L
ee slapped herself on her bottom. It took me a couple of seconds to figure out what she was trying to communicate: "Oh, I get it," I finally said out loud, although I was sure she could not hear me. "The anchor is on the bottom!" She was on the bow, I was at the helm, and we were trying to set a square line for the start of my club's winter race series. The wind was up, the engine was running, and hand signals were the only way to communicate. Her next signal was a thumbs-down. Did that mean she didn't like where the anchor was dropped? "It means back down," she shouted over the noise of the headwind and the engine. "And, like, this means more revs," she yelled as she pointed down and spun her index finger around in circles. "OK, makes sense," I shouted back as I put the gear shift in reverse and advanced the throttle. Of course the boat didn't back down in a straight line, with the stern veering off to port, first from prop walk and then from the wind blowing the bow to starboard. But we did manage to set the anchor more or less in the right direction, and when the dust settled we had a starting line that was more or less square to the wind. "Next time we'll do it under sail, and it will be, like, much easier," Lee suggested as she came back to the cockpit. "Maybe, Lee, but I don't think I could luff up and stop in exactly the right spot. Powering up to where we want the anchor to set worked OK this time."
LATITUDE / TIM
'Invictus' prowls the starting area at the Westpoint Regatta in July.
Page 90 •
Latitude 38
• November, 2017
"Using the engine is cheating," Lee scolded. "I do it under bare poles. First, sail well upwind of where you want to anchor, then take down sails, then drift under bare poles down to the exact spot you want, then let the anchor go over the stern." "Over the stern?" I questioned. "Sure. Because on a race boat the anchor should be stowed aft anyway. Also, you get very precise positioning, because even under bare poles you can
For anchoring, the person on the bow is in charge. Lee did this via a set of hand signals, most of them obvious. maneuver 20 or 30 degrees either side of dead downwind. And, like, the best part is that you can feel the boat yanked to a stop when the rode fetches up, so you know the hook is set. Then you can re-run the rode to the bow and flip the boat around so it rides bow first." "Kind of like what I did when I had to do a Mediterranean mooring with a charter boat in the Caribbean," I confessed. "It was a boat with a ton of prop walk and a small rudder, and I knew I'd mess up in front of all the tourists at the downtown quay if I tried to back in. So I came in bow first, lowered the anchor from the stern when we were still a good distance off, and tied the bow to the quay." "Like, that's not a real Med moor," said Lee. "Of course not. But then I slacked off the bow, pulled the boat out with the
ster n anchor, then swapped the bow and stern lines and pulled it back in stern first. Not as slick as backing in perfectly on the first try, but I know my limitations."
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e were ahead of schedule for signaling the start of the race, but still had some work to do. Actually, it's a fairly minimal task. To make things easy on the volunteer race committee, my club starts the race at 1 p.m. exactly, and if anyone needs to know the precise time for their countdown they can look at their GPS. So all we had to do on the RC boat was choose a course and find the right flags. Then it was just a matter of blowing a whistle every five minutes and calling back premature starters on the VHF. "I can never understand why they need six people on the RC boat to run a regatta," Lee remarked. "I mean, when you have a GPS for time and VHF for communications, why do they still insist on using 17th-century naval signaling technology?" "I guess some folks still like to be salty," I speculated. "Flags and guns. But keeping it simple is the best way to make it easy for volunteers. That's why they tagged me to bring my boat, and they tagged you to be in charge of the starting line. But they usually recruit a cruiser to provide the boat and the anchor, and with this division of labor, the cruiser volunteer doesn't have to know anything about racing or setting a starting line; they just have to have a boat. Sometimes they even recruit a powerboater to do this. When you have a stinkpot, it's the one thing you can do to get powerboaters to like you."
