diego Harbor. It’s been a wonderful weekend of adventure: my first birthday on the Pacific Ocean.

Eric deals with the Customs agents at the U.S. Customs dock. I guess everything was okay because they let us all go. Luckily, the drug-sniffing dog didn’t give a damn about Red Bull.

The Misfits pose before a celebratory meal at the Southwestern Yacht Club in San Diego. (My wife Victoria snapped this photo.) We look none the worse for the wear. Next year, we want to see our shipmate Claude in this photo with us!

And now, here’s a little film that Brad edited from footage he shot during the race – with the same camera he used to shoot those photos! It’ll give you a better idea of what it’s like to be on the water aboard Misfit. Ahoy!

BTW — We didn’t win the race. But I doubt anybody had more fun — or more laughs.

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Tagged as 1D35, Bahia Corinthian Yacht Club, Misfit, Newport to Ensenada, Pacific Ocean, race, sail race, sailing, San Diego Harbor

April 30, 2010 · 1:05 am

The Matey’s Log: Newport to Ensenada

Photos by Brad Hall (Except where indicated)

The Newport-to-Ensenada International Yacht Race, which runs 125 nautical miles south from the shores of one of Orange County’s wealthiest enclaves to the historic, struggling Baja port town, is billed as the world’s largest international sailing event. And while I don’t have the experience to know whether it’s truly the “largest international sailing event”, it sure is the biggest sailboat race I’ve ever been in. This was my second year racing from Newport Beach to Ensenada, Mexico with Captains George and Tom and the crack crew of Curiosity — and once again, it was the kind of adventure that inspires men (and women) to go down to the sea in ships.

The Newport-to-Ensenada race was founded in 1947 as a just-for-fun competition for sailors coming out of World War II. And as big as the race has gotten over the years, you get the sense that, for most of the racers, it’s still “just for fun”. (Though certain hyper-competitive, edge-seeking boats with their flaunting of ratings and their profusion of high-tech sails, can take the fun out of “just for fun”. But that’s just the crabby old salt in me talking.)

In the first Newport-to-Ensenada race (called at the time “The Governor’s Cup”) 117 boats paid $22.50 each to race on April 23, 1948. Winds were estimated at 25–35 knots, and only 65 boats finished the race. 62 years later, Captains Moll and Webber not only paid a lot more to enter the race – but high winds would NOT be a problem. If any sailboats failed to finish in 2010, it would be because they eventually fired up their motors in frustration.

A record 675 boats entered the race in 1983, but with the economic slump in 2009, there were only 270 entries. This year, Curiosity was among 217 boats jockeying for position among the crowd of sailboats at the start of the race. As we tacked back and forth in the light air before our 11:00 am start time, our relatively Hollywood-savvy crew was not aware that icons like Buddy Ebsen, Humphrey Bogart and Walter Cronkite had competed in the race. I simply can’t imagine the thrill of racing to the starting line against Bogie and Bacall aboard Santana.

As is our habit in recent races, we managed to get off to a good start – crossing the line among the leaders of the nine boats in our spinnaker class. I have no idea how they rate and organize all the boats into the various classes, but I do know the difference between a boat rigged for a spinnaker and one that isn’t. Thus, of the 217 vessels in the race, we were only competing against 8 of them: Elixir, Paradise Found, Tranquilo, Escapade, Zeus, Dela, Bonnie Belle and Arearea. Chief among our rivals was Elixir, whose higher rating meant that we had to give her time, but whose collection of high-tech sails gave her a distinct edge. In last year’s race, we’d kept Elixir in sight most of the race. However, with Curiosity’s rating hanging around our necks like an albatross, we’d have to finish well ahead of all the boats in our class in order to win. The whole rating thing hurts my brain.

Crewmen Michael, Wiley and Eric, early in the race, headed to Ensenada.

The winds were fair and we managed 6-8 knots of boat speed for much of the way that afternoon. In a long ocean race like this, where you’re simply racing from point A to point B, there’s not a lot for the crew to do between maneuvers – and as we were pointed on a good heading to Ensenada, and conditions were calm, we proceeded to do what sailors often do under such circumstances: drink, smoke cigars, and tell tales. Of all the joys of sailing, none surpass the camaraderie among a crew of jokers and raconteurs on the deck of a fine vessel making way on a brilliant blue sea. And, as late afternoon flowed into evening, our lead bowman, Claude, helped lubricate our merry maritime festivities by supplying his crewmates with a hearty ration of grog. Thanks to Claude’s knowledge of Royal Navy mixology, not a one of us would suffer scurvy on this voyage.

