If any of you remember the forecast before the race,the actuality was even more complicated. local topography played, as always in long island sound, a big part. There were many small cells, both warm and cold that took turns moving over us. Even though we had a good forecast, the timing worked at the whim of nature. In the end the 2012 version of the Block Island Race was like almost every other race I have sailed. Click HERE for results.
Video by Kevin Tongue. Snow Lion’s first sail of 2012.
Of course one cannot overlook that yesterday there was a solar eclipse
Snow Lion, a Jason Ker design, based on “Aera” has now been revised. Over the winter “Snow Lion” underwent a facelift, botox if you like. Today, we will go sailing to tune the rig and make certain everything is working. The Block Island race starts next friday, and the Bermuda race on June 15.
I will have more to report at the end of the day.
The new “Belle Mente” was built at New England Boatworks while “Snow Lion” was being altered.
We continued our search for sites of former mills in Rhode Island last weekend. Spring was evident, it has come early for us this year, but not without a price. Although it does not show in the photographs of the dams; the water table is very low as a result of a relatively dry spring and little snow this winter.
Alterations to Snow Lion are nearing completion, we all have high hopes of a speed advantage beyond the rating increase. The Bermuda Race start is a little over six weeks away. The longest days of the year. By the time I return from Bermuda the days will be already getting shorter.
closing on the finish transatlantic race 2011 from ws lirakis on Vimeo.
words to live by; from the port watch
This is it. We are off tomorrow, so it is too late to change anything else on the boat. Crew dinner tonight; weather briefing tomorrow morning; then it is off to the start line.
Our class is very diverse. the 289′ Maltese Falcon, 66′ catamaran called Phaedo, Zaraffa a 66′ reichl/pugh. I hope they do not put Maltese Falcon of the starting line with us. She is just too big; she can’t, nor should anyone expect her to be able to manouvre like a small boat. She is a ship really.
This will be my last entry until I return. Hopefully with great tales of the ocean and photographs to support the stories. Wish me god’s speed. see you in a few weeks.
On another subject I am including the following because messages in bottles is a fascinating thing for me.
A glass bottle, cast into the Gulf Stream off New England one year ago as a farewell gesture to a departed sailor, turned up last week on a beach in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland after an improbable, 3,000-mile transatlantic voyage.
Bound with rigging tape and sealed with wax, the rum bottle carried handwritten tributes to Mattapoisett resident Ken MacKenzie, a lifelong sailor who died of cancer in May of last year at the age of 69.
The bottle was launched from the deck of the 76-foot sailboat Lilla last June when the yacht, owned by Simon and Nancy DePietro of Mattapoisett, entered the axis of the stream while competing in the 2010 Newport to Bermuda race.
Coincidentally, Lilla sailed into Bermuda on Monday of this week, taking first place in this year’s Marion to Bermuda race and setting a course record in the process.
“Simon and Nancy live right next door to me, and Ken and I go way back with the boat,” said Mary Lou Manley, MacKenzie’s life partner who conceived the idea of the tribute at his memorial service.
“Ken found two messages in bottles in his lifetime, so we decided to make two messages in his honor,” she said.
MacKenzie spent his life on the water, Manley said. For many years he owned and sailed the famed Ticonderoga, a 72-foot wooden ketch built in 1936 and widely regarded as the finest work ever to come from the board of the legendary boat designer L. Francis Herreshoff. When Herreshoff died it was MacKenzie who scattered his ashes from Ticonderoga, Manley said.
The rum bottle washed up on the western side of the Hebrides on South Uist, one of the islands in the rugged chain known as “Scotland’s breakwater.”
It was discovered by Christine and Kevin Brook, a vacationing couple from the Winchester area of England, as they walked on Drimsdale Beach.
“The first thing they saw through the glass was the Rudyard Kipling poem, ‘If,’ that we put in there,” Manley said.
Her contact information was included in the contents, and when she checked her voice mail last Tuesday, the highland burr of a man named Ian McGuinness briefly informed her the bottle had made landfall. That was followed by an email from the Brooks, providing more details.
“Their email asked me if this was a live address,” Manley said. “It said, ‘If so, do we have a story for you!'”
Drimsdale Beach does not get a lot of foot traffic, according to local resident Jean Newman who works for Am Paipear, the south Uist community newspaper that has custody of the bottle and its contents and plans to run a story on the find in its next issue.
“I walk that beach often, and you feel slightly offended if you see anyone there because everyone wants the beach to themselves. There are plenty of beaches to choose from here,” she said in a telephone interview.
“It was a good place for the bottle to arrive because there are a lot of rocky spots. It’s rather unique that it survived intact.”
It seems unlikely that the bottle may have been on the beach for a long time, she said. “It’s a tidal beach, so it’s lucky that it landed far enough up that it didn’t go back out on the tide.”
The second bottle may still be out there, Manley said. She joined Lilla in Bermuda for the return trip to Mattapoisett after last year’s race and launched the second bottle herself, 10 days after the first.
“The second one might show up,’ she said. “But I just think that it’s really cool that this one made it somewhere and someone actually found it. Here he is Scottish and he ends up in Scotland.”
Snow Lion has been in the water for two weekends now. We have looked at several new asymmetrical spinnakers and adjusted the instruments. On Saturday we had 13 knots from the south and flat water.
Not terribly interesting or exciting footage but a very pleasant outing for those on board. (the video was filmed with a gopro hero)
Lots of new things to look at and check on “Snow Lion” before we leave for the transatlantic race in june. This was our first opportunity, the mast was stepped on friday and the boat loaded yesterday. A new mast track, two new spinnakers and the usual number of projects for any boat going into the water for the first time after a winter of refitting.
A nice 15 knot northerly, offered us flat water for our first outing. Brilliant sun made us feel like spring was really here.
We went sailing today aboard “Snow Lion” larry Huntington’s 50′ Ker design. The biggest news is the replacement mainsail for the one that was torn at the start of the Bermuda Race. ( see June posts). The next big race for “Snow Lion” will be the transatlantic race leaving Newport in June, 2011
The big boats have finished the Middle Sea Race in 2 days and 6 hours. Tghe next finisher should be Alegre, but she is a ways back.
Weymouth Speed Week finished last friday, as always an interesting group of boats and people.
Continuing the thread of the America’s Cup. The prospect of solid wing sails is a given. Sailmaking as we know it is at a nexus. I do not believe that wing sails will be on ocean racing yachts any time soon. At least I believe that; but no different the changes to carbon as a common boatbuilding material, carbon rigging, it is here and will not go away.
What does this mean for the sailmaker and sail designer?
