Looking back on my racing IC24s in the windswept waters off St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands this past spring, it’s difficult to say which of my bone-headed mishaps stung most. Yes, it might’ve been the moment the spinnaker pole went totally astray during a hectic kite drop and crowned me upside the cranium. I hadn’t seen such stars since my old college-football days, laid out reaching for a pass over the middle.
Then again, there was the instant when we jibed in a barrel of breeze and, in an attempt to gracefully swing the mainsheet from port to starboard, I forgot to let go. That one left me flat on my back in the cockpit with my wind knocked out. Woof.
Or was it re-tweaking my testy rotator cuff grinding a winch after a freak injury just a couple of months before? The one that elicited this observation from my physical therapist when I’d told him of my sailing plans: “I don’t think that’s such a great idea.”
So much pain. So hard to choose. So different from what I’d envisioned.
After all, when the plan had been hatched the previous summer, it was a glorious one indeed. I’ve been racing J/24s off Newport, Rhode Island, with old pals Ian Scott and Dave Reed for some four decades now. Every so often, we load Ian’s Crack O’ Noon onto the trailer to compete in a North American or World Championship event. This was a different out-of-town exercise altogether: to charter an IC24 for a week to sail the St. Thomas Yacht Club’s annual International Regatta.
The IC24s are a Caribbean phenomenon. They’re modified J/24s that have been refitted and tamped down; the revamped cockpit means no hiking out, and a blade jib has replaced the big genoa to depower the sail plan. We’re not exactly the world’s flashiest J/24 sailors, but we’ve logged some serious miles. We reckoned that mastering an IC24 would be easy-peasy. Shorts and T-shirts on the racecourse, plenty of cold beers after. Who wouldn’t want to be us?
This rather cavalier attitude was reinforced on the practice day before the main event commenced, in about 12 to 15 knots of wafting Caribbean breeze, as we spun the boat around the buoys without drama. Afterward, however, while sipping brews on the yacht-club lawn, there were murmurs about the impending conditions. It was apparently going to get windy. It didn’t quite occur to me that if the locals were concerned, I should be as well.
The next morning, the big easterly trades—belting in at a solid 25 knots, gusting higher—and a harsh dose of reality arrived at exactly the same time.
How did it all go sideways? Let us count the ways. Dave had recruited his son, Tim, to join us, but we were one of the few four-man crews in the 21-boat fleet. We didn’t think that sailing without a fifth crewman would handicap us, but we were constantly on our ear without the additional human ballast (guilty of being not only overconfident, but also overpowered).
Then, things began to break: the boom vang and the base of our mainsheet swivel block being the most egregious gear failures. We compounded the damage with some dumb, unforced errors: a blown jibe that resulted in a spinnaker wrapped as tightly as possible around the headstay, a jib halyard that skied to the mast head when the shackle somehow came undone (we’d even taped it).
Meanwhile, the races kept on coming, fast and furious, five a day over three days, bang-bang. And the wind? It never faltered. As we nursed the boat around the buoys, our results plummeted. We slowly, inexorably inched our way toward the back of the fleet. It was humbling. Thank heavens the beer remained chilled.
In the aftermath, there was time for reflection. Not for the first time, I was reminded that I’m not getting any younger, and it even occurred to me that I might be getting a little long in the tooth for this particular game. You can still sail without racing, right?
Then again, I’d survived. Ian called a few weeks later to say that it was time to get Crack O’ Noon back in the water for the season ahead. Was I in?
Was I ever.
Herb McCormick is a CW editor-at-large.
