Max Ebb: Fight to the Finish
“Are we, like, across the line yet?” Lee was at the helm, and I was at my nav station. In this unusual reversal of roles, Lee was the skipper and I was navigator, and I was struggling with the user interface of my own expensive chartplotter, trying to determine if we had crossed the virtual finish line.
It was all part of my new strategy to keep expert crew, especially crew like naval architecture grad student Lee Helm, interested in racing on an older boat like mine. I had offered her the helm for the day, and also put her in charge of assembling some of her friends and colleagues as crew.
Lee, as expected, had come up with an enthusiastic bunch of academic misfits: May Day and Lilly Pond were from the ocean engineering department at the university, but neither of them were sailors. Stan Chun was a physics major, working his way through grad school at the custom metal shop in the local boatyard. He had done a few races to Hawaii, and was in charge of the foredeck. And Sal Manella, a biochem major and novice sailor who moonlights as a cook in a local upscale restaurant, was recruited to be in charge of sandwiches.
This crew would be a disaster on most races, but this event was different. It’s put on by a “paper” yacht club, a low-cost alternative to my brick-and-mortar club. No clubhouse, no guest docks, no dining room, and worst of all, no bar.
It was billed as a “gentleman’s race:” no spinnakers, no genoas and no marks to set. The finish line was just a latitude and longitude for each end of a virtual finish line.
“Bearing to the favored end?” Lee yelled down to me.
She could make my chartplotter dance, but I was at sea with it. I think I had accidentally hit the MOB button so all I could display was course and bearing to a point far astern.