Circling Back

Three Lasers showed up for Wednesday night racing a week ago. As we were rigging we got to joking around about staying close on the course and I declared that if we were far enough ahead of perpetual handicap winner, John in his Day Sailor, I’d circle back to the second place Laser to keep it interesting.

I got a nice start and John sailed into a crowd of slow, late starters and ended up crossing the line at a crawl. I approached the windward mark ten boat lengths ahead of the next Laser and got to the reach mark half a leg ahead.

I race for the interplay of strategy and tactics. Don’t get me wrong, I love winning, just not as much as I enjoy prevailing. The success of a strategy or the smooth execution of a tactic lets me know the wins will come.

But here I was sailing up the lake by myself; I could do this in practice. I didn’t need to do it to have fun in a race. So I rounded the reach mark, turned 180 degrees and headed back toward my closest competitor. I rounded up and tacked a couple of boat lengths ahead and accelerated into a position I hoped gave him clear air.

Stuart Walker would wonder if I was following some inner need to lose to him. The guy I tacked in front of hollered over to ask if I was trying to humiliate him. Ah! The complex world of competition. Here I was giving him a chance to show me what a fool I was to not just keep going.

Would I have done that to a more seasoned competitor? Do I look like a fool? Was I accidentally humiliating? Sounds like it was possible, but I let it slide off and decided that he was competitive enough that he was just trying to psyche me out. (A nice rationalization I thought.)

I was five lengths or more ahead at the leeward mark and crossed the line with enough room that the results weren’t in doubt. No victory dance on the fore deck, but I did shoot the line just to show him I wasn’t playing around.