Antigua extreme
A short update from our Gunboat/Antigua Sailing Week report before I go beat myself to pieces in the search for local wahoo…
Sustained 25 knots and 5-7 foot lump made Tuesday a serious hate mission for some boats, with blown out sails and other issues ending a good chunk of the fleets’ day early. In our 5-boat Multihull 1 Class, the Gunboat 62 Tribe pulled out during the first of two short races with halyard clutch problems, while the Gunboat 66 Coco De Mer headed home after tearing a reef block out of the main, unable to hoist the full sail or reef down further when the rest of the reef lines got tangled in the boom. On the big orange Phaedo we had a dream day, with full main and the masthead screacher getting us around the track in fine form, though the Tornado rock stars on the Puerto Rican Cucu Belle are proving able to beat us on corrected in most of the short races, and still hold a 3 point lead over Phaedo. Fortunately, this rare world sees no protests and very little ratings bitching – hitting 22.8 knots on the way to the finish somehow makes such concerns fade away. We have to hand it to Keke and the boys on Belle – a tangled screacher halyard forced them to send a man up the rig during the race yesterday or they were sailing to Guadaloupe, and the bastards sorted it out, sailed back upwind about 3 miles to get back to the course, and then sailed the remainder of the course to finish 2nd rather than getting a DNF…cojones de acero inoxidable on the Cuba/Rican team…
My big surprises thus far have come from my new position as tactician aboard Phaedo (it’s rare that I’m one of the more experienced inshore racers on a boat these days), and in the upwind performance of the big luxury cat. With both 8’ daggers down, this thing claws to windward like a grizzly bear, and we’re constantly chuckling at the charter punters screaming at us for sailing over them, thinking that a catamaran should be pointing far lower than we do. They do point higher, we let our boards and speed to the talking, and we still sail better angles in the big chop (12.3 knots upwind @44 degrees true in 5-7 foot waves works for us).
Bandwidth down here has killed any ideas we had of live streaming each day’s footage, but we’ve got tons of it, and we’ll be bringing you it all when we return to the states next week. Check out the results here, enjoy hundreds more Meredith Block photos in the thread, and video action here. Wednesday’s 30 knots is thankfully a layday, with four more races on Thursday and Friday it could be a battle to the final race…
