A Test of Will
by Janet Riesman
The Stonington Harbor Yacht Club is three years old, has yet to complete building its club house, but has launched what promises to be one of the best races on the ECSA racing calendar. Michael Hennessey and his race committee came up with a terrific idea for a distance race and did an admirable job of organizing a great event. The R2R raises ECSA racing to a whole new level and it is on par with Narragansett Bay’s new Ida Lewis Distance Race and YRA-LIS’s Block and Vineyard Races. The challenge is to sail the length of Long Island Sound from east to west and back again. The start and finish lines were just north of Race Rock, the turning point near Execution Rocks off Manhasset Neck, the distance about 160 miles, and the strategy wide open to the wiles of navigators and tacticians.
No doubt the organizers would have liked a greater turn out than the twelve boats that signed up for the race. But Mother Nature was not cooperative. Thursday, the day before the race, a southerly wind gusting to 40 knots kept possible participants from making the trek from their respective home ports. The twelve soon dwindled to ten. The R2R race conflicted with the Thames Yacht Club’s popular Commodore's Trophy Race September 12th and, of course, Off Soundings is only a week away. The organizers are now considering a different time of the year for next year’s race in hopes of drawing more racers-perhaps the last weekend in September. Needless to say they deserve a fine turn out.
After a slight delay to accommodate late arrivals making their way to the starting line against a strong 25-knot westerly, PHRF Non-Spinnaker, Double-handed and Spinnaker Classes were off. Since the race started just after the beginning of ebb current at the Race, the question was whether to tack north towards Long Sand Shoal to avoid the strongest flow of easterly-moving current or to seek possibly stronger winds in the center of the Sound. In our class (PHRF Spinnaker), Gremlin, Merrythought, and Chaos started at the northern end of the line and got a good angle on the wind and current just south of the Shoal. We on Intrepid took the southern route in hopes of finding stronger winds, but quickly got pushed toward the Long Island shore and had to tack back to hold our position in the center of the Sound.
With the wind averaging about 20-25 knots, it was hard to believe the predictions of Seth Saslo, our 14-year-old meteorologist, now back in school in Pennsylvania. He called us Thursday night before the race with his own custom weather report (done, of course, in addition to the usual ninth-graders’ load of homework), based on his analysis of information from NOAA, Weather Underground, Dial-a-Buoy and other public sites. He predicted the wind would shift to the east during the night on Friday, and then he warned, “you better get out of dodge by Saturday noon!” We must finish the race early Saturday (like that was possible) because by mid day there would not be a breath of air on Long Island Sound. But, with the wind howling late into the night, we soon forgot his warning.
By the spectacular sunset Friday night, all of our competitors had disappeared. What is it about distance races? There you are jockeying for position at the start, with no room to move, and, within an hour after the start, the fleet disappears-each on their own self-styled road to victory. Throw in a mark rounding, and suddenly there they all are again, then away into the night they go. As the Sound narrows down around Execution Rocks to a bottleneck, commercial traffic seemed to increase. We could hear tugs and barges hailing some of our competitors on the radio to determine their courses and we knew that, though we seemed alone all day, we were back in the pack. John Niewenhous’s Loose Fish was the first to round at 22:51 and was quickly followed by the rest of the fleet: Gremlin, Merrythought, Chaos, Lunatic Fringe, ourselves on Intrepid all with in the hour before midnight and then Dame of Sark, Indigo, and Moana Haku just after midnight.