Claude makes his grog in the traditional way: with Pusser’s Rum, according to the English Royal Navy recipe.

— 2 parts water

— 1 part Pusser’s Rum

— Lime juice to taste

— Dark cane sugar to taste

I don’t think Claude actually used dark cane sugar, but he did squeeze plenty of fresh limes by hand.

The cockpit brain trust: Eric and Captain George.

Grog has been a naval staple since it was introduced into the Royal Navy in 1740 by Vice Admiral Edward Vernon (nicknamed “Old Grog” because of his grogram cloak). Grog served two purposes. Not only did it water down the sailors’ rum ration (“what do you do with a drunken sailor?”) — it also warded off scurvy by virtue of all that lime juice. If, as Winston Churchill was reported to have said, “The only traditions of the Royal Navy are rum, sodomy, and the lash” – then, after 1740, in the interest of accuracy, you’d have to replace “rum” with “grog” on that list.

Seeing (and tasting) a good thing, the Continental Navy also adopted the twice-a-day grog ration. But while the relatively- teetotaling American Navy ended the ration on September 1, 1862, the Royal Navy went on swilling watered down rum with lime juice and sugar until July 31, 1970 – when the last call of “Up Spirits” was heard in the Royal Navy. There was no last call on Curiosity that evening, as the grog and the laughter wore into the night.

The Matey in repose. (Photo by Sebastian J.)

At some point in the darkness, we crossed into Mexican waters. I was catching a few winks belowdecks at the time – until crewmate Brad Hall awakened me at 4:00 am to help perform one of the trickier evolutions on a sailboat – jibing the spinnaker. As I came up on deck, it was still dark, though illuminated by moonlight. Normally, jibing the spinnaker is a pain but, as the wind was merely a breeze, Brad and I were able to get the job done easily. It would have been much harder to wrestle that spinnaker if a stout wind was filling it.

And that lack of wind soon proved to be our undoing in this race. For most of the next 5-6 hours, we were becalmed. As much as sailors love the word “grog” — “becalmed” is a word we dread, as it means “to render motionless for lack of wind.” And that was our situation, bobbing up and down for hours on a perfectly flat (but terribly beautiful) ocean off the coast of Baja, Mexico.

Sebastian, Tom, and the Matey in the early morning calm.

Captain George, becalmed. (Sebastian J)

How bad is it for a sailboat to be becalmed?

Let us remember that the ancient Greek king Agamemnon sacrificed his lovely daughter Iphigenia to the gods so that his becalmed fleet would have the wind it desperately needed to sail to Troy.

Extended periods of calm made for madness and mutiny aboard sailing ships throughout the centuries. Witness this ominous passage from William Clark Russell’s seafaring adventure, “An Ocean Tragedy”…

Brad, Michael, George, Tom and Wiley in the calm. (Sebastian J)

Captain Tom, Eric and Claude, becalmed. (Sebastian J)

But, for the crew of Curiosity, there may have been madness, but there was no thought of mutiny. We were confident the breeze would pick up at some point during the day – though we saw a couple boats closer to shore give up, turn their motors on, and proceed under power to Ensenada. We were determined to finish the race in the right way, and our resolve was rewarded when the wind picked up late in the morning – and we saw the whales!

Claude was first to see their spouts: two grey whales (or were they humpbacks?), a mother and her calf, cruising side by side, headed north, from their breeding grounds in and around the Sea of Cortez to their northern feeding grounds in the frigid waters off Alaska. The whales were a welcome sight for our slightly exhausted and frustrated crew: a good omen for the rest of our voyage.

It was nearing 1:00 in the afternoon as we made our final spinnaker run to the finish line in the port of Ensenada De Todos Santos. By now, we were cracking along at 8 knots, a respectable speed, and leaving other boats in our wake. It wasn’t the screaming 12-knot final kick we enjoyed last year, but it cheered us all to bring Curiosity handsomely across the finish line. Our passage from Newport to Ensenada had taken 26 hours, but we had no clue when our 8 competitors had crossed the line.

Pulling into our assigned dock at the marina below our hotel, we noticed that our rival, Elixir, was already in her slip. Elixir had sailed further out into the ocean and caught wind when we, closer to shore, were becalmed. We made our bet, stayed inside, and the wind gods were not with us.

