Overcoming Adversity
The Sea Bags Women’s Sailing Team traveled to Sayville, NY to compete in the Corinthian Nationals this past month. Eight years ago, very early in our tenure as an all-women’s J24 team, we competed at this venue in the J24 Nationals, and it was amazing to realize how far we have come as a team. Teammate Joy Martin raced with Jess and Erica for the first time at that past event and we were excited to celebrate this anniversary with her, but unfortunately, despite her delivering the boat to the event with her husband for us, she tested positive with an illness that made it impossible for her to compete. Fortunately, we were able to rapidly find a replacement, our friend Robin Van Vliet from California, who we met at the J24 North Americans in Mexico.
At this year’s event, Thursday’s practice race was cancelled due to small craft warnings, so Will Welles from North Sails and Kris Werner from Quantum modified their plan from providing on water coaching and led a little workshop for participants. They reviewed:
Boat set up
Team roles
Division of responsibilities
Doing venue homework strategies
Go fast techniques such as reducing weight on board and keeping weight you do have down low in the keel
The numerous pointers these two experts made affirmed the progress we’ve made as a team, confirming lessons learned and systems we have in place. But unfortunately, this was only our second event of the season and once again, we were unable to practice. Mother Nature has had other plans for the Thursdays before our first two events of 2024.
Despite not being able to get on the water the team took advantage of this opportunity to improve and found a quiet spot at the yacht club to take advantage of our time together. We reviewed jobs to be done throughout the event, on and off the water; we studied our Excel document noting who does what at which point on the race course; and we even took our new tool, the GPS connected Vakaros to the parking lot to walk around with it, simulating our starting routine and time and distance to the line.
After two races on Friday that did not go our way, races that would have been better had we been able to practice together, we were ready to go on Saturday. Fortunately, the wind gods were ready, and the first race was off, and we were on fire. We rounded the first windward mark in the first race in fourth, gybed right away, and ended up passing two boats down wind. We rounded the leeward mark in second, which felt amazing, but as we started going up with, the jib halyard broke. We quickly realized we could lower the sail and use the spinnaker halyard on the genoa when going upwind, and then we would need to drop that sail, switch the halyard to the spinnaker, and raise it. This is not the way this is normally done and not efficient, yet we did it all day on Saturday with four very long races. Saturday was a very long day; we left the dock at 9:00 am and returned at 5 pm. Upon returning we took the time to replace the halyard, which, fortunately, we had in our spare supplies.
Throughout the whole event, we had other adversities to overcome, in one race we were fouled by a boat that was forced to tack at the start and sustained damage and in another race on Sunday, we had a teammate fall overboard before a race into the 60-degree water. The teammate was not hurt, and she was able to race, thank goodness, but it was scary.
At the awards ceremony we won The Top Female Skipper, and we also won the “Best Recovery Award.” It did not go unnoticed how we handled not having one of our halyards for the very long day of racing on Saturday. Overall, we are very proud of how we overcame adversity throughout the event, and how we capitalized in two races finishing in the top five of a very competitive fleet.
Written by Erica Beck Spencer, Skipper