In the second part of our his and hers takes on the Région Bretagne – Elimination 2 race at the World Sailing Offshore Double Handed Championships, Team Sail IQ Racing skipper Andrew Hall gives his candid account.
In tandem with co-skipper and partner-in-life, Sandra Bees, Hall helmed Team NZL 1 to 7th place in the wild and woolly 102nm race off Brittany. It wasn’t quite enough to qualify for the 48-hour final but with 30+ knot winds and 3m swells, broaches and ripped sails, the Richmond Yacht Club couple did well just to finish.
If you haven’t already, be sure to also read Bees ‘Shit got real very, very fast’ account HERE.
‘There was no time for smoko. It was game on…’
By Andrew Hall/Sail IQ Racing Team
I would have to say that Sandy started to outwardly show she was anxious about the race a day before the start and that in turn had started to put me on edge. But when we left the apartment the morning of the eliminator, I could only think of the job at hand.
I think for Sandy it was just race-day jitters when we had gone through all the red tape procedures and on the water she seemed fine and if she wasn’t, she was soon going to have no time to think about such issues anyway.
Race strategy
We knew that on the course at times on the downwind, we would see winds in the late 20-knot range with gusts on top of that. With a wind against tide and a sea state that had been hanging around for a few days, It was going to be interesting.
So our strategy was to put on the A2 (asymmetrical spinnaker, the big shit) with full mainsail and sail deep angles. With only the French and one other team using the A2 and every other team using an A4, this meant they had to sail higher angles and had a further distance to sail to the mark.
With our sailing style and the A2, we managed to sail deeper angles than everyone else, and in the sea state this was paying off. After the start, we very quickly put a reef in the mainsail as we had started in the lee of Groix island where the wind and sea-state were a little bit tamer. Honestly once the reef went in, there was no time for smoko. It was game on.
At the gybe point off Belle Island, we had only the French cross in front of our bow. Our gybe could have been executed better, a sheet got caught up and we got a wrap in the A2, but the months of training paid off with the wrap being cleared without too much issue. Unfortunately in the process of the gybe, we had put a small tear in the head of the A2 but to stay in the race had no choice but to sheet on and go for it.
We were now on the port gybe and the sea state was at a different angle to the stern than we had been sailing on starboard gybe, making us broach, That prompted us to put a second reef in the mainsail (only having sailed these yachts for three days prior, we were learning on the fly).
Bingo, we were off again sailing deep angles and as in control as you were going to be for the conditions, sailing straight at the mark while all our competitors were sailing higher angles and having to gybe to make it.
Even though the broach before putting in the second reef was short-lived, the 3rd boat with an A2 had overtaken us, so we started work at overtaking them and did. We had clawed our way back into second place but now had some focus on the small tear in the head of the sail. There is a saying, “foredeck crew put spinnakers up and god brings them down”. Unfortunately for us, this came to fruition, somewhere around Ile D Hoedic we had another broach and ripped the head out of the A2.
“When things go bad, they normally go really bad…”
We quickly went to work at getting the big blue A2 back on board as the bottom part was trying to turn into a shrimping net even though we were still doing over 11 knots of boat speed.
We got that sorted and put up the A4 only to have both snap shackles on the sheets come undone in the hoist. This had been a common theme for the competitors in the first elimination race so we dropped it, repacked it and put it up again only to find it had gained a tear in the process. So we pulled it down again, with no other option but to two sail to the bottom mark.
By the time we turned around the bottom mark we had gone from 2nd to 8th place. Such is the level of competition in this type of racing.
We started our upwind beat to the finish with a J2 and one reef in the mainsail. Very quickly we went to two reefs in the mainsail.
The breeze was very stable and didn’t allow a lot of overtaking lanes so we opted not to short tack under the lee of Griox Island at the top of the beat. This did not give us any advantage as we finished in the same place as we started on the beat home – 8th on the water,.
With a protest from the measuring committee upheld, our final placing was 7th, 2 spots short of sailing the final.
My take home from the race? Breakages and gear failure is costly. At this level, in a one design, it’s just very difficult to recover.
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