Tom Cunliffe
Tom Cunliffe
S ‘
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tand by to broach, lads!’ So said Ed, the best helmsman on board, as we raced across the Channel en route for Deauville. A spring ebb was ripping west and the strong northwest wind was doing its best to make the big seas even more difficult. The boat was a state-ofthe-art, fractionally rigged 3/4 tonner. For the uninitiated, back in 1982 this made her 36 feet on deck JUNE 2022 Sailing Today with Yachts & Yachting
with a tall, slender mast supported from aft by a highly adjustable standing backstay, a pair of main runners, one of which took most of the strain at any time, and a set of checkstays. It was not the most secure of rigs and more than once I heard its type described as ‘a fly-rod supported by cobwebs’. Spot-on. The crew were bunched aft, using their combined weight to keep the stern down. This helped shove the deep spade rudder well into the
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water and, by ballasting the boat by the stern, the crew mass did its bit to stop the bows digging in with the messy results Ed was promising. We were running more or less down the wave train under single-reefed main and the ‘chicken chute’. This was the smallest of our three spinnakers, so-called because it was for heavy airs only and was said by its builders to withstand machine-gun fire. The sheet was in the hands of a trimmer and a winch grinder working
ILLUSTRATION: CLAIRE WOOD, PHOTOS TOM CUNLIFFE
A high speed downwind race across the channel illustrates the high stakes involved when your boat jumps off a wave and starts surfing
