by Julie Hartwig
May 2008
I have now participated in five Bay to Bay Races; a small number in the big picture (2010 was the 30th race), but an achievement nonetheless. My first two races (2004 and 2005) were as crew on Rhoma II, a Sabre 22 and the other three (2008 to 2010), as crew on Flying Fox, an RL28. Both boats were owned and skippered by local TCB sailors Roy and Penny Yeeles and sailing in Division Four (aka, the “Old Clunkers” Division).
Flying Fox is a regular entrant in the event, with the 2010 race being her 20th. The 2008 race saw “Foxy” record her best ever results with wins in Type 1 Monos Overall on PBH, Division Four Monos on PBH, and RL28 class wins on both PBH and CBH.
Each of my five races has been different, with “Huey” managing to insert a few twists peculiar to Fraser Island in BoM’s weather forecast. Over the 30-year history of the race, all manner of weather conditions have been experienced, from “drifters” to “blowing dogs off chains”. 2005 was notable for the former, with about 10 miles out of the total 58 being sailed and the rest done under motor as the fleet proceeded up the Strait looking for wind.
2006 was notable in that “Huey” dished up a 30-knot northerly on the Saturday that resulted in a fair amount of “carnage” before the fleet reached Garry’s. My partner Jon and I were cruising up to Garry’s in our Cole 28 keelboat as a support vessel and suffered the indignity of being dismasted at S38, just south of the Snout Point leads; the entire fleet bashed past while we grappled with our bit of “carnage”. Thankfully, the 2010 race was sailed in ideal conditions: lighter SW/S winds early, building to S/SE 15-20 knots later on both days.
The Bay to Bay is usually a “down wind” race, run at a time of year when south-easterly breezes prevail. Four of my five races have been “down winders” and while this presents a spectacular spinnaker start for spectators, it presents a lot of hard work for the crews, especially those charged with controlling the “kites”.
I have a “love-hate” relationship with spinnakers. Spinnakers are things of beauty and very
useful “rags” when things are going well. But when things go wrong, they usually go wrong very quickly, resulting in blasphemy-inducing “wine glasses”, spectacular “round-ups” and, on occasion, the afore-mentioned “carnage”, including broken rigs and crew overboard. Consequently, the ratio of love to hate in my relationship with spinnakers runs at about 20 percent love and 80 percent hate and the former converts to the latter whenever things are out of control and back again when things are under control.
The love-hate relationship usually gets its first workout when the skipper (owner Roy) utters the dreaded “S” word to the bowman (my partner Jon) and the spinnaker bag is dragged up on deck. While this is happening, the skipper doles the crew’s cockpit responsibilities: who is pulling the kite up, who is tailing, who is winching, and once it’s up, who has control of the brace and sheet. With crew already allocated to port and starboard winches for upwind works, responsibilities during a spinnaker hoist are usually allocated on the same basis, and what you get—sheet or brace—normally depends on which side the pole is set. On the occasion following, we were setting a starboard pole and since I had the port side of the cockpit, I scored the sheet, while the port crew had starboard and scored the brace.
Back to the kite set. While the bowman is organising the pole, there is usually a lot of shouting between foredeck and cockpit as the control lines are set up: the pole is attached to the brace and mast, then “topped” and the downhaul is attached. On Flying Fox, this task is simplified because Skipper Roy has thankfully labelled all of the control lines. The confusion kicks in when our bowman confuses everyone by calling the downhaul a “kicker”.
With the pole set up, the sheet is attached to the spinnaker’s clew and when the bowman is ready, the skipper gives the order to “get her up”. The crew on the halyard (starboard side) pulls like stink while the helmsman tails (with the tiller between his knees). The port crew (yours truly) is standing by with the winch handle to grinds the halyard the rest of the way up when the halyard crew runs out of puff. Halyard up, the starboard crew jumps back on the brace just in time to receive instructions to trim the pole, while the trimmer (me) takes the slack out of the sheet.
