So this weekend we mount up for Block Island Race Week and a stay on the Hotel Evenstar. Yes, Evenstar will be our team’s lodging for a week of sailing and raucous times out on Block Island when we take friend’s 29 foot boat out for some racing.
It will be…interesting…for me. Bittersweet, if you will. It will be my third Race Week, but my first as a crew member on a boat I do not own. The last two times we took my old boat, Shadowfax, out for the week. Each of those trips we had a great time and won more than a couple of nice prizes for the week. We were competitive, we surprised a few people, and we were in the hunt…our first visit there came down to a nail biter finish with a three way tie for first place going in to the last race.
Part of owning Evenstar is for me is a huge adjustment in mindset. I spent four years with Shadowfax pushing that boat to race competitively. The racing mindset is, for the lack of a better word, demented, when you compare it to how most people use their boats. Examples of this? Racers are weight freaks – we would get excited to get a new stripped core halyard with titanium shackles which cost an exorbitant amount of money, because each new halyard saved five pounds of weight up in the rig. Less weight aloft equals more speed. Anchors? One ten pounder, under the floor boards. Now I carry two on the bow at 105 pounds each with hundreds of pounds of chain anchor rode. Speed freaks, weight freaks…my speed issues now are getting to the anchorage when there is plenty of room; my weight issues are about making sure I’ve got enough batteries to run the fridge and the blender.
Literally every decision I make on the boat – from how we sail it to what gear to buy and when – is made against a completely different context. So when we order a new sail, we do not buy the lightest, fastest, latest high tech sailcloth…because we don’t need it. My money could be spent on something else more important to the cruising time on the boat. On the old boat we bought for light weight and speed, on Evenstar it’s more about ease of use and durability.
I am looking forward to this trip. We will have seven people staying on the boat (more or less). We will be as comfortable as some who are spending thousands of dollars to rent a house, and we will have a great time. But it is just a little hard to look back and not remember the feeling of my first “bullet” – my first 1st place race trophy at Block Island Race Week, without reflecting on the differences in coming back as a member of the crew on someone else’s vessel.
