The Win
Ryan Finn gives us a look inside his recent victory at the Port Medoc race in his rebuilt and refit Mini “Myrna Minkoff.”
So, here I am at the start of my first mini race in Europe. I’m at a place I’ve never been to called Port Medoc, with a bunch of people I’ve never met. It’s sunny and I’m waiting nervously for an e-mail from my agent Beth Perry regarding my EPIRB MSSI # to give to Classe Mini.
It’s been almost a year since I begun a total refit on my Finot prototype #252, Myrna Minkoff in preparation for the Mini Transat, a race that starts in less than two weeks. My plan was to do this race, but I massively underestimated the time it would take to build a new mast a boom from blank tubes, build sails, move chainplates, replace all the running rigging, redo the deck layout for the new sail plan, and a thousand other jobs that bubble to the surface while you are methodically bringing a race boat down to reset mode and then back up. It’s been a tremendous learning experience, and I’ve had a lot of support from in-kind sponsors, friends and family to get here. Unfortunately I had no in-kind sponsor for time, or a counterfeit money machine which would have been just as good, except they probably would have arrested me at a gas station in Slidell trying to buy a role of Lottery tickets.
