I am going away to Marblehead this weekend, sailing in an Etchells regatta against the big cheeses of the sailing world. I'm excited about it. I'm not bringing the Hooked On Tonics, in its woefully slow state, but am instead crewing for the fleet hotshot on his shiny, new, well-tended Etchells.
Because this is a big race, the Atlantic Coast Championships, there are some official rules. They check your boat to make sure it conforms within some pretty tight tolerances to the class rules. They weigh the boat, they measure the sails and the equipment, they weigh the crew. Yep, that's right. As a crew, we can't weigh more than 285 kg, all together. I think that turns out to be something like 628 lbs.
So I thought we were all set, the three of us, well under the weight limit. But our skipper decided that we were, in fact, so far under the weight limit that we should add a fourth person. He went and found a teeny tiny woman to be our fourth, which put us right at the weight limit, according to the weights we'd all estimated ourselves to be.
But of course, my estimate was a guesstimate, as was the foredeck guy's. I dragged out the musty dusty scale in my basement last Tuesday and it told me I weighed six pounds more than my guesstimate. Uh oh. The foredeck guy weighed himself and came in four pounds above his guesstimate. The teeny tiny woman hasn't confirmed her weight, but if she was guesstimating too low we're even deeper in trouble.
Today I went to the skipper's office (he's a doctor) and jumped on his scale, and was pleased to see myself almost seven pounds lower than my musty dusty scale told me I was. That might mean I'm right at my guesstimate, or it might mean that my erratic dieting this past week has had some effect, or it might mean that his office scale is off.
Years ago, at the J/24 North American championships, four of the five crew members had arrived and we were weighing and measuring in the boat and all of our equipment before the skipper arrived. We kept weighing ourselves and guessing what the skipper would weigh. We estimated that we were over the weight limit. So over the course of twenty-four hours, four of us lost 13 lbs. We didn't eat, we drank diuretics, we put on heavy sweatshirts and ran in the summer heat. One guy lost 8 of the 13 lbs on a long and unhealthy run. He jumped on the official scale, told the measurer to write down his weight, and shortly after, collapsed in the back of our van in a fetal position, dry heaving.
I don't think it will come to that for this event, but one difference between this event and that one is that the sailing instructions permit the race committee to randomly weigh 15% of the boats before any day's racing, and the boats that don't comply on that day won't get to race. Which means, at least theoretically, that it's not sufficient to lose a bunch of water weight for the purposes of making the weigh in.
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