Tag: sailing

As previously noted, the Sea Bird yawl was never meant for racing, but that hasn’t stopped Sea Birds from joining races over the design’s long history. In 2010, we decided Irene Agnes should join that illustrious company.

So, we registered for the Herreshoff Classic Yacht Regatta, held out of the Herreshoff Museum in Briston, RI. Not surprisingly, in retrospect, it turned out to be a quite less than illustrious showing.

I vividly remember the bemused look of someone I was chatting with at the party the night before the race as I described our boat. “What are you doing here?!” he exclaimed, unable to suppress his laugh.

It was a fair question. We were laughably out of our league, and I had no illusions of being particularly competitive. Mostly I saw it as an opportunity to have some fun with other boats and show off ours. Laurie was working the day of the race, so I enlisted the help of my friend Matt for the race. Laurie would join me for the sail back up the bay the next day.

DNF

The wind was light at the start, and I did miserably. Aggie was not going to point as high as a Herreshoff S-boat, particularly in the light breeze, but that didn’t stop me from grossly overestimating laylines and pinching desperately for the start. We were the last over by a long stretch. I could hear Tom Day berating me from beyond the grave for my hubris.

We made the first mark easily, but then the wind completely died. We could see the other boats similarly stranded across the bay. After drifting around for quite a while, we called it quits. It was clear we weren’t ever going to make the second mark, much less the finish line.

I cranked up the outboard and we motored back toward Bristol. Entering the harbor, the outboard died, and we got a tow back to the dock from another boat. There we rafted up for the night alongside a schooner yacht being captained by a friend.

A Long Trip Home

They had to leave before dawn the next morning to make a transit back to a homeport in New York. With still no wind in sight, and our outboard still not working, they offered to tow us at least out of the harbor. From there, we were on our own to our dock in Mount Hope Bay as they parted ways to head south.

We drifted nearly the entire day, catching the occasional zephyr when it would pass by. Eventually we broke out the paddle we had picked up as an emergency back up and did some paddling, which worked surprisingly well. In the late afternoon, we accepted a tow from a friend heading back to the same marina.

That was the only race we ever entered with Irene Agnes, and probably the only one she ever participated in in her long life. That summer turned out to be one of Aggie’s last seasons underway before turning into a yardbird on the hard, so she never got a rematch. Although she’s finally getting underway again soon, I doubt we’ll enter her in any races again – unless we manage to get a solely Sea Bird regatta going!

Our experience at the Herreshoff regatta and the long trip home did also underscore a couple other aspects of the boat’s operation, mostly related to the outboard, sweeps and other auxiliary power choices. Now that she’s getting back underway, we’re ditching the outboard. More on that in another post.

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