[kaohsiung keelboat regatta]

Yesterday we had the first keelboat regatta with our still-on-the-making team onboard of the 飛樂比 （Freybe). Freybe is a top-notch racing keelboat from Hong Kong. 18 m carbon mast with curved spreaders for maximizing main sail angle, double spinnakker halyards for making hoist-douse peels if necessary in order not to loose a single second of power in the sails. Hydrolic mast tension and double-grind like the America’s cup that can be send to different whinches depeding on where is needed.  Everything is adjustable, every tiny detail of the sails can be trimmed to perfection (if we ever get that pro).

We have trained only one a half sessions, and we still haven’t have time to test all the sails in our quiver, so what is was meant to be our third training session on Kaohsiung waters, we decided to register to the yearly race organized by Argo Marina. Train as you race, race as you train right? So no better practice that racing with the team to get some real feeling on how fast (and complicated) this boat can be. 

For me, it is the first time co-commandeering a boat like this. I was mostly in the mid-bow mast section, doing mostly tactics and hoisting up and down jibs and spinnakers sails. Eve also co-commandeering from the pit giving orders to the rest of the team. It was great to bring so many instructors from my Taitung summer camp to experience an event like this. Yankee in the runners, Jasmine grinding, Kuan fast and nimble in the front bow, and Yayar on upwind and downwind trim (she is not in the summer camps  but she counts as Taitung’s one too).

We had an very good start, crossing the line at full speed in front of the entire fleet. We had only one long distance regatta, so it was all-in, no margin for error, so my heart (and brain) was racing non-stop for the 83 minutes that lasted the race. The course was clearly favored to port tack, so we decided to close haul all the way to the layline. The wind was stable (9kts) and barely no gust with change of speed or wind direction.  We had Nion breathing behind our neck for most of the upwind beat. Despite us having a much higher rating their boat speed was clearly better than us (That is when we realized that we have clearly little experience with our boat and we still don’t know how to juice it up). We still managed to defend our pole position by pinching into the wind. They tried to overtake us a few times from above, but our captain Ming did a very good job with the helm always fending off their attacks. After 20 minutes of nerve-racking attack-and-defend, Nion gave up and footed away clearly going for a lower angle but more VMG strategy.

Long distance laylines are often hard to judge, and we still don’t have a proper navigation system up and running so we had to judge as if we were sailing a dinghy when to tack. Surely we could have done a more accurate job, we had to bear away only on the last stretch of the leg, still clear ahead of Nion and the rest of the fleet. The biggest problem of the race came on the downwind leg. Mark 2 was obscured by the bustly commercial port of Kahsiung, and we couldn’t see clearly  against a few container cargo ships, so we had to risk hoisting the wrong gennaker and not being able to sails a top speed to the mark.  Still not being completely sure where the mark was, we decided to go for a A1.5 spinnaker, our biggest kite, more suitable for a training run than a broad reach. By the time the mark was visible to us, we had close to little margin of error, and we were sailing at the limit our kite angle.  The boat behind us clearly went for a more safe strategy only sailing with a genoa without using a kite, so our risky decision, with a big element of luck put us well in front of them just by sheer size of sails. 

Having rounded mark 2 safely, it was a long way downwind back to the finish line. We haven’t sailed with spinnaker yet, so it was all new for us. It was a trial and error, trying to reach the values of the chart from the previous owner of the boat, but neither upwind nor downwind we managed to reach the unfathomable speeds that they boat is supposed to reach. Amidst a slalom in between container ships and other big vessels, we did a couple of messy gybes trying to avoid dead downwind straight to the mark, and slowly Nion, our afternoon adversary, caught up with us.  We still managed to cross the line in first position, but we knew that with little time margin, the differences would be eaten up by the IRC rating, so we would be first. 

We ended up being on third place. On second place it was Ray Hsu with his 3-people Soto 27, that creeped in with really low ratings compared the bigger boats of the fleet, and unmistakably on first place Nion, with our friends Sugita and Anthony in charge. It was loads of thrilling and exhilarating fun. Next race in two weeks in Keelung. 

(tbh i don’t think anyone except Mrs. Francisca “Pasaroto” Peixoto Queen of the oceans, will take the time to read or understand this full post)