A final toast from the Matey. (Sebastian J)

So, there was nothing left to do but enjoy our one night in Ensenada. The hotel was in a festive mood, with mariachis playing in anticipation of a big wedding that night. Showers were taken, a few more drinks were served – and we all headed to the race headquarters to check out the results. Alas, after times were corrected, taking each boat’s rating into consideration, we finished next to last. But as we toasted Captain Moll that night over a fine dinner, we all felt like winners. It had been a fine voyage, a safe passage, and another great adventure. Here’s to many more!

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Tagged as Captain George, Continental Navy, Curiosity, grog, Mexico, Newport to Ensenada, race, Royal Navy, rum, sailboat, sailing

March 1, 2010 · 12:59 am

Sailing with the Tsunami

“So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”

Macbeth (Act 1, Scene 3)

Shakespeare’s doomed, regicidal Macbeth was a soldier, not a sailor, but had the bloody Thane of Cawdor been racing a sailboat in the Santa Barbara Channel on Saturday February 27, 2010 – he could not have described the dichotomous conditions better: fair and foul. And one of the major factors that contributed to this strange day on the water was put in play in a faraway South American country more than 12 hours before the race began.

At 10:34 PST on the night before our second sailboat race of the 2010 season, there was a magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile — one of the largest temblors ever recorded.

The head of the University of Chile’s Seismology Institute said the quake was “50 times bigger than the one in Haiti.” That might be true, but luckily, compared to Haiti, Chile was well prepared for such a huge shaker. Only 300 people died according to early accounts – but a seismically triggered tsunami was sent racing halfway around the world.

And some 4,900 nautical miles northward toward Ventura, California.

About nine and a half hours after the Chilean quake, Brad Hall and Darroch Greer arrived at my house at 8:00 AM to carpool out to Ventura Harbor for our race. The network weather witches had been heralding a series of storms sweeping down from the north, and indeed, we drove west on the 101 Freeway in and out of patches of rain. We discussed the quake in Chile – but we had no idea it would affect us that day.

We were more concerned about another factor that would make it an odd race. Our supremely capable and experienced lead bowman, Claude Dubreuil, would not be among our crew that day. That meant that leadership of the foredeck would devolve to me. As I’m a relative nautical neophyte — happier to follow orders than give them.

Captain Tom Webber. (Photo by Brad Ball)

I had apprehensions that had nothing to do with the weather. Getting the headsail up and down, rigging, flying, and dousing the spinnaker, these were the maneuvers that occupied my mind. I knew we’d get wet. That was a given. I was hoping there would be enough wind – but not too much. I was hoping I could do my job, not screw up royally – and manage to stay in the boat.

When we arrived at Ventura Harbor, I noticed that the water in the harbor was as muddy and murky as the Mississippi River. Usually, as you walk down the ramp onto H Dock, you can see the harbor bottom. I figured the murk must’ve been churned up by the storms that were already passing through.

Captain George & Michael on our way out of Ventura Harbor. Smooth sailing so far. (Photo by Brad)

Brad's set to haul the jib halyard.

The weather lifted as we pulled out of our slip and sailed out of Ventura Harbor toward the starting line at Mandalay Buoy. There was a heavy swell that promised a wet afternoon — but on our way to the line, we did a pretty good job of getting the headsail up and deploying and jibing the spinnaker, etc, without Claude’s veteran leadership. Despite the choppy conditions, I managed to stay in the bow and roughly approximate what Master Claude would have done. The few mistakes that I and the foredeck crew made were soon remedied – and we were all feeling pretty good as we approached the starting line

The strangeness began at the start of the race. We were among the first boats to cross the starting line in a crowded, chaotic start. I expected to hear the crunch of fiberglass. Shouts and curses were heard – but miraculously, there were no collisions.

We were among the leaders as we raced toward the first mark, Platform Gail, sailing in and out of a soaking rain.

A cold, soggy Darroch and The Matey on the rail. (Photo by Brad)

The promised storms had arrived on cue, drenching the crew most miserably – but also helping to drive our boat, Sprit Decision, at an average speed of about 8 knots to windward. We were sailing on a direct line to Platform Gail – and aside from the rain – it was a great day so far.

It was a good omen when a pod of playful dolphins starting racing alongside us, darting back and forth across our bow.

Alas, our good fortune would not last.

