White Rats

At the Etchells Midwinters in Miami, PRO Dave Brennan decided to try something new, and in the process may have changed sailboat racing as we know it.

The Etchells class has been around since the early 70’s, and at age 35+, it is arguably the hottest one-design keelboat in the world. Many of the biggest names in the sport sail them now along with a strong and committed group of class stalwarts who’ve been sailing them for years. The Jaguar Cup, an annual series consisting of four events sailed in Miami and capped off by the Midwinter Championship, now draws 90 boats from all over the world. And this isn’t just any 90 boats – it’s a deep 90 – and while the racing is off-the-charts good, the unfortunate by-product is that even after a 2.2 mile first beat, everyone gets to the windward mark at the same time. I mean EVERYONE.

The Etchells is a very pretty boat, and it’s a joy to sail. There are very few designs that are quite as pointy, however, or as unresponsive when the helm is hard over, which makes these “en masse” mark roundings particularly scary. So the Biscayne Bay race management team decided to try something new: two windward marks. And why not? Given the fact that the leeward gate has become de rigeur at pretty much every event that I’ve sailed in over the past 10 years, I’m surprised it’s taken this long for someone to take a shot at the windward gate. Paul Elvstrom incorporated it into his innovative “triple racing” format, but to my knowledge, it hasn’t been tried in a high-profile fleet race yet.

So despite some whingeing from the peanut gallery, Dave told us his plan on Thursday evening at the competitors’ briefing: We would have two marks approximately 10 boat lengths apart that would be rounded from the inside out – with no offset marks (which would turn out to be the fly in the proverbial ointment). Our team did quite a bit of thinking about the tactics and rules situations that rounding the right-hand mark to starboard might create – things like:

· The spinnaker would be hooked up on the wrong side – we would need to figure out how to add a windward set to our repertoire.

· Bearing away on port into the teeth of a lineup of starboard tackers on the layline to the right-hand mark while trying to do a windward set would be challenging to say the least.

· Should our choice of windward marks be dictated by traffic, by which mark is further downwind or by which side of the run we wanted to play?

· In a port rounding, the boat coming in on the layline and tacking has few rights – in a starboard rounding, the boat coming in on the layline and tacking is in total control.

So our assessment was that the addition of a second mark would significantly open thing up and create new opportunities to gain (and lose) ground, but we would need to rethink our spinnaker packing and setting routine. Given the likelihood that there would be a line of starboard tack boats that would make it difficult to bear away to a run or roll right into a jibe set, we would need to run the spinnaker forward and set it off the bow. For this, we went back to the old “Soling roll” technique of rolling the chute into a bundle, and we set it up with the sheets and halyard led between the mast and the shrouds so that it could be easily run forward by the forward hand like a running back with a football while the middleman (me) shifted forward to the halyard for the hoist.

But what about the “fly in the ointment” that I mentioned earlier? Along with leeward gates, offset marks have also become the norm, and with good reason. When a starboard tack boat bears away around the windward mark into a line of port tack boats sailing upwind, very bad things can happen - and the offset mark does a reasonably good job of preventing these bad things. But with a windward gate, would you still need offset marks? Would setting two windward marks AND two offset marks be too much for a single mark boat crew to handle? The BBYC race management team determined that the windward gate would obviate the need for offset marks – and this was the one and only mistake they made. When a boat that’s going downwind on starboard jibe and heeling to windward passes to leeward of a boat that’s going upwind on port tack, masts can come very close together, and on the very first rounding, aside from a number of incredibly close calls, Bruce Burton got his mast taken down.

For the second race, out came the offset marks, and after that, it was relatively smooth sailing. A windward gate doesn’t thin the herd as much as a single weather mark does, and one of the interesting side effects is that everyone gets to the leeward gate at the same time. There were some hair-raising pileups there, but most people are used to leeward gates by now, and good judgement seemed to carry the day.

Overall, I think the experiment was a success. Two windward marks are probably better than one as it keeps the fleet closer and creates more opportunities to pass boats – good if you’re behind. The downside is that you apparently still need offset marks which will strain the resources (and the backs) of many race management teams. Not so bad in Biscayne Bay dropping marks in 20 feet of water – a daunting prospect in places where the water’s pretty deep. There are those who’ve argued that a 90-boat fleet may not have been the best place to try this out, but I’d like to see other clubs follow Dave Brennan’s example and give it a shot.

Who knows? Ten years from now, we may not be able to remember what it was like to sail in races with only one windward mark.