The sun came out, but the wind evaporated like a syrupy margarita in the hands of a Key West Parrot Head. It's shaping up to be an uncharacteristic sort of Key West Race Week. Not quite tourism board conditions everyone has come for, but whomever is here at Acura Key West Race Week presented by Nautica has been sailing long enough to accept that there is nothing you can do about the wind. It is what it is, and today it was not.
But there are worse places to be stuck with the afternoon available to goofing off. Hell, even Paul Cayard had to slide into relaxation mode (although, not too far). "Tomorrow is a long way off right now and most of the 2,500 sailors are well into their third Margarita or Mudslide at this point." He writes in today's brief installment of his daily e-mail blast. "I am going to run to the beach out by the airport and go for a swim."
The tourist traps are booming and those who came with family and friends are getting in some quality poolside vacationing (there's even poolside bingo, bizarre as it sounds) at the Galleon Marina's Pool Bar (a.k.a. Tikki Bar) where a thirsty crowd in sailing gear has congregated. If you listened closely at around 2:00 this afternoon you could make out the drone of blenders firing to life all around the Conch Republic. I believe the J/80 class weas contributing this effort. You can't blame this crowd for its unrelenting thirst. It is after all the best way to recover from baking all morning under a mid-latitude sun. In an ideal world, you maybe follow that Mudslide up with a nap, a bit of computer work, a bike ride, a fishing trip, or a jog down to bottom of Highway 1. There's not shortage of options here.
The lack of racing aside, we managed to entertain ourselves this morning, as well as a few of the media boats hovering around the Division 2 starting area. Onboard the J/109 Tastes Like Chicken, True Horizon (which makes gimbaled camera mounts) and Jobson Sailing mounted a pair of digital cameras onboard the boat today to get perspective of the PHRF racing. Jobson is producing short video pieces each day for the regatta and ESPN2, and has had cameramen and mounted cameras onboard a few boats over the past few days. If you haven't seen his nightly productions, I assure you it's worth every minute of your time to check them out (www.jobsonsailing.com).
Small as the camera units may be—one mounted on the stern rail, and one mounted above the instruments, looking aft, their presence alone was intimidating. Knowing we might eventually show up on the highlights reel—for better or worse—was downright unnerving. But mic-ed up we were, and while under postponement, we did manage to turn the cameras on for 10 minutes or so as we sailed upwind in 4 knots, then set the lime-yellow kite and drifted downwind. It's just too bad it wasn't 25 knots and blazing speeds—anything else would be better than what came off our boat today. But if anything, the experience, brief as it was, gave me a better understanding why some professional teams are squeamish about cameras on their boats. We had to be cautious about what we said when the cameras were rolling (explicatives, especially), which isn't easy when you're drifting around under postponement. There are the personal stories, the jokes (dirty and not), and the kind of stuff that stays on the boat. It's this hysterical interaction that makes us ultimately forget the fact that we didn't sail a race.
Our mastman Forrest actually makes a point to poll the crew as were sailing back from the racecourse each day. He poses the simple question: "High point, low point?"
The simple answer for today is, "…Low point: No racing. Highpoint: everything in between."
