By Paris Henken
I arrived at Fort Lauderdale late Friday night the day before Thanksgiving break, picked my bag up at baggage claim and waited for my skipper, Aine Fretwell, to pick me up in our red rental car. After navigating our way through the Florida streets, we arrived out our host’s house. The regatta started the next day and I couldn’t helped but think that Aine and I had sailed together once before. In addition to only sailing together once before I had only sailed a snipe twice. I had to admit, “This was going to be interesting.” As an avid 49erFX sailor who is trained for trapezing, hiking was going to be a whole different situation in that the last time I crewed full time was high school sailing freshman and sophomore year in the CFJ. As we showed up the next morning to the yacht club we continued to check the conditions for the next couple of days, wind and waves. Being use to gnarly conditions, Aine and I were both very ecstatic to sail in the challenging conditions. We get off the dock and started the long sail out to the ocean. I do have to confess that after the half an hour of sailing out my legs were killing me. However, we had arrived at the venue, talked over my tasks as a new snipe crew, and were then ready for the first race.
The first start happened to be our best start there at that regatta. Being aggressive we kept on the line and ended up rounding the windward mark second. We sailed downwind catching any swell we could ride. We rounded the leeward mark third, however after going upwind then back down to the finish we ended up passing the second place boat back riding this huge wave into the finish. As the wind stayed at a good 15 knots with swell of 2-3 feet, we finished that day off with a 2,3,4,5, tied for third place and one point out of second.
The next day was a little different. The morning started off with no wind and was expected to slowly build throughout the day to 25 knots around 1-2 pm. We received a tow out and after a day of hiking, we were both very sore. However, as the wind slowly started to pick up we got into our groove. Our starts were not up to par and the wind direction added onto difficult tactical decisions. We ended the day with two races and two 8th places.
We ended our first regatta together with a fifth place out of 21 boats, while only 18 boats sailed. I learned a lot about the snipe and find it really exciting to be able to sail outside my normal skiff sailing. I had tons of fun with Aine and wouldn’t be surprised to sail future events with her in the Snipe.