Bermuda Race '02 '04 '06

Offshore racing is actually the purest form of cruising. That's because race rules prohibit motoring, so when the wind dies and the usual reaction would be to spin up a few RPM's, you must instead resign yourself to the Gods of yore and let nature take its course. It is quite ironic that free spirited individuals who go to sea precisely in pursuit of throwing off the shackles of civilization would otherwise immediately resort to the use of a motor to moderate their speed if not for the oversight of a rules committee dictating their actions, a fealty to authority that surely runs counter to the spirit of the thing. Indeed, the slowest I have ever sailed was not during an Atlantic crossing nor countless coastal cruises but in the 2004 Bermuda Race when there wasn't a breath of wind for 30+ hours, an experience for which the crew of the Marlow had no precedent. The initial remedy was to find something useful to do, such as calculating our expected time of arrival. We were doing a knot and half and had some 400 nm to go, which would be 11 days to Bermuda. Forget about winning, how would the crew survive each other for even another day with nothing else to do?

There's no shortage of targets among this group but the mob finds a focal point in the unfortunately named Walter Fink, known among local cadres as the Legend of Long Island Sound. This ignoramus had been charged with getting butter for the farewell clam bake the night before departure but instead showed up with "I Can't Believe its Not Butter". This level of ignorance and lack of sophistication was profoundly disturbing to Sham, who's people have sailed this coast since the 17th century, and who had invited Walter in the first place. Fink might have been keelhauled but for the subsequent discovery of a bigger bonehead in our midst. Mark Dingle, as pale a greenhorn as there ever was, had been charged during said clam bake with taking the dinghy out of the marina to collect fresh saltwater for boiling the clams. Two stiff ones into cocktail hour Dingle jumped into the dinghy adjacent a cockpit full of crew already amped up in anticipation of the Race and proceeded to start the motor with the prop out of the water. The sound of the roaring engine must have muffled the heckles from the crew because he didn't look nearly embarrassed enough, but more likely he was just so clueless he didn't realize the severity of the infraction he had just committed. However lacking in seamanship, here in the doldrums Dingle more than made up for it in sportsmanship, having provided invaluable fodder for the killing of hours, taking on every provocation with the easy laugh of a boarding school kid who had seen worse, until ultimately the conversation turned to that most common of shipboard discourse, ribald honorifics toward any beautiful woman real or imagined ever glimpsed by the crew. And so we rode out the calm of 2004, building camaraderie and bobbing like a buoy on the glassy sea, grateful to have been brought to heel by nature in a novel way, antithetical to but no less welcome than our intended plan for the speediest of passages to Bermuda.