HUDSON RIVER SOJOURN: Wednesday night races

VALCOUR ISLAND, LAKE CHAMPLAIN - Sunday afternoon and we’re anchored in a cove just south of Bluff Point. Black ducks tippling near the rock-ledges shore. Further up in the cove, pontoon boats and an assortment of other small power boats - their occupants on the beach playing corn hole and listening to country music - have replaced the flotilla of mostly Canadian sail boats that surrounded us last night. Dozens of them in here for protection from both wind.

When the sun went down, their anchor lights came on. The mast-top lights were about the same intensity as Venus’s reflected light - the evening star, but not a star at all - as it rose in the west. The anchor lights blended in with the rest of the night’s stars, most of them part of the Milky Way. A bit of magic. The north wind had swept the skies clean of cloud and humidity and each star was as articulate as the words in a poem recited by an English actor.

That was the north wind. (That’s for you, Wind!)

Last Wednesday evening we anchored in Shelburn Bay south of Burlington to gain a lee against the steady southerly breeze. We watched three different classes of sailboats assembling in the middle of the bay. Wednesday night races. A summertime tradition in sailing waters throughout the US.

My sailing friends in Lewes enjoy their one-day, midweek races on Delaware Bay. All shapes and sizes. Crews of one, crews of five. A good excuse to drink cold beer on a weekday summer evening. Kind of like a short weekend in the middle of the week.

In Shelburn Bay, we watched the fleets go off by timed horns blown from a committee boat. Race officials had set up the customary windward starting line using themselves and a red nun about 75 yards away. Soon the chaos of the pre-race jockeying gave way to echelons of graceful and quiet sailing boats stringing out in a single-purposed line racing to the first mark up the bay and at least a mile or two away.

After taking the upwind mark to port, some of them only making the mark after two or three crosswind tacks, the fleets completed a relatively short reach to the second mark. Then their crews scurried to pop their colorful and billowing spinnaker chutes for the long downwind leg back again.

We watched as leaders and laggards gained and lost position in the different legs, but it became quickly clear that this 50 or so sized fleet comprised well-matched vessels and crews. When they rounded the downwind leg mark - the red nun - they crowded it like zinnias planted too closely in the garden. They worked to foul each other’s wind, destroying momentum from faltering spinnakers, speaking their strategies in hushed tones to keep from being heard by crews in boats no more than ten feet away, waiting for the exact right moment to tiller their boats toward the mark while simultaneously smoothly but furiously dropping their spinnakers to make the final tack into the short and final upwind tack to the finish line. Just as thunder follows lightning, shouts of victory quickly followed the committee boat’s horn signaling a winner.

We weren’t close enough to hear the tops of metal beer cans popping or see the little spouts that accompany that familiar and happy sound. But our imaginations filled in what our eyes and ears missed.

Wednesday night races - are your hearts still beating as quickly as ours?

Here are a few photos from the races. As always, if you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading!