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01.29.2008
New Article: "Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war"
August 2006 Issue of Sailing Magazine
SWANDEVOUS ANYONE???
By Charles J. Doane
"Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war"
--William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Exploring the nature of friendly competition at a Caribbean cruising rally
We were a wolf among the lambs is what we were. Or so we liked to think. Of all the boats appearing at this hybrid event---the 2006 ClubSwan BVI Rendezvous and (Sort of) Regatta---ours was the only one being actively campaigned through all (or most) of the regular Caribbean racing season. Indeed, Avocation, a Swan 48 built in 1997, was on something of a roll. In spite of the fact that she had an inexperienced pay-to-play crew that had sailed together for only one day previous, and that no member of this crew, not even the bowman, was younger than 48, she'd just taken second place in a competitive spinnaker class at the Heineken Regatta in St. Martin. Not surprisingly then, on joining the boat at the Bitter End Resort on North Sound on the island of Virgin Gorda, I found her entire forward end was jammed full of brand-new racing sails. But Hank Schmitt of Offshore Passage Opportunities and his partner Jan Breyer, Esq., of Minneapolis, Minnesota, were definitely downplaying any competitive twists that might be teased out of this ClubSwan gig. "Come on down," Hank had proclaimed on the phone. "We're taking a week off between the Heineken and the BVI Spring Regatta. We're gonna hang out and get treated like Swan owners." Still, he did seem a little pleased with himself after I arrived at the Bitter End to find he had just that afternoon aced Phase I of the ClubSwan Rendezvous Laser Regatta with three firsts, a second, and a fourth. "I was over early the last time," he noted with a smile.
I should explain about Hank. He's one of those laid-back people who nonetheless are always pressing forward, like a human perpetual-motion machine. I first met him in 1992 during an event not unlike this one---a cruising rally called the America 500 that Jimmy Cornell organized to commemorate the quincentennial of Columbus's first voyage to the New World. A former oil-rig worker/commercial fisherman/yacht-rigger/diver, Hank sold everything he owned and dragged his Tayana 37 Hunk-a-Schmitt through the streets of his hometown, Huntington, New York, on a trailer in the local Columbus Day parade in order to raise the money to get to the start line in Spain. We first got to know each other in the Canary Islands, where I helped him re-rig his boat after he dismasted her pushing her too hard at night under spinnaker en route to Madeira. But the day after the Laser competition, Hank was definitely back in cruising mode. There was a "fun" fleet race scheduled, from North Sound to Jost van Dyke, in which all 16 Swans in the ClubSwan squadron nonchalantly participated. We had a good aggressive start aboard Avocation---there's something about a start that always brings out the predator in Hank---but then he got indifferent as soon as we were outside North Sound. The big boats around us---a couple of Swan 80s and 56s, plus a 53---started popping chutes straight off. "Forget about that," said Hank. Whereupon he retired to the lee rail, where there was some shade, and tucked into a trashy spy novel. It did get tight in the end. We had one sistership in the fleet, another Swan 48 named named Quero-Quero, which had come all the way from Portugal. When they swooped in from deep right field as we turned down the channel between Jost and Tortola, things suddenly seemed to matter again. We were sailing wing-and-wing, without a pole, and up to that point had been happy to just let the jib flop around pointlessly when the boat rolled in the mild northeast swell. But soon Quero, which was also sailing wing-and-wing, was close behind us. "They're putting up a pole," I announced grimly from behind the binoculars.
Jan at once started making jokes about us putting up our pole, hoping to inspire us, or at least humiliate us. But we (that would be me, Hank, and Jan's buddy, Bob Whitlock, another attorney from Minneapolis) pretty much ignored him. Sloth and indolence was the order of the day. And it paid off! We were neck and neck with Quero all the way down the coast of Jost. In the end we beat them by just a boat length at the finish line, the exact location of which was revealed by the Race Committee only on a need-to-know basis---that is, once we were within 50 yards of it. The next day, when both Jan and Bob started flipping out over what to enter in the Hors d'Ouevres Contest, I knew all bets were off. I was also getting worried about my nose, as I'd woken up in the middle of the night sneezing blood all over everything and now felt pretty crappy. That afternoon, during a scrumptious barbecue on a burger barge moored in White Bay off Peter Island, I solicited advice from Diana McConnell, of Nautor USA, the acting Fearless Leader of our Swandevous. She pointed me at Ira Zaslow, a veterinarian crewing aboard Midnight Sun, a Swan 46 from San Francisco. Ira, together with Bob Beltrano, an airline pilot and owner of Nai'a, a Swan 53, delivered a diagnosis of sinusitis. "Happens to us all the time," explained Bob, whose wife Kristen is also an airline pilot. "It's a hazard of the trade." The following morning we decided to make a pit stop at Road Town, on Tortola, before rejoining the rest of the Swans at Marina Cay, just across from Beef Island. As soon as we tied up in Road Town, Jan and Bob trotted off in search of ingredients for their Horse Ovaries. Meanwhile, I went on a Plugs 'n Drugs Run, looking for some antibiotics for my sinus disease, plus a new spark plug for our tender's outboard motor, which was also on the disabled list.
