2011 Sundance Cup - Women's Match Racing
Yep! That’s my team. How do you take four experienced female sailors and instantly find their strengths and weaknesses and make them look like the first Jamaican bobsled team at the 1988 Olympics? Women's match racing and then add a little wind for good measure. Things happen fast and a couple of seconds here and there of inefficiency or hesitation and the seconds add up quick and things can and do get ugly. I spent two days doing a women’s match racing clinic in Fort Worth and then two days of match racing followed by the finals and I have only one thing to say … OUCH!! I’m bruised from head to toe (Doug says I look like a leopard) and after watching the younger and more experienced female match racing sailors in the finals, I feel very old and slow.
This was an incredible experience. Being horribly humbled isn’t fun but Dave Perry said he got his behind kicked in his first match racing regatta so I guess I’m in good company. We had a perfect score of 0-12 meaning we lost all 12 matches that we sailed. Another ouch!
However, being eliminated meant I was able to jump on an umpire boat and be a fly on the wall and watch the finals up close and personal. These girls are amazing sailors. I thought things were happening fast on my boat and we were just a little slow but things were happening so fast the umpires could barely speak fast enough to keep track of the movement. Two umpires follow each match and they get as close to the competitors as the competitors get to each other. At one point we were an obstacle and the girls were circling us. Each umpire role plays as the port or starboard boat and they do a sort of play by play in their own shortcut language ‘I’m port, give … tacking, done’. My favorite was ‘get off my boat, get off my boat’ when one umpire would inadvertently switch boats. I was impressed by the umpiring and realized I’d been looking for that shortcut language to run through my head when I’m racing to constantly keep track of who has rights.
The match racing fascinates me for training purposes but being the one getting beat up on the competitor boat wasn’t as much fun as sitting on the umpire boat and listening to the play by play and the advanced thinking about what might happen and how they’d rule and what needed to happen to bring the boat under better control or in better position. I think I have a shot at learning the umpire portion but the competitor part felt a bit like torture and if I can become a more knowledgeable sailor without needing a week or two to heal, I’m all for that route. Umpires do have to be active sailors and the guys I was with sail often enough that I’d classify them as professional sailors so I have to wonder if they got that good from doing or watching or both.
Fort Worth Boat Club hosts the Sundance Cup every year. They put on a fantastic event and went above and beyond to make everyone feel welcome. It was an awesome venue and event in all respects.
Click here for a few videos and pictures to get a feel for the match racing action. Doug and I might try to do a little of this sometime this summer on the Butterfly course so if you see us chasing each other around at the start, it isn’t because one of us stole the other’s sunscreen and is trying to get it back.
