2010 Queens Cup

Well we haven't written to this blog for a long time. I'm not going to try to catch up on all that has happened with us and Mezzaluna since the last entry. What happened this past weekend deserves a spot all its own.
This years Queens Cup was a lot different than last year. Last year was the first time Jeff had sailed in the Queens Cup. They didn't even finish. After 13 hours, they had only traveled 23 miles. They could still see Milwaukee. This year we made it to Grand Haven in 10 hours and 4 minutes. Wow! It was an adventure right from the start.
South Shore Yacht club was all dressed up, lots of yachts flying their flags from past regattas. We were planning on a 3 week cruise to Michigan using the Queens Cup to have some fun to get over to the other side of the lake. Our plans are to sail up to Traverse Bay along the Michigan coast and back via Door County and the Wisconsin shore line, exploring as we go. We had our son Steven and nephew Jim Dan Patterson to join us.
With all the work that was done this past winter. There were a lot of things to do to get ready for our trip. The trip will even include some finishing up of some of those projects. We didn't even get a chance to try out the new GPS unit before we pushed off. The party Thursday night was a lot of fun. We had a lot of friends there, met a bunch of new ones and learned about some of the places we hoped to visit from those that had already been there. The whole week had been hectic as we had painters working on our house and had to clean out our bedroom for them and put it back together again so we weren't coming home to a mess. At the same time we needed to pack up the boat for our trip. With all the trips back and forth supplying the boat, I figured all that extra weight would surely slow us down. We even had comments from a friend from Racine about that. We figured that with a boat that already weighs 29,000 pounds, what difference would another ton make.
The race is on a Friday night. We were scheduled to start right at 1800 hours. Our friends the Schimenz offered to take our car home so we didn't have to leave it sit in an unguarded parking lot for the duration of our trip. They were so glad they came down to see us off. All the boats and their flags is quite a sight. There were 195 boats in the race. They took off and we gathered our crew to prepare to go. Katie was at the helm as we tried to get out of the slip. We started backing out and had to go to neutral to fend off the pilings. That's when our whole adventure started. When she put it in gear again she only had forward. I knew right away that the shifter cable had some loose. This happened last year once too. We shut the engine off, pushed ourselves out of the slip and when we had drifted back far enough turned it on and took off for the starting line. We made it just in time.

There is a handicapping system for these type of boats. When you have 24 footers racing against 70 footers, you have to have a way of evening things out. Consider our 40 footer at 29,000 pounds. Most 40 footers weigh about 18,000 pounds. That is what our ballast weighs. So they have what they call the Phrf ratings. Performance handicapping system. Our phrf rating is 201. There were only 3 other boats with a higher handicap. Some of the really sleek cool racing sleds had minus handicaps. The 201 means they will subtract 201 seconds per nautical mile. For the minus guys, they had time added. For this race we would have a total of 3 hours and 50 minutes subtracted from our time to even things out.
The winds were out of the SSE at about 12 knots to start. Great conditions, sunny, warm and a good breeze. There are 13 divisions in the race. The smaller ones are started together. They start the short handed fleet first. No these are not people with small hands nor short arms. They are boats with 2 or less people aboard. The next group to start was our group, the slowest of the boats. They progressively start the next group 10 minutes later with the fastest boats starting last. The nice thing about this is that you get to see a lot of boats as you are going along. We could tell early on that things were going good. We were in front of our whole group and pulling away. With our handicap, we would win our division if this held up. After about 2 hours we were passing some of the boats from the single handed division. As sunset came on no one had passed us yet.