When we got within a quarter mile of Platform Gail – which we would need to sail around before returning to the finish line at Ventura Harbor – we were suddenly becalmed. The wind and water both became eerily still. What we didn’t know was that, about this time, 12:24 PM (PST) – a 3-foot tsunami surge from the Chilean quake was arriving in Ventura. It had taken these waves generated by the 8.8-magnitude quake 14 hours to travel from the temblor’s epicenter to our patch of the Pacific. And somehow, the effect was to leave us slack-sailed and drifting in the lazy swell.

Captains Tom & George consider what to do to get our becalmed boat moving again. (Photo by Brad)

Eventually, we got enough of a puff to push us around the oil platform and fill our spinnaker for a downwind run home to Ventura Harbor. As we approached the harbor, our cell phones began to ring with calls from our wives concerned about a tsunami warning. What tsunami warning? We didn’t feel any tsunami…

Then, as we got within a few hundred yards of the harbor mouth, a Coast Guard ship ran out to intercept us. A Coast Guard officer on a bullhorn advised us that we could not enter the harbor because of a surge that was coming out of the harbor. In my three years of sailing in Ventura and Channel Islands, I’ve never heard of a surge coming out of the harbor – the surf and the tide is usually pushing toward the shore – not out to sea. But the tsunami surge from Chile was hitting the coast and bouncing back out, back and forth — and the two currents were smacking into each other just inside the harbor’s breakwater. It looked like the confluence of two mighty rivers. Strange conditions, indeed. In fact, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department reported minor damage at the harbor from several buoys getting washing away.

After about 10 minutes of waiting outside the breakwater, the Coast Guard (timing the surge interval) gave us the okay to proceed into the harbor. It was weird to sail into the harbor against such a strong current. And it was yet another lesson in how small – and interconnected — the world is.

As we pulled into our slip, the rain had stopped and the sun was coming back out. Foul was fair again. It was as odd a day on the water as I’d ever experienced.

And I loved every moment of the adventure.

What follows are more photos that Brad Hall, our loblolly boy, took on our voyage.

The Matey (that's me) as we sail out of the harbor. So far, so good.

Foredeck mate Darroch is clearly not wet and miserable yet. Is he thinking about his sandwich?

Captain Tom is also all smiles in the early going. Doubtless, he's thinking about a sandwich!

Tom doesn't look so smiley now, does he?

All's well that ends well.

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Tagged as Chile, earthquake, Macbeth, race, sailing, Santa Barbara Channel, tsunami, Ventura, Ventura Harbor

February 14, 2010 · 12:52 pm

The Matey’s Log: Sailing Season Begins

Captain George Moll wanted his crew on the H dock in Ventura Harbor at 8:00 am on Saturday morning, February 13. It was a good thing that the race was being run the day before Valentine’s Day. Like golfing, sailing is a sport that takes men out of the house for long stretches of time on the weekend. But sailboat racing is worse than golf because it’s never certain when you’ll be done. 18 holes of golf always take about the same amount of time to complete. The duration of a sailboat race depends upon the vagaries of the wind and conditions on the water. The race was set to start at 11:00 am, and if the gods Aeolus and Poseidon were with us, we could easily be back on the dock by 4:00, as I’d promised my wife, Victoria. Or we could be home much, much later.

Captain George wanted us at the dock good and early because our boat, a 32-foot Beneteau First 10R named Sprit Decision hadn’t been in a race since early December. The crew was glad to be racing again. We were all veterans of earlier campaigns, though every one of my crewmates is a far more experienced sailorman than I am. Captain George and Captain Tom Weber own Sprit Decision. George and Tom are a pair of old salts who keep everyone entertained with their crusty maritime Oscar and Felix act. Affable, gentlemanly Michael Froelich skippers his own boat, and is a key member of our crew as a helmsman and sail trimmer. Claude Dubreuil, an expert diver and sailor, is our fearless leader on the foredeck. (I assist Claude on the foc’s’le.) And my longtime buddy, Darroch Greer, may be the new guy on the foredeck crew, but as a diver, sailor and surfer, he’s also much saltier than me.

And me? Well, they call me “The Matey”, but my virtues as a sailor extend little beyond blind loyalty to my captain, the strength to haul lines and pump halyards, a knack for cursing like a tar in Nelson’s navy — and a good bit of weight on the rail. All in all, the six of us were a fine crew with which to start the 2010 racing season.

The February 13^th race was the first of the Spring Series sponsored by the Pierpont Bay Yacht Club out of Ventura Harbor. Sprit Decision was among the twenty or so boats competing in the spinnaker class. The racecourse began at the Mandalay buoy, across the Santa Barbara Channel, around oil platform Gilda, then back into Ventura Harbor.

