What would you rather do? Race or do race committee? Well, the answer is pretty easy. We go to the trouble of buying boats, maintaining them, practicing with them, and spending down marital credits to disappear for a day—the price varies according to season, mood, and the behavior of children—because we want to sail and compete against other sailors.
 
So lots of sailors moan about, bitch about, and even actively shirk their race committee duty, even though it's glaringly obvious that if there is no race committee, there is no racing.
 

© Michael Lovett

On Saturday, I sanded the hard-to-reach places. Notice how I missed the aft surface of the starboard bench support?

This weekend I jumped off a cliff. Figuratively speaking, of course. Over the holidays, my father and I applied the first coat of varnish to the Sled, the wooden Thistle we've been working on for the past few months. (This isn't a several-months-long project, but that's what it becomes when work takes place sporadically on the weekends.

© www.yvan-bourgnon.fr

Yvan Bourgnon and Sebastien Roubine rounded Cape Horn in a modified beach cat.

Cape Horn has long been the most iconic landmark in the minds of sailors. In fact, for reasons of history, geography, and drama, I think it should be an iconic landmark in the minds of all humanity—so much so that it annoys me when the sailing world diminishes its Greatest Cape by endlessly and tiresomely referring to it as the "Everest of sailing." Do you think any climbers would be willing to undermine Everest by calling it the "Cape Horn of climbing"? Cape Horn can stand on its own. We don't need to compare it to a mountain.

Key West Race Week delivers an environment impossible to compare with any regatta in the world. Personally, it felt like someone dragged Reno, Nevada to the oceanfront, and ran one of the most amazing spectacles in sailing: bull riding, carny activities, jet pack rides, pirates heckling you on the street. . . I found myself in the middle of the spectrum between "Mad Max" and "The Real World." For our team, West Marine Rigging, it became a story of amazing success and survival.