The single-handed leg of the Bermuda 1-2 was the first race with our Class 40 and it started out in memorable fashion, with pea-soup fog obscuring competitors, the race committee, land, marks…the works. Add in the wind direction that had us on a hard beat out of Narragansett Bay and my heart rate was up.
We have written a bit about the first leg, but briefly, it was – as is common racing to Bermuda – a predominantly upwind/close reaching affair. The first part of the race was a blast – good breeze with wind angles that varied back and forth between jib reaching and Code Zero sailing. Our brand new sails were excellent and kept us in the hunt…until the wind shut off. Suffice to say that we don’t have the boat properly tuned for light-air upwind sailing. The final miles to Bermuda were precisely that – upwind in very light air. My tracking angles were embarrassingly huge. I was thrilled when I finally crossed the finish line. Kent Racing’s first race was complete with no equipment issues at all!
Until I started the engine and put it into gear…and we made no progress. Everything was fine above the waterline…the transmission was shifting, I could hear the engine go into gear, but we were going precisely nowhere. Bermuda Yacht Services sent out a boat to tow us in. As soon as we were secured on the dock, I grabbed a mask and found no prop on the saildrive. After some amazing logistics and the help of friends, we found a prop in the US, Cat Chimney, my extremely capable co-skipper put it in her luggage, then I strapped on some scuba gear and installed it. With that, we were ready to return.
The doublehanded return leg started in the close confines of St. George’s Harbor with a reach out of the very narrow channel that leads into the Atlantic. All four of the boats in Class 5 squeezed through and we were off! The leg started in rousing fashion with our Code 5 up in heavy beam-reaching conditions that had both Cat and I grinning ear-to-ear and the boat getting up to 16.8 knots regularly. We stayed in close touch with the fleet…the mighty Dragon with Michael Hennessy and Cole Brauer were close by for much of the first night…until The Cloud found us.
Rain clouds often suck the life out of the wind close to them, and a big rain cloud approached us…and parked. We floundered in light-to-no-air for more than half a day, watching competitors move by on the horizon as we eked every tenth of a knot we could out of the boat. All of this was, of course, followed by full gale conditions. When the wind returned, it did so with a vengeance. We started jib reaching, added a reef, added a second reef, then a third, then went to the staysail. We had that sail combination up for over 24 hours. In the middle of this, we had a instrument failure that had us hand-steering the boat for over nine hours. Cat prodded the autopilot back to life, but in the meantime the Gulf Stream welcomed us with even more breeze, thunderstorms and driving rain. Epic, Noah’s Ark rain.
As we approached Newport, the wind finally freed up enough so that we were able to do something brand new for this race…set a spinnaker! Our big kite went up for the final ten hours into Newport. The bay apparently wanted to welcome us in similar fashion to our departure, so a thick blanket of fog descended on us. Thank goodness for AIS – we had an ocean-going tug tussling with us for the same bit of real estate at the finish in 75 foot visibility. We could see him on AIS, we could certainly hear him, we talked to him on the radio…but we nipped across the line without incident.
Solo and doublehanded racing projects are hardly solo or doublehanded when the boat is being readied to race. The first and most important person for a solo skipper going doublehanded racing is to find a sailing partner. I could not have been more fortunate to be enthusiastically joined by Cat Chimney. In addition to being a smart and fearless sailor she has a work ethic that is matchless and the engineering mind to make all of the planning and execution flawless. Her social media skills vastly eclipse mine and her sense of humor in all conditions made this an excellent partnership.
Our support system started in South Carolina where the boat had been hauled at the site of Warrior Sailing. Ralf Seitz and Ben Poucher combined to make our stay there efficient and enjoyable. Kurt Oberle at High and Dry Boatworks got our bottom blasted and painted. Willis Marine in Huntington and Gurney’s Resort and Marina in Newport were superb hosts. Cat’s affiliation with the American Sailboat Racing Foundation provided critical support. None of this would have been possible without the support of my dear friends Billy and Laura Newport. There were many more friends – some of which we met along the way and eased our passage in ways that frankly amazed us – that made us feel incredibly fortunate to have started this journey with so much good will.
This is just the first step for Kent Racing. Thanks for following us…keep tuned to this station. There is more to come.