The Santa Barbara Channel is a glorious stretch of blue Pacific Ocean that separates mainland California from the northernmost Channel Islands. It runs between Point Conception and Oxnard on the coast and the islands of Anacapa and San Miguel. It’s as gorgeous a body of water as you’ll find on the planet, and whether you win or lose the race, it’s a pleasure to spend time on these waters.

As we sailed out of Ventura Harbor, we saw hard-working souls in two large out-rigger canoes paddling their way back inside the breakwater. It was a reminder that human beings have been navigating the Santa Barbara Channel for centuries – maybe even millennia. For many centuries before they first encountered Europeans in 1542, when Juan Cabrillo and his cohorts arrived from Mexico to “discover” the channel, the Native American Chumash tribe went back and forth across the channel in large, primitive dugout canoes, connecting the islands with their mainland villages and establishing trade between them.

We crossed the starting line just a few seconds after 11:00 am, and were sailing among the leaders, headed for the offshore oil platform called “Gail”. (All the oil platforms in the channel are named after women. It does get lonely on those platforms.) Platform Gail is about 10 miles from Ventura Harbor – and with a steady 10-15 knots of wind, we were showing 7-8 knots of boat speed. At that rate, we’d round Gail within a couple hours. Sprit Decision, her bottom newly-cleaned and treated, was knifing through the large, wide, rolling swells, as we made our way toward Gail.

Gail and her sister platforms are sitting in the Santa Barbara Channel because of the many oil fields below its sea floor. The channel has been mined for over 100 years – and was the site of the very first offshore oil well in 1896.

The channel was also fouled by one of the worst oil spills in history in 1969, when the black stuff came oozing out of fissures around a recently drilled offshore well a few miles south of Santa Barbara, blackening hundreds of square miles of water, killing aquatic wildlife, and mucking up the beaches from Goleta to Ventura. That disaster helped to galvanize the nascent environmental movement in the United States.

I must admit, I wasn’t thinking much about that history as we rounded platform Gail because there would soon be important work to do. Once we got around Gail and were headed back to Ventura Harbor, the wind would generally be on our stern – which meant a spinnaker run to the finish line. Flying the spinnaker is one of the main responsibilities of the foredeck crew, and it’s one of those critical shipboard evolutions that can either kick the boat into a higher gear – or trigger a disaster.

Before the race, we’d practiced deploying the spinnaker – with mixed results. (Among other snafus, I managed to nearly get myself knocked off the boat helping to jibe the spinnaker.) But, rounding Gail, we got our spinnaker flying with very little drama, and were soon making between 10 and 11 knots on our run back to Ventura Harbor.

Claude looks back to admire the swell.

Since the start of the race, the long, rolling swells pushing toward the shore had continued to build – and were now quite large: eight to ten feet from crest to trough. As it was a following sea, Sprit Decision was literally surfing the swells that came in under her stern. The sea, the ship, and the crew were in a great rhythm less than a mile to the finish – but it wouldn’t last.

Suddenly, as we neared the shore and shallower water, the perverse geometry of the sea came into play, and the swell began to fall off more precipitously. The wind was gusting as we were riding down one particularly large swell, and as Sprit Decision’s bow dipped dramatically – a gust of wind drove the spinnaker down toward the trough of the swell. The boat’s bow was pushed parallel to the rolling swell and the boat was listing heavily to starboard, its rail nearly in the water. In an instant, we were on the verge of getting knocked down and broached by the onrushing swell.

Michael, trimming the spinnaker, came close to a bath when we were nearly knocked down.

Quick work by all hands kept the ship from heeling over disastrously, but it was critical to de-power the spinnaker. (In other words, get the wind out of it, so it wouldn’t be driven into the water, taking us with it.) Alas, one of the spinnaker’s working sheets got hung up on deck cleat! You may not know what all that means – but the bottom line is that we were nearly knocked down a second time before we were able to free that spinnaker line, right the ship, and haul down the spinnaker. Of course, there are no photos of these wild and wooly moments. At times like that, it’s all hands on deck!

Twenty minutes later, we were across the finish line. It had been an exciting and satisfying first race of the season. I’m not sure where we finished – probably somewhere in the middle of the fleet – but it was a pure joy to survive the experience with Captains Moll and Weber and the gallant men of Sprit Decision.

And, best of all, with the wind as consistently stiff as it was – we finished at 2:00 pm. That’s two hours earlier than I told Victoria I’d be done! So, I got home earlier than expected.