you wrote:
Boy its easy to be an armchair tactician after the fact with good video to
review!
Right. And it's important to remember that this is a casual cruiser's
race. Some of these owners have never been in a race before, but
retired and bought a big boat without working up from smaller boats and
learning how to sail.
I have no idea, and the following is total speculation. It's entirely
possible that the helmsperson was the owner and was just thrilled to be
sailing with a full crew. And the whole crew was sitting there thinking
'Gee, we're sailing...' or perhaps they were thinking 'I'm experienced
crew on an unknown boat, and I don't want to say anything because the
last thing the owner needs is a bunch of people shouting
instructions.' And, knowing Mike's reputation, it's also possible that
the owner was thinking 'I've got Mike on board, and I need to prove
something...' Who the heck knows.
It's funny down here. A couple of years ago I was anchored off Santiago
and heard a 'MayDay' call on the radio. The boat had an engine problem,
and wanted a tow into the anchorage. It was a little stinky off-shore,
but not that big a deal, and they had raised the sails only because the
engine failed when *motoring* downwind. They didn't know how to tack
around the corner to make the four mile wide entrance to the bay. After
listening to a bunch of radio chatter, I hailed them. I explained that
inside the bay the water was flat and there was an easy 10 knot breeze,
and being tired of the radio drama I said 'There's about a mile of good
sand holding here. If you can't sail that boat into this anchorage you
need to sell the boat. Aim for my boat, miss it by a quarter mile, and
drop the hook.' I explained that the idea was to sail to the right
spot, head directly into the wind and drop the hook, the captain said
'But, if I head directly into the wind, won't my sails flog?' I tried
to explain that that was the point of the exercise, the boat will stall
and stop, and that it's important to set priorities and sometimes you
just have to let the sails flog. I might have confused him by telling
him that it might be a good idea to lower one sail about a mile away,
and just putz along under jib or main alone. I also suggested that on
*my* boat I would sail in under main alone, because I could backwind the
main to set the hook, but under current conditions with a huge sand
anchorage it probably wouldn't be necessary to get though the night.
That was totally confusing for the captain. Watching through the
binoculars, he dropped all sail right around the point, and wallowed. A
Westsail 32 went out and towed him in... and darned if the captain
didn't make the tow boat drop him off right in the middle of the
'perfect spot' according to the cruising guide book. Unfortunately,
that was right on top of three other boats, who had to move.
There are a lot of idiots down here, and some of them have really
expensive boats.
Wal
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