Max Ebb — Forecasting Time
It’s getting hard to find crew who know what to do with a spinnaker pole. All the hot young race crew are sailing on the hot new boats with asymms tacked to the end of a bowsprit. My crew has suggested a retrofit, but my boat was designed during the dark years of the IOR, and it’s just a little too heavy to bring the apparent wind forward on a run. So I have to square the chute back with a pole.
On the other hand, bearing off to a run is one of the secret pleasures of sailing an older boat. The wind goes aft, the air seems to warm up, the deck stays dry, and the crew is rewarded for the bash to windward on the previous leg. Not so with a fast sprit boat, where the apparent wind is hardly ever aft of the beam.
“Like, you’re just showing your age, Max,” Lee Helm scolded me while I was browsing some recent photos on the yacht club bulletin board of Transpac racers crossing the Diamond Head finish line. I hadn’t realized that I was actually thinking out loud, and Lee had been eavesdropping from close astern.
“Hey, you still get to fly the asymm from a pole and sail deep on the way to Hawaii,” she assured me. “When the wind is up and the swells are surfable, there’s a point on the ocean polars where a deep run is best VMG. It complicates the jibes a little compared to a symmetrical jibe, but, like, that’s what good crew are for.”
Sprit envy may have been part of it, but there were other things making me think “new boat.” If I was ever going to race my own boat to Hawaii, I needed a boat that would get me there before the parties were over. One of our members, a foredeck specialist and veteran of more Transpacs and Pacific Cups than he can count, had kindly stapled all the pages of the Notice of Race together and hung them from a nail next to the bulletin board for easy perusal. He noticed me reading it and came over from the bar to join the conversation.
“I got more time logged steering a broach coach with the pole tripped than some of these kids have on the water,” he boasted.
“What is this ‘FTCF’ scoring?” I asked, looking up from the Notice of Race. I naively thought there might be a simple answer.