Unfortunately, I struck out on both counts. But Jan and Bob were in the Zone. They found everything they needed---mangos, bacon, cream cheese, plus several other important condiments. As soon as we got to Marina Cay, they hunkered down in the galley like a couple of kids with a new chemistry set. In short order they emerged again, displaying a bowl of brown goop they called Mango Curry Dip. They wouldn't let Hank or me actually taste it, but they did let us help garnish it, so it wouldn't look so brown and goopy. We paddled ashore to dinner that evening in our rubber duck like members of a cargo cult, holding aloft the sacred bowl of dip. There was lots of murmuring going on as the crews of the different boats sampled each other's offerings and evaluated their prospects. And the last crew to show up, Rui Saomarcos and company from our arch-rival Quero Quero, looked very smug as they plopped their Maderos Dip down on the table. But Jan and Bob weren't about to be intimidated. "We're looking good," announced Jan gravely after he tasted a bit of everything. "We are definitely in the running."
As for me, I was feeling much better, though I was still dribbling a bit of the red stuff. I decided maybe I didn't have sinusitis after all; that maybe I had just ruptured a blood vessel up my nose. (Note to self: No more free-diving on anchors while recovering from head colds.) ICAP{T}he morning of the penultimate day of the rendezvous, a Friday, the fleet sailed in company from Marina Cay back to the Bitter End. That afternoon there were three events scheduled: Phase 2 of the Laser competition, a GPS Treasure Hunt, plus a boule competition. Boule, FYI, is French for bocce ball, which is a game where old men in berets stand around tossing large balls at a much smaller ball. To prepare for the Laser racing Hank started fasting and declined to eat lunch. Meanwhile, our new partner-in-crime, Guilia King, from Chicago, the first of the crew coming to race in the Spring Regatta, who had joined the boat the previous afternoon at Marina Cay, convinced Jan that we needed to field a Treasure Hunt team. Jan convinced me I should be part of it. The rules of the treasure hunt were simple. Each team was given a small outboard-powered skiff, a handheld GPS, and a list of five waypoints in the North Sound area with some clues about what to look for at each location. You could run the waypoints in any order, except the last one had to be the fifth one, where a hidden bottle of rum awaited the winner. As soon as Jan, Guilia, and I hopped in our skiff, the blood lust was upon us. You can imagine then how outraged we were when we found, just two waypoints into the hunt, that the batteries in the GPS we'd been given had gone dead. "Protest! We've got to protest!" I insisted.
"No, wait!" declared Jan. And miraculously he produced a set of spare batteries from his daypack. We soon reached the fifth waypoint, a small beach on the Bitter End's waterfront, and spent 20 minutes searching there for that damn bottle of rum. Finally, though, we decided someone must have beaten us to it and so returned disconsolately to home base. "Congratulations!" announced the Hunt Coordinator as soon as he saw us. "You're the first team back. Did you find the rum?" Whereupon, even as our hopes started soaring again, there was much muttering and scratching of heads. Then we noticed some members of another team strolling down a waterfront trail, heads crooked over a GPS. In one of their hands was a bottle of rum. "Hey! Where'd you get that?" we demanded.
With looks of confusion upon their faces, our opponents admitted that the rum was the very first item they found on their peregrinations about the sound. As it was, Jan had to clap a hand over my mouth and dragged me kicking and screaming from the scene. Under the circumstances, we thought it best not to participate in the boules. ICAP{A}t dinner on Friday night, it was announced that Quero Quero had won the Hors d'Ouevres competition. This was a bitter blow. We looked forward to meeting them again on the water during the last event, a fleet race on Saturday around Virgin Gorda, so we could re-educate them as to our superiority. But they were content, it seemed, to rest on their laurels and did not make the start. Clearly, our own attitude toward this race was ambivalent. At least as far as spinnakers were concerned, we were not about to depart from the regime of Sloth & Indolence that had served us so well in the first race. On the other hand, Hank did not pull out his spy novel and spent much time sitting out on the windward rail, pretending it made a difference. The conditions were glorious, and Jan steered the whole race. From time to time he announced this is exactly what he had been working so hard for all these years.
The final awards dinner that night was like something from out of a fairy tale. Hank, who had finished with three firsts and a second the day before, was proclaimed King of the Lasers. Jan, Guilia, and I were hailed as Masters of the Treasure Hunt. The dessert pastries, appropriately, were crafted to look like miniature swans. The wine flowed freely. And in what seemed like a never ending series of serendipitous and somewhat magical coincidences, I met several folk from my sailing past whom I had not seen in years.
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