The skipper looked sternly at his crew. “Shipmates”, he said “we are about to take on the endeavour of our lives, er, again. I can offer you nothing but toil, sweat, cramp, blisters, a sore bum and if you pull the wrong piece of string, blood and tears as well. This is a sail & oar raid, which means that if there is no wind, it becomes an oar & oar raid”.
And so it proved. With often feeble winds for this time of year, we ended up doing quite a lot of rowing. Four of us had an oar each in the rowing races, without a helm and with only car wing mirrors for guidance. Three of us often rowed in the sailing races, while the fourth member of the crew acted as a member of the RIB safety boat team.
Our aim was to beat as many of the five other BayRaiders as possible, helped by four long oars, a master sailing tactician (my brother-in-law), a conventional jib on a short bowsprit and the aforementioned toil, sweat, etc. We all have the blisters to prove that we put in the effort. We also gained an insight into what it was like to be a Viking but without the usual shoreside perks.
If the wind drops below about 5 knots on the nose, instead of clawing slowly to windward, it is usually a lot quicker just to sheet in the main, furl the jib and row straight upwind until you hit the next patch of breeze. The boat that habitually beat us, Sommarvind, a Stora jaktkanoten from Sweden (overall winner in 2011), barely bothered to raise their sails on some sailing days and rowed like Vikings possessed.
When we were fortunate enough to sail, the BR20 behaved impeccably as always and then was only consistently outpaced by Lapsus, a beautiful Dutch Valk keelboat of 1941 vintage. Tarika, a 17’ BayRaider gave us a spot of bother when sailing on Loch Oich, beating us by four seconds. My excuse is that I didn’t notice the obvious drag from our unraised outboard until we were a third of the way around. They also chased us closely over the line in the final sailing race on the Beauly Firth. The BayRaider Expedition Mallory had the nearest scores to ours by doing well in both the sailing and the rowing. In a raid like Sail Caledonia, if you want a good placing, you need to do consistently well in all the races, regardless of the conditions.
Our focus on consistency certainly paid off and it was enough to give us an excellent score. What we didn’t realize was that being first in class so many times also made us overall winners. When the results were announced, I think we were all a bit shocked, as we had assumed that Sommarvind had repeated their 2011 win.
I’ve already booked a place on next year’s raid. I’m hoping that with a bit more wind, we can enjoy the scenery and expend fewer calories. Whether I can persuade my excellent crew to share my vision after this year’s experience is another matter….