It is at this point that one of two things can happen. Either the kite will fill with a satisfying crack or it will flog because it has gone up with a “wine glass” in it. This is a bowman’s worst
nightmare because there is nothing quite as disheartening to a bowman than to watch a spinnaker that he thought was perfectly packed, knit itself into more knots than a macramé wall hanging. Much shouting usually ensues as the bowman tries to untangle the flogging mess. Some skippers will add to the confusion by roaring at the crew, but thankfully, ours obviously knows that offloading on the bowman is a fruitless waste of verbal energy and, while quietly cursing under his breath, allows him to get on with the job of sorting the mess out.
The halyard, pole and sheet are all eased, the sheet is unclipped, the clew untangled and the sheet reattached. Then the halyard is cranked up again, the pole brought aft and “crack”, with a bit of trimming, the kite sets perfectly. They do say perfection takes a bit of practice!
The secret to avoiding wineglasses is in packing the spinnaker and there is a definite art to this. Simply stuffing all that pretty-coloured nylon into its sail bag is a sure-fire order for a double-sized wineglass to go! I was taught – by our bowman – that the easiest way to ensure you don’t knit your spinnaker is to start at the head and feed the edge of the sail through your fingers until you reach one of the clews. Repeat this along the foot until you reach the other clew and again up the other luff until you reach the head again. Then you simply gather the three corners together – making sure that you don’t twist them – and stuff
all the sail cloth into the bag, fold the three corners on top and tie together with the sail bag’s pull cord. The theory behind this method of packing is that if you have three straight sides, the spinnaker cannot possibly go up with a wineglass in it. However, because spinnakers are often packed in the confines of a cramped cabin where there is nary enough room to swing a cat, let alone spread out half an acre of sail cloth, there are no guarantees that a spinnaker will come out of the bag cleanly.
There are other ways of packing spinnakers, including socks and bottomless buckets with rubber bands, both of which are pretty much guaranteed to eliminate wineglasses because the head of the sail is fed through both sock and bucket and the clews poke out the bottom. Most packers of spinnakers are usually quite finicky about the method they use and tend to get a bit stroppy if other people pack their spinnakers, so it is a job best left to those who put the damned things up and pull ‘em down.
Two other crew members are vital when it comes to flying spinnakers: the crew controlling the sheet (usually me) and the brace. These two crew work in tandem, with the brace doing the opposite of the trimmer. In my first Bay to Bay (thankfully run in light winds), I was handed a spinnaker sheet and given a crash course in trimming. The instructions went something like this: “Watch the luff (that’s the edge that comes down from head to pole) constantly; if it starts to curl or collapse, give the sheet a good tug until the curl pulls out, then ease the sheet until the luff is on the verge of curling. Keep your other eye on the masthead wind vane. If the wind moves forward, ask the brace trimmer to move the pole forward and sheet on; if the wind moves aft, ask the brace trimmer to move the pole aft and ease the sheet.”
It sounded simple and it mostly was. After five Bay to Bays I’ve become a competent trimmer, but the operative and often ignored word in those original instructions was CONSTANTLY. Take your eye off a spinnaker, even for a split second, and, like the watched pot that won’t boil, it will inevitably collapse the moment your attention is diverted elsewhere. This results is loud bellows of “SHEET ON!” from the bowman or helmsman, often both. The problem with the Bay to Bay is that there is usually some other poor bugger who has done just that and the resulting round-up is guaranteed to make a spinnaker trimmer take their eye off the luff.
The situation with round-ups is particularly hairy when several boats are running close alongside each other in boisterous seas. This often happens from Inskip Point to Fig Tree, along South White Cliffs and on the run up along Big Woody Island to the finish at Urangan. Everyone is trying to hold it together because if you round-up in this situation, the risk of collision is massive. Being the leeward boat protects your port side, but if you round-up you risk collecting the boat to starboard. Being the windward boat means you can round-up without hitting anyone else, but you risk being collected by the line of boats to leeward. The worst place to be is in the middle of the line because then you are “piggy in the middle” and liable to cop it from both sides. It’s a bit like being the bottom card in a house of cards. If you make a mistake, the whole lot falls down on top of you. In these situations, it is very hard to keep your eyes “in the boat”.