As the night went along, we saw winds getting up to about 17 knots. With Mezzaluna, we can carry both jibs and a full main sail in those conditions. The wind stayed mostly out of the SSE but was scheduled to move South. We also knew there was a chance of thunder storms later in the night. At sunset we had a gorgeous full moon come out. It kept us lit for several hours of the night until the clouds finally moved in. Everything was going great. The boat was handling well. We were moving along good. Boats were passing us as they should, with them being racing boats and a lot lighter than us. There are a number of ways to plan your trip across. You can take the rhumb line, which is the straight line from one point to the other or you can strategize based on expected changes in wind direction. We saw boats way North and well South of us. We chose to stay close to the rhumb line, never getting more than about a ½ mile off of it. Steven did some driving early on and then had handed it over to Jim Dan before he went to get some sleep. Katie helped with the chores on deck and got the most sleep. Jim Dan eventually got a couple of hours of sleep. Jeff was awake all night. We would occasionally see some lightening way off in the distance. It is interesting when you are out in the open lake, how far away you can see something like lightening. We were shocked at how quickly we had gotten to the middle of the lake. Looking at our ETA we were in for an arrival before sun up. Jeff was going to have to find a way to fix the shifter cable before we went to tie up so we would have some control. In the dark was not planned for, much less in 4 foot seas that we were soon to be in. With about an hour to go Jim Dan had woken up along with Steven. Jeff turned the helm over to Jim Dan and went below to get some food. Just as he was below conditions changed quickly. We had listened to the radio just 10 minutes earlier and heard that North of Muskegon they were going to have some severe storms soon. Winds were going to be in the 30s or higher. That was well North of us but we knew we would have to watch for it. Well when it hit us Steven saw the wind gauge hit 32 knots before it quit giving out a signal for the rest of the night. The boat healed up a bit but not too bad. We were rocking tho. All of a sudden Jim Dan yells out "The Steering wheel is off". It was fortunate that Jeff was below as he grabbed a light and turned it on and through it in the cockpit so Jim Dan could see what was happening with the steering. Those of you that know sailing know that the boat will have a tendency to head up. You would have expected to see us round up real fast with those kind of conditions. Especially with 2 jibs out. Mezzaluna tracked real nice. She did start rounding up some but Steven was quick thinking and released the Genoa some and started steering with the sails. Jim Dan found that the shaft had come out with the wheel and was able to get it back into place and get control of the helm. Wow, was that fortunate. We now had to keep forward pressure on the wheel to keep it in place. We found out later that a push pin that goes through the shaft had oddly fallen out.

With the winds that we were now in and seas that had grown rapidly to around 4 foot we decided to furl up the stay sail and see how we would do with full Genoa and main. We were sailing a steady 8 knots now where we had been between 6 and 7 most of the night. We late found in our electronic log that we hit 10.7 knots. Mezzaluna was flying. She was comfortable rocking and rolling in the waves but never felt out of control. We started passing boats. Not just crawling by them but flying by. Some were dealing with problems of their own. We later learned that many had their spinnakers up and had trouble getting them in. Our next concern was how are we going to find the finish line in the dark. As we approached the shore, Steven went forward, clipped on to the life lines to start spotting for the finish, we were just trying to follow the boats in front of us hoping they knew where it was. If we would have had more time with our GPS before leaving, we could have put a waypoint to steer to that would have been right where one of the markers was. We didn't have that luxury. Any way, Steven found it and we got across the line at 0400 central time. 10 hours and 4 minutes. We started the engine up and headed into the wind and got the sails down and secured and decided to head in to calmer waters and find a way to fix our shifter. As it worked out we were able to drift up to a dock and people on shore helped out with a smooth landing. We were excited, we knew we did well. By the time we were tied up on the dock it was about 6 am Michigan time. Time for some beer. We took care of our boat, eventually anchoring off the dock as the waves started to move us around too much and we didn't want to mess the boat up.

We had already checked in and had to wait until 1500 hours for the results. Jim Dan had bought a ticket for the Lake Express to come back to Wisconsin in the afternoon. He decided to catch the morning ride back if he could get there in time, which he did. Steve got more sleep as we hung out and cleaned up the boat more. Eventually the three of us checked out the art fair in town before going to look at the results.

As we are looking at the results, they are printed out by division, we find our name at the top of our division. We had kind of suspected that could happen. As we look closer there is a number one behind our boat and a number 2 behind the next but then the number jumped. Looking at the other divisions, there were no other number ones. We WON! We won the whole regatta. Our corrected time was the best of the entire fleet. The next closest boat was 17 minutes behind us on corrected time. We couldn't believe it. What a way to start out a trip. As Captain Ron is known to have said, " if it's going to happen, it's going to happen out there!"

Well we are writing this on Monday morning. Steven took the Lake Express back Sunday morning and after fixing everything on the boat we headed North and pulled into White Lake to spend the night. We are going to spend part of our day here and then head up to Pentwater where we are told it is a bit nicer. Before we do we need to fill up with water and fuel and check out the light house museum they have here. We will be making more logs during our trip so stay tuned to this blog if you are interested.