Seventeen enthusiastic sailors lined up for the HHSA Thursday-evening race on August 6. An equally enthusiastic breeze of 15 knots diminished to a less enthusiastic 10 by the finish. Still, it was an exciting race around the harbor on a falling tide.
In Division A, Artful Dodger, a Tartan 3500 sailed by Mike Powers, took the top honor, and the Sonar named Second Wind, skippered by Mary Worrell, finished in second place. In third was Masquerade, Michael Loberg’s Morris 36.
Woody Bowman continued his triumphant season in the B Division with a first in his catboat Julia Lee. Second was a Gannon and Benjamin Bella, Isabella, sailed by John and Lisa Stout. Avanti, a Cape Dory skippered by David Lott, came in third. Julia Lee’s success, however, has a downside: because of three consecutive victories, her handicap was reduced by 10 seconds a mile for Thursday’s race. Julia Lee took that in stride, but because she won again, another 10 seconds will be subtracted for the rest of the races this season, for a total of 20 seconds per mile reduction. What price glory?
On Sunday, high winds, possible rain, and generally nasty conditions resulted in the cancellation of the run to Robinson’s Hole, and ultimately all racing. Later Commodore Jerry Goodale went sailing anyway, and reported that the waters were calm on the Falmouth side. Nevertheless, it would have been a long, wet, sail, tacking directly into the wind on the return.
The sail to Robinson’s Hole is almost 11 nautical miles each way, a nautical mile being 1.15 land miles (1,852 meters), and equivalent to one minute of latitude around the equator. The ratio of a nautical mile to a land mile is almost the same as that of a meter to a yard. A knot is one nautical mile per hour. “Knot” derives from the 17th century, when sailors used a device called a “common log” to measure the speed of a vessel. The device was a coil of rope with uniformly spaced knots attached to a piece of wood shaped like a wedge of pie. After the piece of wood was lowered from the stern of a vessel, the line was paid out for a specific amount of time. Then the line was retrieved and the number of knots between the ship and the wood was counted. The ship’s speed was said to be the number of knots on the line. However, there are two different speeds to be considered: “speed over the bottom,” that accounts for the current, which a GPS would measure, and “speed through the water,” such as that recorded by a common log, where the current is ignored or guessed at.