Yesterday evening I was in charge of running the race committee for the first Thursday Night Race of the sailing season. It's been raining for about a week straight, so I wasn't looking forward to it, but the clouds magically cleared yesterday morning and the day got sunny. I had lunch outside, even, and the sun on my skin was a treat. But as the afternoon progressed I watched a layer of fog sweeping in from the ocean. It was a very thin layer -- only 50 to 100 feet high, I'd say, but impenetrably dense at the surface. I was pretty sure I would cancel the race but held on to the possibility that the fog would lift by race time.
I had a gang of volunteers helping me. It's surprisingly easy to recruit volunteers when you ask non-sailing friends whether they'd like to sit on a boat, drink cocktails, and fire guns for an evening. So they appeared at my house, bearing snacks, and we cheerily packed into my car and headed to the yacht club. It was freezing cold and visibility was almost nil. We unloaded and walked down the dock to the race committee boat; a couple of additional friends joined us there. A bunch of sailors who were gathered inside the clubhouse hoping the race would be cancelled started to trickle out and put on their foul weather gear. My guests spread out all the hors d'oeuvres in the cabin of the motorboat and sat down in captains chairs and started eating shrimp and drinking rum and tonics.
Then the heckling began. I kept walking back and forth to the dockhouse to look out and see how the visibility was. It was crappy. The few brave sailors who had come out of the clubhouse were asking whether we would have a race, hunched in their rainjackets. The fog kept rolling in heavily and lifting again -- there would be moments when you could make out the hazy outline of Clapboard Island a mile off shore, and then moments where you couldn't see the boats midway out the anchorage. I told folks I would be postponing the race for a while and probably cancelling it. Everyone wants to look tough so they pretended to be disappointed and hovered around the race committee boat looking enviously at our shrimp. Partly to entertain my crew of volunteers, I decided to be sort of hardcore about postponing the race (even though most everyone who was thinking about racing was standing around at the dock looking at us). We counted down the time and at exactly 5:30 we shot two blasts with the shotgun and simultaneously raised two postponement flags -- one at the dockhouse flagpole and one on the race committee boat. Then we ate more shrimp and invited a couple of the sailors aboard and socialized for twenty minutes or so, with breaks for me to go up and check the visibility. Any time the fog lifted enough to see the vague outline of the island some sailor would point it out. I'd say, "if I can see the island for at least fifteen seconds, we'll talk about it." I never could. One minute before 6:00, we took down the two postponement flags and made a long sound signal with a horn, and exactly at six we shot the gun three times and raised the signal for abandonment of the race: the N flag over the X flag. (See the flags here: the postponement flag is the answering pennant, a red and white stripey guy labeled "code/answer" on the page, and the "N" and "X" flags are as labeled.)
We stayed on the race committee boat for a while, eating and laughing and talking, and then made our way up to the clubhouse, where there was a blazing fire going. I made Dark & Stormys for my volunteers and we sat by the fire and finished the olives and shrimp and chips and salsa. It was really fun. The group of friends I'd gathered hadn't met one another before, but somehow they clicked easily and they were all asking to come back and really run a race anytime I needed them.
What a cool story!
I know it's a lot of trouble, but I wonder if you could post pictures some time of your boat, and/or of occasions like you describe above.
I think the flags thing is neat. I used to want to hang over my desk the one that means "Signify Your Intentions."
Posted by: Jim | May 28, 2004 at 11:48 AM