It was a nice day for a race at the Boat Club. The sky was clear and the wind was probably blowing 15 knots. I knew on bigger boats that it was important to have people cross trained, so I decided it would be a good day to let one of my cockpit crew take a turn at the tiller. We headed for the start with the number 2 genoa up and a full main. The boat would have max power and be a real hand full for the winch grinders and the main trimmer (me).
I forget who we had working the winches, but our primary (and best) cockpit guy (another Lee) was now on the tiller. We made a few practice tacks, and everything was going great. We got into the starting sequence, and still no problems. With maybe two or three minutes to the start, we were reaching away from the line on port tack. (Remember, Feather can be a hand full on a reach.) Dead on the bow was a starboard tack Etchells coming right at us.
I asked the driver which way he wanted to turn. He thought going down was a good idea, so we wouldn’t lose sight of the Etchells behind the genoa. That sounded like a good plan, so I eased the main. That wasn’t enough to allow the boat to turn, so a asked the genoa trimmer to ease the genoa. That’s when the need for cross training became obvious. They got an over ride on the winch and didn’t know how to clear it immediately. Mistake #1
Normally I drive and am the one with situational awareness during maneuvers, but I was now showing the guys how to get the over ride out. I guess I assumed the helmsman was maintaining situational awareness. Mistake # 2
It didn’t take very long to clear the over ride, but we had a sense that time was running out. A quick glance back showed the helmsman with the tiller pulled hard to windward. As soon as we got the sheet cleared, we let it all go. I was dumping the main at the same time to stand the boat up and let the rudder do its thing. Because of Mistake #2, this was Mistake #3
The Etchells had hailed us and gotten no response. He wasn’t a very experience racer, and didn’t know about the gremlins that some times made themselves at home on Feather. He did what should have been a smart thing and turned down wind to avoid a collision. Unfortunately, so did we. When we first got our heads out of the cockpit and saw the Etchells, we were aimed at his shrouds and about to hit him at close to a 90 degree angle. With the momentum we had, the result of this collision was going to be an Etchells cut in half. I let out a mighty noise that our helmsman properly interpreted as a need to turn up as fast has we could. You don’t get 10,000 pounds to change direction that quickly, so a collision was unavoidable by this point. However, the turn to port was the only right thing we did. Rather than sail directly through the Etchells, we managed to turn almost 60 degrees to hit it at about a 30 degree angle.
To this day I can see the face of the guy sailing the Etchells. His eyes kept getting bigger and bigger. At the last possible instant, he stood up, and our bow removed the piece of boat he had been sitting on. We out weighed the Etchells enough that the collision pushed the stern to leeward and we managed not to hook the back stay on our bow pulpit. All things considered, a two foot diameter hole of deck and topsides was less damage than it looked like we were going to do. The insurance company had the Etchells back in top shape in record time, but it was very rarely seen racing again.