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Off The Couch This weekend, your Ed got his fat ass off the Barca Lounger for a 67-mile race from Santa Barbara, CA around Santa Cruz Island to port and finish in Ventura Harbor aboard the still new Andrews 77 turbo sled Alchemy. Here is my mini report.
My right arm hurts. Usually that arm gets a good nightly workout, but wasn't ready for the task of muscling a 77' maxi sled around. And yes, these things require muscle, and skill and ability, especially at the pointy end. Even steering requires a bit of grunt, especially since Alchemy has the unique feature of being water ballasted. With a very impressive system that can fill up three tanks per side with 7,000 thousand pounds of water in about 40 seconds, the boat takes on a whole new persona with the equivalent of 30 extra bodies on the rail! I'm rusty, soft and getting old, and a boat like Alchemy makes it all so painfully obvious! The owners, Dick and Mary Compton, (who btw, could not be nicer folks) and the project manager Jim Yabsley, were nice enough to invite me to sail and have me steer a bit, so after driving upwind in the building breeze towards and around the west end of Santa Cruz Island, and then hauling ass off the breeze with the A3 kite up, my frigging arms hurt today!
But I'm sure the boys who grind and especially those in the front will laugh because they are the ones who really work, with the bow particularly busy, as these boats require constant sail changes to stay on polars. Mark Sims, one of the best bowmen anywhere, handled it all beautifully, and you take on a real appreciation for just how good these guys are. Start with the No. 1 jib, go to the code zero, to the No 2 jib, round the west end, up with the A3, peel to the job top, up with the A5, up with the A1, to the windseaker, then the A3, then Jib top. Get the picture? With kites set on nearly 40' spinnaker poles, and 100' hoists, there is a level of crewing that is simply mandatory to match the level of sophistication this boat has. The boat also has a retractable keel so that the boat can access most harbors. It is an incredibly slick system for raising and lowering, much of which was designed and put together by Compton and Yabsley. A word on this owner and crew are in order. I'm not sure I've seen an owner and his wife so involved and active on their boat. His lovely wife Mary was in the pit, doing a ton of work - a clear part of the team, and Dick was running all the systems, with knowledge, as far as I could tell, of every aspect of the workings of the boat. Impressive. When I got to the boat, I didn't know what to expect, but it was a low-key, friendly and fun group. I'm sure they thought I sucked, and they weren't wrong, but they kept it to themselves.
The boat is amazingly fast, and I think we hit 23 down the backside with the A3 up in about 25 true with local legend Gary Swenson steering. Have I mentioned that I've never sailed with anybody better than Gary? The one thing that stands out is just how fast the boat covers ground. We made it back from the east end of Santa Cruz Island to the finish in Ventura, a distance of 16 miles, in an hour and change. The performance numbers of this new generation of big boats really are phenomenal, and until you actually sail on one, you can't truly appreciate it. I
do know this: I am forever ruined for any kind of distance racing on nearly
anything other than this absolute rocket ship. This boat is the very definition
of Good Times.
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