on board

The Win

Ryan Finn gives us a look inside his recent victory at the Port Medoc race in his rebuilt and refit Mini “Myrna Minkoff.” 

So, here I am at the start of my first mini race in Europe.  I’m at a place I’ve never been to called Port Medoc, with a bunch of people I’ve never met.  It’s sunny and I’m waiting nervously for an e-mail from my agent Beth Perry regarding my EPIRB MSSI # to give to Classe Mini.

It’s been almost a year since I begun a total refit on my Finot prototype #252,  Myrna Minkoff in preparation for the Mini Transat, a race that starts in less than two weeks.  My plan was to do this race, but I massively underestimated the time it would take to build a new mast a boom from blank tubes, build sails, move chainplates, replace all the running rigging, redo the deck layout for the new sail plan, and a thousand other jobs that bubble to the surface while you are methodically bringing a race boat down to reset mode and then back up.  It’s been a tremendous learning experience, and I’ve had a lot of support from in-kind sponsors, friends and family to get here.  Unfortunately I had no in-kind sponsor for time, or a counterfeit money machine which would have been just as good, except they probably would have arrested me at a gas station in Slidell trying to buy a role of Lottery tickets.

Anyway, Beth delivers and Classe mini gives me the green light.  That is of course after a million small fire drills, all dealing with race bureaucracy, including an impromptu physical at a doctor’s office the night before the race start and having to go to the top of my mast to take a picture of my boat from above minutes before the start gun (tiny whistle actually). 

Tweet! They’re off!  At the time my transom was facing the committee boat about fifty yards away and I was sorting through the race instructions to figure out the start sequence, but the fleet had better ideas and sailed across the line.  Once I noticed this they were well on their way.  I crossed the line, saw where everyone was going, but wasn’t totally sure myself, and wondered why nobody was hoisting kites.  I put mine up, passed a few boats, and then realized why nobody put their kites up.  Threw in a gybe, doused immediately and headed up around the mark we had all just rounded.  

On this close reaching angle I was able to play with some of Myrna’s new go fast features.  It was blowing about 8-10 knots and boats were putting up code zeros of different types.  I had just doused the spinnaker and didn’t feel like adding to the chaos because I knew this was a short leg before it turned into a beat west of Point de Grave.   So I popped down below, pulled the mast straight with the prebend adjuster,  eased the back stay way off until the jib was sagged out like a Star boat, and put on a ton of lower check stay to power up the main.  To my delight we had speed on everyone and no need for a sail change.  I was just behind Dan Dytch on a similar proto and we had a good light air beat to the first offshore mark.  The fleet went inshore, Dan and I went offshore, switched tacks a couple times.  I went right, he went left and I rounded first. 

From there it was a drag race reaching in 10 knots of wind.  Basically I went directly down rumbline focused more on changing sails than changing course.  First gear stacked, then jib ease, then check stay, then fifty pumps of water ballast, then dump it again, then 100 pumps and code zero, then fractional spinnaker, ballast dump etc…  As we sailed down the Aquitaine coast, I was pumping and dumping ballast constantly depending on wind strength and the sail that was up.  It’s one of the conditions where a canting keel boat would be a luxury to sail. 

Boats began heading off in different directions.  Dan stayed behind me, but seemed to be having some troubles and by late evening hours I couldn’t see anyone behind me.  I found out later that Dan had pilot problems and had to retire.  Into the early morning hours as we approached the BA mark off of Bayonne the wind died completely.  An hour before sunrise I could see navlights pulling up behind me.  Then we were all stuck together in no wind ten miles or so from BA.  After 80 miles or so of racing, a restart.

With sunrise came a light SE wind and I pinched up to stay inside of everyone.  I rounded the mark 15 minutes ahead of the next boat and as the wind had been steadily going left I sailed east of rumbline on starboard tack, anticipating what would become a beat back.  Great, a 100+ mile beat in a mini.  Yay.  It shifted quickly to just west of north, and I rode the header offshore to get away from the coast which has a constant swell rolling into it.  This is a surfers coast and there is always a swell that makes any wave action totally disorganized.  You have chop at different angles within a constant swell, and it requires a bit of work to keep a mini going well upwind in these conditions.  The wind was now a steady 15 knots and I went about 20 miles offshore before tacking on a header.  I wanted the lift, but I also wanted to keep my options open and stay on top of anyone who went inside.  I got a nice lift out of it though and after an hour of going to port tack I was almost pointing at the BXA mark at the mouth of the Gironde River 80 miles away.  I sailed like this for most of the beat sleeping a lot with the autopilot off and the helm balanced.

 The next morning I saw some expansive grey clouds to the NW with rain and certainly another wind shift.  To prepare for what could be more than 25 knots I tightened the inboard V1s and D1s, put in loads of prebend down below, eased the forestay a couple inches to get more bend and prepared the reefing lines.   The squall hit with a little more than 20 knots, but the header put the boat at a funny angle to the goofy ass Aquitaine wave action and I put in a reef to settle things down a bit.  This did that, but I was not happy with the helm or how the boat was pointing, and when the wind dropped to 18 I reefed the jib and shook out the reef in the mainsail.  The mainsail is very large for the size of the boat, but you need a lot of power aft on my boat to keep her pointing well in confused waves, which seems to be what the Aquitaine coast is all about.  What worked really well here was the reefed jib and making the mainsail board flat with the head twisted off, but also with quite a bit of outhaul eased to keep drive in the lower part of the sail.  I was pointing well (for a mini) and rode the header for a while.  The sea state at this point was ridiculous.  The boat was slamming like mad and waste high chop was coming from everywhere with the short period of wind shifts we experienced.  All of that was being broad sided by the constant swell.  I waited patiently for my angle and tacked out again to get away from the coast into deeper water. Part two Monday. Photos by Bruno Bouvry.