Running in such close proximity with other boats can be terrifying and exhilarating in equal measures and it often pays to have one crew keeping an eye on the boats ahead, around and behind you. If there is a wind shift, the boats behind you will get it first and en masse round-ups astern usually gives you a warning that you are in the firing line for something unpleasant and therefore time to prepare. On board “Foxy” our preparations run to the issuing of the instruction to “dump everything except the pole”.
The wind, however, is its own master and sometimes, no matter how much attention you pay to the luff, the wind will suddenly shift forward a few points and the boat will swoop into a round-up before you’ve had time to register that your are rounding up. Such a thing happened to Foxy in this year’s race. We were running on a broad reach off the Bluff under the big shouldered masthead symmetrical kite, the wind was blowing a steady 15 knots out of the southeast and while the sea state was a bit lumpy with a metre or so of slop rolling up the strait, we were comfortable and in control.
Point three of a second later a big wind shift turned it all to marshmallow and Foxy had swooped into a massive round-up. She simply dug her port side into the sea and powered up towards the wind. The kite was flogging so hard the rig was vibrating through the boat. The trimmer’s first instinct is to hang on and sheet the sail on but this is the worst thing you can do. However, the correct action – dumping the sheet – can be quite a hurdle to get over, especially when the boat is on its ear and you’re busy doing the ole “one hand for the ship” stuff until that initial “swoop” up to windward has flattened out. Once the sheet is dumped, the kite really starts to flog. At the back of the bus, the skipper is trying to steer her back on course and while he’s doing that, I’m trying to get the kite under control. Almost there, then round-up number two happens. Identical outcome. A third round-up later and we finally get things back together.
No more than two minutes have passed since the first round-up, but it feels like half an hour. The adrenalin is really pumping, the heart is hammering, I’m breathing hard from the effort of trying to wrestle the spinnaker back under control and another five percent has converted from love to hate. I finally had to give the sheet to the bowman, who’d come aft, because I just couldn’t handle the weight on it anymore. With the kite settled once more, we were again romping along and when the boat speed suddenly clocks 9.4 knots, five percent converts from hate to love. That’s when spinnakers can be exhilarating.
The next morning, we have a dreadful tide-affected start (the less said the better) that sees us finally get over the line 20 minutes after the rest of our division and only four minutes ahead of the flyers in Division Two. These “desperados” very quickly sail over the top of us until there are only half a dozen boats behind us. In an inspired decision, our skipper decides to forego the big-shouldered symmetrical kite in favour of the MPS. This magic sail gives us a real advantage because when things get a little “shy”, we simply ditch the pole, attach the tack to the bow, sheet her in hard and sit back and watch the round-up action going on around us. We make massive gains and by the time we open up the Strait at McKenzie’s Landing, we’ve clawed our way past 20-odd boats and are in amongst the tail-end Division Three boats.
When the wind continues to move forward and other boats around us are getting rid of their kites, we still have one more trick up our sleeve – a flat “tallboy” reacher that allows us to continue clawing our way through the field. The tallboy is trimmed exactly the same way as a spinnaker and requires the same constant attention, but it sets like a big genoa and is an infinitely easier sail to manage when the wind is on or forward of the beam. When other boats are dropping their spinnakers and reverting to their tiny headsails to reach up along South White Cliffs, we are bowling along quite comfortably with our “tallboy” and gaining heaps of ground. In the gusty conditions we encounter along Big Woody Island, where the wind is aft of the beam, we simply pole it out and unfurl the genoa to run wing-and-wing and easily hold our own against boats flying kites.
By the time we cross the finish line at Urangan, there are 31 boats behind us. Being told by the guys on Blackjack that we were “awesome along Big Woody; we could only just hang onto you” made up for our humiliating start and proves that sometimes the spinnakers are best left in their bags.
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