Through Day 2 of Worlds

Today is Day 3 of the World Championship. Both Day 1 and 2 were particularly rough for almost all racers.

[I apologize for the XX’s and YY’s, parts of this are a draft for Sailing Anarchy’s front page.]

Light breezes continued to persist in Palermo, site of the 2008 International 5O5 World Championship. Fresh off their layday following the European Championships, sailors awoke to find conditions not dissimilar from what they had seen the previous week: a shifty easterly with winds not more than eight knots. Sensing the fleet’s disenchantment with the conditions, the fleet postponed ashore for an hour, allowing racers to grab a second cappuccino at the yacht club bar before heading out for the delayed start. The race lasted approximately 1.5 hours with it being taken by Pinnell and Gibson of GBR. Gorge and Schomaker (GER) finished second and Holger Jess & Scheder-Bieschin took third.

It was a particularly rough initial race for Team Interstate 95. We had a bit of communication problem in the prestart sequence and ended up on the wrong side of the gate launch, resulting in a DNS. We trudged downwind to watch the race from below the leeward mark. Needless to say, it was a long two hour race to be watching, not only because of the light wind, but also due to the poor result (a DNS, last place + 2 points).

Following the first race, the RC tried in vain to start another race, but after a recall and an abandonment, sailing was finished for the day at 16:30; the fleet threw up their kites and headed back ashore.

Saturday night we were taken out by Claudia, Andrea’s college friend. She took us to an area whose name translated to “Horse’s Shoes,” which was pretty much a very down-to-earth beach area completely devoid of the usual tourist venues. It was about 15 minutes from the club, about halfway back to the villa where we are staying. There we went to a really cool pseudo-outdoor (more or less an enclosed porch) restaurant that was the Sicilian equivalent of a crab house. Large paper tablecloths adorned the tables with the menu printed on them, and beers where an attractively priced 2 euro apiece (we actually drank white wine). The five of us started with a round of various crustaceans / shellfish, including clams, mussels, oysters, octopus, and sea urchins. The clams and mussels (as previously) were the highlights. Sea urchins were apparently the specialty of the place, and upon finding this out, I immediately wanted to try them. However, I must say, the sea urchin experience is a bit lacking. Granted, it was cool to watch the guy at the front counter opening them up, but each urchin only yields about 5 teaspoons of this pinkish, caviar-like meat – salty, poignantly tasting, but still good. Having never seen them served before, I had also ordered the pasta with sea urchin sauce, which ended up being pretty underwhelming. In the future, I’ll avoid the sea urchins and save my euros for the octopus. I recommend you do the same.

Following dinner, Claudia took us to a bar (again, not like a bar in the U.S.) for gelato. A few things really stuck out in my mind out of the entire experience. First, the dude serving the gelato was so well dressed that I know think of the frozen delight-serving profession as a masculine one. The Sicilian gentleman was dressed in a buttondown shirt with a (bit too wide) tie and a small navy blue hat similar to what a navy serviceman might wear aboard a battleship. With his sleeves rolled up, I was somewhat in awe as he scooped my pesche (peach) gelato onto my cone. Good stuff.

Also amusing was the payment system of the bar. I had encountered it way back when I originally visited Italy back in 2004, but I hadn’t seen it since my Russia trip in 2006, so the operation evoked memories of Soviet-style market operations. In this bar (which had a normal (coffee) bar, a gelaterria, and a wine store all under one roof), you go to the area from which you desire goods and services, order what you want, receive a printed receipt with your desired items, head to the register and pay, and then return to the original area to receive desired goods and services. Upon delivery, the server will put a small tear in the receipt so that it cannot be used again. In this bar, it was clear why this system was employed – so that one register could be used for the entire place. In Russia, I had been informed that the reason for this system was so that it would ensure that customers wouldn’t be given goods for which they wouldn’t be able to pay later on.

In other news, the Red Sox lost! Joy!

Sunday marked Day 2 of the 2008 International 5O5 World Championship. Sailors drudged away from the dock at 11:00 (having anticipated another early postponement) to get out to the racecourse to find a light 4-6 knots of breeze from the northeast. The first race of the day was started in this breeze and ended up taking a lot longer than expected. Midway through the second windward beat, the breeze dropped off to just above calm. Race winners Howie Hamlin and Mike Zinn (USA) narrowly beat the time limit of two hours by seventeen minutes. Normally accustomed to the strong winds of southern California, Hamlin and Zinn had built a crushing lead of more than six minutes over the nearest competitor. In fact, per the rules, the race committee scored more than seventy boats as DNF for failing to finish within one hour of the race winners. Second place was taken by XX and YY, with third going to ZZ and AA.
Team Interstate 95 was sadly among those scored DNF, making the race particularly frustrating since we had picked up five or six boats on the final downwind run.

Following Race 2, the wind clocked left about 100 degrees and built to a solid 8-10 knots from the north. The frowns on crews’ faces turned a bit, and many put back on the trapeze harnesses they had removed during the previous race. The race committee, fearful of another dying breeze, setup a particularly short course, with a beat only about a mile. The chop built back up a bit, and combined with the small course, lanes were hard to find. XXX took first, YYY took second, and ZZZ took third.

Team Interstate 95 fared alright, finishing somewhere in the back 10. We were particularly frustrated as we were fouled very hard by a Finnish boat at the leeward mark of the triangle. We were giving inside water a German boat (both of us on port) and the Finnish boat came barreling through, hitting the German boat and foolishly calling starboard. We ended up coming to a near stop, the outside of a three boat pileup. Needless to say, this threw off our game, and we ended up giving up a lot of boats we had just passed on the next upwind leg.

Following 3 races, the top five are as follows
1. X
2. Y
3. Z
4. Aa
5. Ab

Today is Day 3. 2 more races are scheduled. Breeze continues to be light and flaky. The Californians are growing restless; I fear a riot brewing.

Quote / thought of the day: [From an unnamed German business tycoon] “Sicily is very nice, we [Germany] should have bought it years ago.”