When you sail a four day, 10-race regatta, it all gets jumbled together, to be honest. And when your result is in the 40s, it is hard to distinguish the memories from one race to another.
There are impressions and lessons, however, and these are the ones that have lasted with me from the North American Championships, recently raced in our district at the Buffalo Canoe Club.
Butterfly Beauty
When you are in the Radial fleet, you get to watch the
full rigs up close when they start, and sometimes when they pour through the bottom gate. The boat
handling is beautiful. The top guys are poetry. Their white wings shiver and flash constantly from
maneuver to maneuver, and I loved to watch them dance around the course.
Lane Drain
If you cannot hold a lane, you are nowhere. Start after start,
until I was so discouraged I no longer tried, I could not hold my lane. The kids were just too good
and too fast.
Sick Vang
You better like a tight vang in the Radial. I have never carried
it so tight. Peter Sidenberg and I were both struggling with holding lanes in the slop, and we
decided that tight vangs were faster, but then I said to him, "Yea, but we are not very
fast!" So I sailed over to talk to Alex Heinzmann (he eventually came third overall) to ask
him. He confirmed it; the vang's got to be tight. His vang was almost always block to block or
tighter the whole regatta, upwind and down, Amazing.
Al Clark and Peter Sidenberg
Geesh. These guys are by far the best master
sailors I have seen. Al ended up ninth overall in the Full Rigs. He and Peter Sidenberg make us all
look like we are sailing Opti's. Yea, they sail full time, but it remains astonishing that, at their
respective ages, they are as competitive as they are. (Peter is around 70, I think, and Al is
somewhere just south of 50). My admiration is multiplied by the fact that they both cut their
competitive teeth sailing in Canadian waters.
Real Pinwheel
In the last race, I ended up on the outside of a perfect
pinwheel. It was a raft of about six boats, gunwale to gunwale and nose to nose, making this
pirouette around the leeward mark. It was so bad and took so long to swing around the mark that I
gave up, bore off and gybed around to sail back upwind to the mark.
Powerless
Where's the power in a Radial in chop? When you lose it and that
bow starts to pound, it is so game over. The time it took me to get going again was mind numbing. I
guess it's the same for everyone, but when you are bouncing up and down in one spot and 20 yards
away in the same breeze Lisa Ross is powered up and hiking, you got to wonder what kind of bad sign
you were born under.
DFL does not mean "Decently Fast Laser"
I won't say what it does
mean because we all know it. I had my first. OMFG.
Shifts? What Shifts?
When you get spit out the back in the first 100 yards
and it takes another 100 to find a lane, you take the side you can get. And when there are upwards
of 40 boats ahead of you, I don't know how you tell a windshift from the wind you get when yet
another 16-year-old decides to race you, and only you, and tacks right on your air.
Danielle Dube is my favourite
She got torched on some BFDs in the
qualifiers, but sailed hard anyway in the Silver fleet, then took the time to tell me about it and
help me with some ideas for my own sailing. She also wrote a good summary for the Masters Sailing
Team of what to expect of the wind at the Worlds, as her home club is where the regatta is to be
held. I met her at CORK a couple of years ago, and she has always made me feel like the old guys
matter.
Alex Heinzmanne is pretty cool, too
Alex trained with the Masters Team on
the weekend before the North Americans and gave us some good advice when we got off the water at the
end of the day. He continued to be helpful to me during the NA regatta (and he came 3rd in the
Radial fleet). I could ask him anything, and he was right there to provide insightful advice. As
much as some of the kids I race against in the Radial can be snotty and full of themselves, there
are the gems that you are glad to know and cheer on as they work to represent Canadians around the
world.
Where is the balance?
When I race badly, I am moody and distant. I avoid
conversation. I don't hang around for the barbecues. When I do well, I am happy to socialize. I care
too much about winning and think other people care when they don't. I keep thinking that caring
matters - that if I stop caring I will fly to the back of the fleet so fast, I won't remember that I
know how to sail. But I think there has to be a better balance between caring and not caring. I
think caring less will help me sail better. So, because I care so much about winning, I will start
caring less about winning, so I can win more. HUH?
The Heart Bounces Back
I was hoping to be in the 20s in this regatta. I
thought that was reasonable. I ended up in the 40s. I thought, as I usually do, that it was time to
hang up the hiking stick. I went down Monday morning to the club to pick up some stuff. It was about
7:00am and the water was flat and beautiful. The sun was just up, and the warmth of it was beginning
to soften the night's cool touch. When I heard the familiar sound of the padlock of the equipment
shed opening in my hand, and the creak of the door as I walked in, and breathed the smell of the
sails and the years of sailing stuff in the shed as I picked up my gear, I felt myself getting ready
to race again. "Shit!" I said. Till then, I was quite happy in my resolve to stop
competing. "Shit!" I couldn't believe that, unbidden, the feeling rose again, and I knew
it would be only a matter of time till I was waiting for the prep flag, finger on the button of my
stopwatch, to be challenged again.
Rob Koci races in both the Laser Full-Rig and Laser Radial fleets around District 3. Currently, Rob is the District 3 secretary and maintains a frequently updated race diary on D3Laser.com. Rob's home port is St. James Town Sailing Club in Toronto, Ontario.
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