“Careful Dad,” David warns, as we close towards the buoy. The first yachts have already rounded, and are careering downwind back through the pack, just to add to the mayhem. We’re aiming for the buoy from one direction, and we’ll get there the same time as the black yacht, though it’s coming in from the other side. The difference is, we’re on port tack, while they’re on starboard. That’s another tactics thing, it basically means they have right of way, and we don’t. I see Claude swear under his breath, as he has no choice but to ease off, and let the black yacht tack around the buoy before we do, but he cuts it close, so that we’re only just in its wake, the water still frothy. But then something happens, I don’t really understand it at first, I just hear Claude shout out, and look up to see the side of the black yacht is right in front of us, so close I could reach out and touch it. I see Claude spinning the wheel like crazy, to steer us away, and there’s a horrible second before our yacht responds, and I think we’re going to smash into the black boat. But then the rudder must bite, and we carve down away from the wind.
“Asshole!” someone shouts, and I see it’s Lily’s dad. “Crazy motherfucker.” Then he seems to get control of himself. He concentrates on bringing the yacht under control again, and we head back up into the wind towards the buoy. But now the black yacht is much further ahead of us. We round, four boats back from them.
“Can they do that, Dad?” Lily asks. He doesn’t answer until we’re set on the downwind leg, our sails open, trying to catch them up again.
“Yeah. He can. He shouldn’t, but he had the inside line and I took it too close.” He looks super focused now. And super mad.
We all stay quiet on the way back downwind. Like if we’re serious we’ll go faster. When we get a swell underneath us, we cream forward faster, closing the gap, but then the wave will pass out from beneath us, and it’ll pick up the Abigale, and they’ll stretch out the lead again. I can see Jacques Bellafonte, steering on the other boat, he keeps turning round, and measuring the distance between us with his eyes. And on our boat, Claude Bellafonte is doing the same, only I can hear him murmuring, come on, come on…
When we round the downwind buoy for the final upwind leg, we’re thirty seconds behind. This time Claude doesn’t ask me, nor even David, which way we should go. Instead we follow the black yacht up the left hand side of the course, and somehow we creep closer. But not close enough. It rounds the final upwind mark still thirty seconds ahead, and there’s nothing we can do. We pull out our spinnaker sail, and it cracks like a whip as it fills with wind. It’s blowing a bit stronger now, and you can feel the pull of the sail on the yacht’s heavy hull, as we cream through the water. Twelve knots on the log. Thirteen.
And then suddenly up ahead something happens. I don’t know exactly what, but the colorful spinnaker sail on the black yacht, which should be taut and filled with wind, like half a balloon, isn’t. It’s billowing like a sheet hung on a drying line. And across the water we can hear the shouts, and they fight to get it under control. I see the reaction in Claude, he tenses, leans forward as he spots the problem, and then goes back to concentrating on what he’s doing, steering the fastest path through the waves.
It only takes them thirty seconds to recover the lost rope, and the black yacht is up to speed again. But it’s all we need. Suddenly we’re neck and neck, side by side, running downwind, parallel to each other, and each taking turns to move ahead as we ride the waves downwind. Jacques steers his yacht towards us, forcing us to react and go the same way, to avoid a collision, but Claude does the same. We’re closing fast on the finish line. Emily squeals out in excitement. We’re gonna win, we’re gonna win.
But I don’t know if we are. It almost seems random as we take it in turns to have the lead, depending on who’s on the wave. And we’re all holding on, as it’s like being on a rollercoaster. The finish line is twenty meters away, the black yacht two meters ahead, but it’s at the end of its surge, and we’ve got the next swell. The push of the wave hits the stern of our boat, and we get a downhill boost. We’re a meter behind, ten meters from the line. You can see the excitement on the people on the start boat. One of them is holding a starter pistol in the air. We can’t be five meters from the line, and suddenly we must be level, and still we’re being pushed faster, while they’re still falling off the back of the wave they were riding.
Bang! The starter gun fires, and we surge across the line.
“Who won?” Lily asks, but no one answers, no one knows. Then the radio crackles.
“Sixth place to Morning Star, Abigale in seventh. Superb racing. Couldn’t have been closer.”
So we won.
Chapter Twenty-Four
After that things go a little bit crazy.
At first we’re still careering downwind at ten knots, but Claude
