Fifty-five knots! Really! And I didn't measure the wind--it was measured by the Canadian weather department at that time. It was during the 1978 (I think) Strait of Georgia race at Easter time; the race was run by the West Vancouver Yacht Club. It's an annual affair and the WVYC does it well. Big dinner the night before with an elaborate weather forecast by an official weather forecaster with charts and handouts, the whole works. He said that he was worried that that race might not get started because of NO WIND. He couldn't see any wind in the forecast.
I was sailing my Ranger 29 with five other guys who all knew how to sail.... I forgot what class we were in but I started so far back that my crew were actually upset with me--lots of grumbling. The start of the race was under the Lion's Gate Bridge off a long pier and as pure luck would have it we drifted over the line in first place in class.
The race course was up to Welcome Pass, then across the strait to some islands and then down the east side of Vancouver Island until we were off Active Pass, then back to the Frasier River buoy and then home to the final buoy off a lighthouse. Big time race--first time for me.
Of course we were elated to be first in our division and worked like the devil to get the sails just right for the little breeze we found. We were still in first place at Welcome Pass but big boats were beginning to pass us up. And the breeze was picking up, maybe ten to fifteen.
We started across the strait with twenty five knots of wind, around five PM and I asked the crew if they were hungry yet. No, no, no, we still leading. I had made five quarts of spaghetti sauce, really good stuff with sausages, pork chops, meatball, the whole works. And the boat had a two burner alcohol stove which gimbaled. EXCEPT I had tried the gimbaled part of the stove with empty pots. With a full pot of sauce and a pot of water for the spaghetti, the gimbaled part now didn't work. So I lit the stove and helped the stove to move in the right direction--the guys were all busy working their butts off sailing.
And sailing we were doing. Winds had picked up to thirty-five to forty knots as we approached Vancouver Island. And waves were picking up as well. Winds were from the south east and so were the waves. I remember the turn to the south but I was beginning to not feel very good and told someone else the watch the sauce. I was fast becoming sea sick and laid down on the forward berth. Which was good cause it was close to the head.
It got dark and I remember going on deck once (probably to get sick again) and found the lee rail sort of crowded, several of the crew were now sea sick. Waves were as high as our speaders and when we were down in the trough you saw nothing but dark and the wind was much lighter in the valley of the waves. But when you came up the next wave and reached the top, you could see all these red light off our starboard and green lights off our port. At the top of the wave the boat would give a jerk as the winds hit it and then we sluced down into the next valley. When we came up again the light would be all different as different boats were up at different times.
All the crew got sick except one guy who kept drinking Drambuie (a liquor that he had bought crossing the border to reach the boat--cheaper that way) from the bottle.
Somewheres during the night the sauce became unattended and went airborne. It traveled across the boat to the port aft bunk and my buddy's brand new down sleeping bag. When he got in he said the sauce was warm but he had to keep getting rid of the pork chop bones. Some weeks later he told me that the cleaners had put the bag through the cleaning seven times but were unable to get rid of the stains.
There was spaghetti sauces all over the boat. Someone took one of my wife's good towels and made a coffer damn to hold most of it near the stove.
Around two in the morning there was no one else to run the boat--all but the one guy were sick. We were using jib and double reefed main--probably could have dropped the main as well. And we still going down into troughs and then coming up and getting beat on by the wind. Later on the official word from the Canadian weather was that we had sustained fifty-five knot winds.
Around Active Pass, we quit the race and ran for the WVYC home base. Going with the wind was easier. We lost our man overboard pole, a light that was attached to it. A wave had hit the boat from somewhere and washed those items overboard. We didn't even think about going after them. A serious aside: Having been in those conditions I would never have a MOB pole again. Totally useless. You'd never see the pole and it would lie straight down in the wind anyway. That's just my comment.
A few years later I sold the Ranger 29 and as we were cleaning it up for selling, my wife mentioned that the stainless steel stove was rusting. I told her like an all knowing husband that I was then that stainless can't rust. She said, come look and by gosh, it was rusting, except it wasn't rust--it was dried spaghetti sauce. I'm sure the new owners wondered about red stuff in strange places on that boat after they bought it.
Fifty-five knots and I'd never do it again if I knew ahead of time. I did win second in class one year with a different boat--it's a good race run by a good yacht club.
And, no, I never made spaghetti sauce again for a long distance race. That's another story.
