Racing our Liveaboard Sailboat in 💨24-28 Knot💨 Beercan Race #ourladydefiant #yachtracing #liveaboard

Racing Our Liveaboard Sailboat in High-Winds – Richmond Yacht Club Beer Can Race

welcome to the start line of the first Richmond Yacht Club beer can race of the 2024 season. To set the scene for you, we have wind out of the West at 20 to 22 knots here at the start. Out on the course, it’s more like 25 to 28. The small boats have just started and are already out and on the course. We’re the last start which is the sperr class over 30 ft. The course is to go out basically to the West to a red channel marker and then back into the Finish.

On Board Crew Members

The people on board with us today are JP in the red life jacket, Scott with the greenish beanie on. He’s the same person that went down the coast with us this last summer, Era – my wife trimming, Jeb and that’s me at the helm. Have trophy in front of you.

Starting The Race

There are a few different things going on here. That horn you just heard is the start. Scott is tailing and JP is grinding in. We tell Scott to stand up so that he’s pulling the line up away from the bunch of line on the drum so that he doesn’t get any overrides. This is more of a racing jib, which means that its foot is really low. It also means that it unfortunately doesn’t clear the stanions. Um, so every once in a while if you don’t pull it in fast enough through attack, you have to have somebody go forward and pull it up over the stanion so you can pull it in nice and tight.

Hardware Issues During The Race

Once we get everything set, we’re on our way. Until what happens next, which is the jib halyard slips through the clutch a little bit. If you’ve watched our Three Bridge Fiasco race, you’ll know that we had a jib halyard snap in the middle of a race and it looked a whole lot like that, just happened.

What we’re thinking right now is that the jib halyard that the jib is currently on had just chafed through, and the jib just hadn’t dropped all the way. In reality, it had just simply slipped through the clutch, and we were able to put it on the cabin top winch retighten it and just leave it on the winch for the rest of the race.

We never got it quite as tight as we would like, but we were able to recover from this and continue with the race.