Singapore Straights Regatta 1999
For those of you back home sailing in cold, wet, foul weather gear, hoping for wind, we have one thing in common: There wasn't a lot of wind at this race.
The race schedule was optimistic:
Day 1 -- 2 buoy races in Singapore
Day 2 -- Singapore to Indonesia (Nongsa, Batam)
Day 3 -- 2 buoy races in Nongsa
Day 3 -- Nongsa to Republic of Singapore Yacht Club
Day 4 -- RSYC to Raffles Yacht Club
So, day one we had no wind and drifted in the sweltering heat for 3 hours. Slowly a storm system moved in and the wind picked up to a reasonable strength. We managed to get one race off. There's some tough competition at this regatta. Several olympic sailors and a couple of professionally skippered and crewed boats made the racing tough for our rag tag bunch on a 15 year old boat.
Here's a photo from the spreaders of Switchblade, the Farr 43.
The first race was a strange series of marks that was something like a windward-leeward and a triangle. The first three legs went well and we were sailing fast, but as we started the up-wind leg after the jib mark, the wind died again. We were flushed hard with current and watched in horror as the faster boats, who had rounded before the wind died, were pushed by the current towards the finish line. All we could do was fight to make it to the mark while searching for puffs of wind. As we drifted closer to the mark we managed to get pushed sideways around the buoy, but not before the faster boats in the fleet had left us way behind.
We managed a fast return leg through some anchored vessels (there's always something in the way) and we gained some ground that we had lost when the wind died. Overall we placed 5th out of 11. We took our losses knowing that the longer race to Nongsa would be a good chance for us to improve our position in the fleet.
Day 2 we basically had to hit one mark on the way out of the Straights of Singapore then hang a right to Nongsa and cross the shipping lanes. To avoid the current we hugged the shore and kept a close eye on the depth sounder and the large Santa Cruz 70 in front of us. We had a quick run down the mark, but in its true nature, the Singapore wind died as we were halfway across the channel. Fortunately we had planned to keep high on the course so the current would sweep us towards the finish line.
We caught a break when the wind picked up in our localized area, and we took off, watching the fleet fall behind. Making good time, we crossed the line and placed 3rd for this leg in the "Tiger Cup". (We're still trying to figure out who the guy in the floral shirt is....)
Day 3 consisted of buoy races outside the Nongsa Marina. Early that morning I took a walk out onto the jetty and photographed the hazy dawn. (Switchblade is in the center...)
Haze of course means no wind. But we were blessed with horrendous current. Most of the small boats had to be towed repeatedly to the start line by the small fishing boats. It was a constant game of dragging boats back to the start line, as they were swept away faster than the motor boats could keep up.
After several hours of baking in the sun in 90 degrees F. and 80% humidity, a breeze started to pick up. We managed to get one race off, but it wasn't Switchblade's day for good races.
We got the spinnaker halyard wrapped underneath the topping lift, so when we rounded the mark, our shute came to an abrupt halt halfway up the mast. It took some precious time to clear and rehoist, and no one was kind enough to wait for us.
The really sad part, is we performed this maneouver in front of the photography boat and they had quickly posted this photo on the website. We even got comments from the owner's daughter who was all the way back in Holland....
Awarded an 8th for the day, we sucked it up and planned our revenge on the longer leg from Nongsa to RSYC.
Day 4 (race 6), the leg from Nongsa to RSYC was started on time with a little wind to help. As usual, Switchblade steared her own course. We went inside to stay clear of the current and tried to catch some of the breeze off the land. It worked well for us and we soon found that we were leading the fleet! As a few hours passed some of the quicker boats had caught up with us and were getting ahead, but we had made great progress, and with our handicap we were still ahead.
One of the marks in the course was a gate, and it was placed somewhere in the middle of a narrow channel. The current was running so hard through this channel it was like a bubbling, girgling river. To complicate the task, there was a large rock reef in the middle, and on the side. We fought our way against the current, trying to find the gate we were supposed to go through. We tacked back and forth, frustrated as we were unable to make any headway. Since we needed to get to the gate, we decided to take a chance and head through two rock reefs against the current. With one hand on the key, one eye on the depth sounder and everyone sitting in silence, we slowly inched our way across the channel in between a large rock pile and the reef. As we passed behind the large rock, we were in shelter from the current and the boat quickly accelerated and gave us some precious distance to cross the rest of the channel.
But no one could spot the gate. In fact it appeared that several boats had completely ignored the gate and just stayed on the far sides of the course, out of the current. We checked and rechecked our position, the position of the gate, and the race instructions. Desperately we tacked back out into the current looking for the gate. After searching for 30-40 minutes we decided we would use the GPS readings as a record that we had passed the position where the gate should have been. If we didn't sail the defined course, at least we could prove we tried damn hard to find the gate.
With the decision to abandon the search for the gate made, we quickly ducked in shore to get out of the current. Our speed over the ground picked up and we decided to try to duck behind some of the small islands for more relief from the current. This turned out to be an excellent move and we made some signficant distance over some of the other boats and it bumped us up one place in the overall positions.
The time we spent searching for that gate really killed our overall finishing time. We placed 5th, respectable, but if we would have read the ammendments to the race rule posted at 10pm the night before the race, we would have seen the gate had been removed from the required course.
The last race was fairly short from RSYC to Raffles Marina. It stared off with some decent wind and we tried to stay close to shore. We were very paranoid about the current. It seemed like a good move, and we held our own for quite a while, but we started to get a little to close to shore and cleaned the keel on some rocks. Nothing major, but we noticed that when the depth sounder read 0.0, it was absolutely correct.
As the wind shifted we found ourselves having to tack to get back on the rhumb line. This was a real bummer as the boats who stayed outside had the advantage. We sailed fast, but we couldn't recover the lost ground and the current didn't seem to be pushing against the outside boats. So we sailed the rhumb line as fast as possible but we couldn't make up the lost ground.
We clocked in at 9th overall that day, which no one wanted to even think about. Our standings in the entire regatta was 7th out of 11. I'm out of excuses, so we'll just have to see what we can do at the Raja Muda.