Six Ynglings worth of sailors waited for the weather to improve on Labor Day weekend before taking to the mouth of the Sakonnet River at 10:00 on Monday morning to match wits and racing rules and tactics in the first annual Labor Day Team Racing event at SYC. Bruce Chafee, Yngling fleet captain, organized the event (he'd been threatening to pull the Ynglings together for a team race since last winter). He promised my boys during team race recruiting efforts that this inaugural team racing event would be the most fun they had sailing all year (which is saying a lot) and his predictions turned out to be way true.
In a building southerly, after five races the "great white fleet" comprised of Orion, Loki and Peter Lozier's rocket ship eked a 3-2 win over the darker-hued Ynglings Teal, Sleipner and Gael Force. The painted ladies started out strong with a win in the first race, on the strength of a first place by skipper GB Bryant, with young guns Hutch Bryant and Rex Littlefield in Teal, and strong enough finishes by Sleipner, steered by Cushing Anderson and ably crewed by Captain Bruce, and Gael Force, skippered by Leland Thomas, with help from Erik Thomas and Jack Littlefield, to give the team a win in the debut.
Subsequent races showed the lead seesawing between both teams, as first one team then the other had positions to win (what it takes to win is assembling the fewer number of points, which are determined by your finish -- first place gets one point, sixth place gets six. In a three-on-three team race, if the sum of your team's finish points is 10 or fewer, you've won that race.) The course -- a simple windward-leeward twice around, with start and finish at the leeward mark, was diabolically designed to promote interaction between the boats -- the windward mark was left to starboard, which meant that boats giving themselves a comfortable approach to the windward mark did so on the port tack and could look forward to starboard tackers messing up their carefully calculated layline. And so they did, on many occasions -- often resulting in the port tack boat fouling the starboard tacker and doing their obligatory 360 deg. "donut" to avoid being DQ'd and costing their team the race. Several races literally went down to the wire, as last second manouvering often left a boat or two completely out of the finish picture: Teal was "Loki'd" (not once but twice) when the Richmonds managed to peel Teal out of the race by using the leeward boat's right of way to force Teal to the wrong side of the finish pin (while crossing the line on the correct side themselves.)
Records will show which teams won the 2nd, 3rd and 4th races (maybe Noel Field, who, together with Ian MacDonald, ran the mark boat/RC boat, scored, judged and juried the five races, can post the actual finishes by race if he still has that slip of paper). The white fleet, with Bill and Parker Richmond and Vicki McGeoch in Loki, Steve O'Connor and Jonathan Stapleton in Orion, and Peter Lozier, Will Shore and Bart Littlefield in Peter's new drysailed (there's another story there) Yngling, won two of them to set-up a rubber match at 2 wins each.
For the final race, aggressive pre-start maneuvering saw several painted boats over early, requiring a mulligan -- and letting the white fleet have the upper hand early -- but like every other race, nothing is for sure. While sailing in the middle of the pack on the penultimate leg, with our team positioned for a win, our boat managed to avoid starboard tackers on the approach to the windward mark, only to (nearly) T-bone a close-hauled and starboard tack Gael Force on the other side. Having no practice at pulling off an elegant donut to exonerate ourselves, we completed the first half just fine, but spent enough time flapping in irons at the 180 point to let the entire fleet -- good guys and bad -- pass by, likely costing us the race victory and the day. Somehow we managed to pass one of the bad guys -- and the other white boats got themselves in good positions up front -- to give the White Fleet the win for the rubber match, and for the SYC Team Race inaugural outing.
Reports are that all participants had a terrific time, learned a lot about racing tactics and rules (and about Ynglings) and look forward to more team racing in the future. The Race Committee will definitely look into adding team race days to the 2007 race schedule -- where we can spread the fun and excitement around to more members and friends.
