Valentine's Day Regatta at Costa Rica Yacht Club

Although we have raced boats before, we have never entered Samadhi V in a regatta. At the urging of our Tico friends we decided to participate in a regatta here in Costa Rica. We would be racing Samadhi with a crew of two, and no practice... what fun!

12 boats showed up to race yesterday. The course was an upwind-downwind course between two buoys set about 3 miles apart just off the beach. Winds at the start of the race were about 8 knots.

We were starting downwind, so we hoisted the spinnaker in the sock and broad reached towards the starboard side of the line to stay in clean air. With one minute to go Kelly unsocked the chute, and I trimmed the sheet. We crossed the line a few seconds late but we were moving! Within the first 10 minutes we had opened a substantial lead over the entire field. We were surprised to see this as there were several lightweight, high-performance boats that should have killed Samadhi in the light air!

We maintained our lead to the first mark, through a flat calm period of about 30 minutes. Then we blew it. We haven't practiced racing Samadhi before so we we weren't very fast in getting the chute down and the genoa unfurled and driving. After we had everything done another boat Caprichio had managed to pass us. Once the genoa was out and trimmed, we got the staysail out and trimmed then we started reeling in our competition. By the time we made it back to the upwind mark we had a comfortable 1 mile lead on them.

Another mark rounding taught us that sailing with a crew of 2 and a spinnaker in a 55' boat keeps you very busy! Genoa in, staysail in, spinnaker rigged and launched... The boat that was following us almost caught up (they had a full racing crew) until we unsocked the chute once more. With the spinnaker out, we bid our farewell to them, and they never got close again. We opened a very large lead and our rounding of the downwind mark went fairly smoothly, if not quickly. We enjoyed our final tack back sailing at a very comfortable 8.5 knots in the 12 knots of breeze. We crossed the line about 10 minutes before our nearest competitor (according to their crew). We anchored and tidied up the sails in time to watch them cross.

Although we were first to finish (by a very large margin!), we ended up placing second on corrected time. Since we were the ONLY boat sailing without a full racing crew we can certainly live with that!

Perhaps best of all, once Batsú was anchored, Adri & Alex invited us all aboard to celebrate the successful finish. Before long, there were at least a couple of dozen happy sailors joining in the fun, waiting for the tide. One little girl of three became the de facto hostess, presenting each of us with peanuts one at a time and screaming, "Chamo!" if we didn't accept fast enough.

We were all a little sad when it was time to pull up anchors and head back to the marina. Maybe if we're lucky there'll be another regatta before we leave.