Sunday was my last frostbite race of the season. After all of the hard sailing the day before, and with the daylight savings time's lost hour, I had woken up feeling like a million bucks; green and wrinkly. But it was race day, so I peeled myself out of bed, drank way too much coffee, donned half a dozen layers of thermals, and went racing.
On land it was a balmy 50 degrees when we left the dock, but out on the water it was closer to 40F. The winds for the first race were around 12-15 knots with short vicious gusts and longer patches of wind in the low to mid-20 knot range.
It's hard to set up for those conditions. No sooner is the boat settled in for the lighter patches that one of these gusts would hit and a collections of quick depowering adjustments would occur, only to have the boat run out past the high wind and the crew need to reverse all of the adjustments made just moments earlier. I was doing mainsail trim and tactics. Lets just say, I did not need a gym membership after that work out. And there was a second race.....
The second race was similar to the first except this time the gusts and lows were about 3 knots higher, making the helmsman's and mainsail-trimmer's job all the more difficult. I must have cycled the mainsheet, fine-tune, traveler, and backstay adjuster perhaps a couple hundred times.
While every muscle in my body felt used and abused, and my right shoulder and chest muscles were agonizingly filing their complaints, none the less and not unexpectedly, I slept well on Sunday night.