Keeping An Eye On Loose Ends

I was doing pretty well in the fifth race of a competitive Master Laser regatta in New England. I figured my next move was to keep going right until the Laser underneath me tacked and ducked, give him enough room to breathe and then tack and race him to one more quick port tack and the starboard layline. The finial tack to starboard would be about five boat lengths shy of the windward mark. He would be forced to follow me into the starboard tack and I’d be clear ahead.

My light weight (156) was a disadvantage in the gusty breeze and I could only keep the boat on its bottom by parking my mainsheet hand up near my collarbone ready for a big ease whenever the standard rig out-leveraged my hiking.

 A gust of moderate pressure walked across the course toward me and wanting to translate its extra pressure into forward motion, I eased a full count before it hit. Something was weird; I had given a big arm’s length of line, but the main had only pulled out to the corner of the boat; I had a slack sheet on my side of the block and the hull was lifting right up in the air. I stayed hiked out flat, luffed, got things flattened out and looked to see what was jammed. The slack of the vang had been caught by the mainsheet on a previous trim and sucked into the block, loop handle and all.

Another gust started working its way through the fleet. The friction of the four pieces of line, plus knots, held the main sheet in place. I grabbed the sheet on the other side of the block and pulled enough line through that the gust rattled past me without theatrics.

I reached down and again grabbed both the main and vang on the mast-side of the block and tried to pull them back out together. Things seemed to get appreciably tighter. I was now in jeopardy of having the boat that had been beneath me, pass me to windward. While it was still possible I bailed onto port and headed for the starboard layline before I got into any serious traffic problems.

I eased the boat a bit off the wind and took a determined crack at pulling the lines free. It didn’t look like too big a tangle, but my pull seized it up and I could no longer get the sheet to move in or out. It was time for some focus and as I was now pretty much alone with the windward mark off my port aft quarter. I tacked onto starboard, pulled just past the windward mark, luffing into the wind.

My next attempt was to untie the vang tail from the centerboard, slowly work a piece of the caught loop free enough to get a bit of action out of the block and then to try pulling the sheet and that piece back through; this time it worked and slowly the vang rolled out from under the pressure of the sheet.

I immediately turned downwind and rounded the mark. The nearest boat was nearing the leeward mark and the leaders were across the finish line and sailing around waiting for the next horn. As I passed the rescue boat that had come to see why I was sitting flogging my sail I declared, “Gear malfunction!”

But I revised my diagnosis during the long ride to the leeward mark and back up-wind. A number of times I’ve caught the tails of my control lines in the sheet block. This was clearly the worst, but also part of a pattern. I realized that I had never taken the threat seriously and this was really a failure to prepare the boat, not a gear failure.

I’m not sure what the solution is yet, but I’m sure there are things to try – slightly shorter tails, perhaps bowlines instead of strait tails, an addition to my quick checks after an adjustment or tack to be sure the tails are clear of the block area.

What isn’t a solution is to blame it on the gear.  Improvement comes from having a clear picture of where I’m at present and where I want to get to – I am not capturing all the data from my regattas for between-regatta processing and I want to eliminate all the predictable gear and boat handling issues. There was no need to spend any time recriminating myself for the failure, just put in some time before the next regatta looking at solutions and develop a routine that raises my awareness of the lines.

By the way, the next race I scored a couple of boats higher than my average for the day. I hated to “waste” my throw-out on a preventable issue, but once the preparatory horn had sounded, starting the next countdown, I had my regatta strategy to consider and I wasn’t about let a gear mistake perpetrate a focus mistake.