Alan S. Glos
Well-Known Member
A short story about how sailboat racing can make you humble.
In my early teens, I raced a 14' Rhodes Bantam on tiny Acton Lake near Oxford, Ohio and 20 years later finally won the Rhodes Bantam International Championship in 1981 and again in 1983, so I felt I sort of knew my way around a race course. Then the R-B Class died and I found myself racing Sunfish on Cazenovia Lake here in Upstate New York. After a few summers and some modest success at the club level, I decided to to see how it would be to compete in a District Regatta at the Rochester Yacht Club on Lake Ontario. Afterall, how hard could it be? There were 12 boats competing and the whole weekend was light to moderate wind in big waves left over from an earlier storm. Also, they had been doing a lot of bottom dredging near our race course and one had to watch out for debris on the surface. For the life of me, I could not seem to develop consistent boat speed and even the local sailing school kids were beating me downwind. To make things worse, I could not seem to get a decent start. At the end of the first day, I was sitting in 10th place.
On the next/last day, I started to get the hang of the conditions, and despite continued so-so starts, managed some middle-of-the-fleet finishes. With one race left, I figured that if I could get a good start, I might even "run with the big dogs" a little. I focused, and when the starting gun sounded, I was on the favored end of the line, in clean air and driving hard when suddenly I came to a near complete stop and the whole fleet passed me to leeward. It felt like I had run aground even though I knew we had a good 10 feet of water under the keel. Finally I raised the daggerboard, the boat lurched forward and then stopped again a second later. It turned out that I had hit a 3 foot long, dead lake carp that managed to drape its carcus around my daggerboard and then my rudder blade! Believe me, a dead fish this big makes a great sea anchor. I think I ended up dead last in this race and next to last for the regatta. Ouch!
The moral of the story is that when you move to a new racing class, be prepared to be humbled a little. I am also convinced that I had offended Neptune with my hubris, and the dead carp was His way of taking me down a few notches. Lesson learned.
Alan Glos
Cazenovia, NY
In my early teens, I raced a 14' Rhodes Bantam on tiny Acton Lake near Oxford, Ohio and 20 years later finally won the Rhodes Bantam International Championship in 1981 and again in 1983, so I felt I sort of knew my way around a race course. Then the R-B Class died and I found myself racing Sunfish on Cazenovia Lake here in Upstate New York. After a few summers and some modest success at the club level, I decided to to see how it would be to compete in a District Regatta at the Rochester Yacht Club on Lake Ontario. Afterall, how hard could it be? There were 12 boats competing and the whole weekend was light to moderate wind in big waves left over from an earlier storm. Also, they had been doing a lot of bottom dredging near our race course and one had to watch out for debris on the surface. For the life of me, I could not seem to develop consistent boat speed and even the local sailing school kids were beating me downwind. To make things worse, I could not seem to get a decent start. At the end of the first day, I was sitting in 10th place.
On the next/last day, I started to get the hang of the conditions, and despite continued so-so starts, managed some middle-of-the-fleet finishes. With one race left, I figured that if I could get a good start, I might even "run with the big dogs" a little. I focused, and when the starting gun sounded, I was on the favored end of the line, in clean air and driving hard when suddenly I came to a near complete stop and the whole fleet passed me to leeward. It felt like I had run aground even though I knew we had a good 10 feet of water under the keel. Finally I raised the daggerboard, the boat lurched forward and then stopped again a second later. It turned out that I had hit a 3 foot long, dead lake carp that managed to drape its carcus around my daggerboard and then my rudder blade! Believe me, a dead fish this big makes a great sea anchor. I think I ended up dead last in this race and next to last for the regatta. Ouch!
The moral of the story is that when you move to a new racing class, be prepared to be humbled a little. I am also convinced that I had offended Neptune with my hubris, and the dead carp was His way of taking me down a few notches. Lesson learned.
Alan Glos
Cazenovia, NY
