I should explain about sailing boats here, just in case you don’t know much about them. I didn’t, at least not until Dad taught me. They’re not like motorboats, in that you can just go in every direction you want. The way my dad explained it to me was like this: It’s a bit like riding a bike on a very steep hill. The wind is the hill, and it falls from the top down to the bottom. So it’s easy to go downhill, or even across the hill. But if you want to go up, you can’t. It’s too steep, and you have to go in zig zags. Like switchbacks on a mountain road. Each zig is called a tack. But then when you change from one tack to another – the corners – that’s also called a tack (I told you it was confusing) but really you’re just changing from one switchback to another. If that doesn’t make sense, I didn’t get it either, not until we got out there and started trying it. Then it’s quite easy.
“Three minutes to the gun.” David calls out, as we tack again and pull the sails tight. My shoulders are hurting from the effort of it, and I’m hot.
“Bearing off. We’ll go a minute and gybe round then gun for the start.” Claude shouts back. I don’t know that much about what they’re saying, so I just do what I’m told.
“Get that main pulled in! Going about…” Claude spins the wheel until we’re running with the wind, and Lily pulls on the main sheet so the boom isn’t able to sweep too fast across to the other side. Then he gradually hardens up on the new tack, and with the sails pulled tight, we’re pointing right at the right hand end of the start line. About fifty meters back from it. There’s a log readout on the instrument panel, telling us the speed in real time. It eases up, from six knots to seven. Seven point five.
“One minute to the start.” David calls out. There are three boats just downwind of us, but another two upwind, positioned just a few meters ahead of us, giving them the upwind advantage. One of them is the black yacht, so close we can see the taut expressions on the crew’s faces. They pull its sails tighter and it accelerates, moving a half boat-length in front of us. Then, amid shouts and noises and David’s countdown alarm beeping, a canon fires on the cliffs on the shore. We see the smoke momentarily before the noise, and then twenty yachts all hit the start line together. For a few minutes I think we’re all going to crash, or at least the race is going to be neck and neck the entire way, but actually we quickly begin to spread out as the faster boats take the wind of the slower ones, and pull ahead. We’re about sixth, I guess – though it’s not easy to say, because of the zig-zag thing I just told you about. David showed me the course we have to race, before we left the berth. We have to sail up against the wind to a marker buoy, then come back down wind again, then do it a second time, only not quite so far, and then come back down to cross the line in the same place where we started. It’s all a bit pointless when you put it like that.
But it doesn’t feel pointless, not now I’m doing it. It feels exhilarating and quite scary, and just really, really exciting. We’re heeling over, bucking and smashing through the little waves, and there’s spray flying through the air, and there’s still two boats so close you could throw a stone onto their decks, one downwind of us, which we’re beating, and the other upwind, which unfortunately is the black yacht. We tighten and ease the sails, trying to urge the speedometer up. Sometimes it’s as high as nine knots, sometimes as low as six, and we see the difference in how the black yacht eases ahead, or we pull back closer. Then suddenly the black yacht rolls into a tack, faster than before, its sails only momentarily flogging as it changes onto the other angle of the zig zag.
“Tacking to cover,” Lily’s dad – Claude – says at once, and everyone runs to change the sails so we can go the other way too, following it. Then there’s a moment of noise and chaos as we round up into, and through, the wind, our speed drops to three knots, then the wind presses the sails from the other side and we squeeze forward again. Five knots. Seven. Nine again. The water slipping past the rails beneath us is blurred. But even so, the black yacht is now further ahead, maybe two whole boat-lengths. And these are long boats. We’re looking at its stern now, the name painted in red: Abigale. Then there’s a hiss and a crackle on the radio, and a voice comes through, managing to sound smug even through the static.
“You need to work on your tacks Claude!”
David
