20 seconds after the start, I look over my shoulder and can tell we're going to have a rough one. We've started near the pin in the first race of the 2022 E Scow National Championship on my home Lake Minnetonka. With a half-mile-long starting line set to accommodate 69 boats, the righty I'm now seeing sends a parade of sails marching up inside us, and our only option is to keep going left.
With patience, situations like this can often work in one's favor. On inland lakes, it's common for both sides to be advantaged at some point during a beat. "Win your side" is the adage. I glance up toward Brackett's Point on the lake's western shoreline, where I've seen countless lefties roll through from this direction in the past. But when the next puff hits, we lift higher and higher.
Yup, we're going to have a rough one.
I've sailed on Lake Minnetonka my entire life, but I've never seen the wind do this before. A few hours before racing, a cold front rolled through from the bottom of Canada, littering the upper Midwest with storm cells. The result: a blustery breeze between 8 and 18 knots with up to 40-degree wind shifts-an absolute nightmare for the race committee, who spent most of the day hoisting postponement and general recall flags before finally getting a race off at 3 p.m. Now that we're underway, I find myself somewhere in the back of the mid-fleet, praying for a shift that will never come.
The E Scow mid-fleet is a scary place. First beats in this class are absolute bloodbaths, and since the boats are 28 feet long with 6-foot beams, the lanes, like the hulls, are long and narrow. With sails blanketing your vision every way you look, it's easy to get disoriented. When packs of boats meet, skippers make split-second decisions that can either salvage a race or send them drifting into the netherworld. As we make our way up the beat, I'm finding that most of the rules of mid-fleet sailing do not apply to today's racing.
This story is from the Winter 2023 edition of Sailing World.
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This story is from the Winter 2023 edition of Sailing World.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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