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(reprinted from the Easton MD Star
Democrat)
ST. MARY’S CITY — The Chesapeake Bay south of the Bay Bridge was teeming with sailboats of every description — sloops, C&C 34s, catamarans, trimarans, cruising and racing vessels. Co-captain of the TabbyCat, Susan Ratrie ordered the crew to hoist the mainsail as she killed the engine, all the while maneuvering around other boats tacking in every direction around her. An automatic winch raised the mighty sail with a whir. A cannon was fired in the distance, signaling the 10-minute warning. TabbyCat slowly tacked to starboard, biding her time, hoping to approach the starting line in precisely 10 minutes. The crew pulled the lines in response to her instructions. The sheer number of vessels — each jockeying for position and circling madly around like cars without brakes — made it easy to believe there would be a collision at any moment. The five-minute warning rang out, and TabbyCat circled to starboard, edging at a steady rate toward the committee boat. The crew — Susan’s husband and co-captain Mike Ratrie of Grasonville, Phil and Cindy Wadsworth of the Pines, and Master Captain Leon Holzman of Virginia — kept their eyes out for Susan, as the headsail obscured her view from the helm. “Ten seconds!” “Sail out!” “We’re going too fast, line out!” Susan yelled, ordering the crew to luff the sails in an effort to slow down the gigantic vessel. Were the boat to cross the line early, it would be forced to circle the course again, probably costing it a viable starting position. Finally, the last cannon was fired, and TabbyCat turned south on her port side. Another catamaran raced in front of the boat, nearly causing a collision, but the damage had already been done: the TabbyCat, of Castle Point Marina in Grasonville, was the first vessel to cross the starting line of the 2006 Governor’s Cup yacht race. Watching such an intense moment of sailing without a trained eye or vocabulary is a bit like watching a dramatic foreign film without subtitles — you know something really important is going on, but there’s no telling exactly what it is. And in the Governor’s Cup — the longest overnight yacht race in Maryland, spanning a full 70 miles from Maryland’s current capital of Annapolis to its first capital, St. Mary’s City — those dramatic moments are few and far between. The ensuing hours are largely filled with small talk — how fast the wind is blowing, how fast the vessel is moving, whether it might be better to shift the jib’s angle from the wind to pick up speed, and all in the incomprehensible gibberish of sailor speak. These idle hours are enjoyed by cruising vessels such as the TabbyCat —a Maine Cat catamaran weighing some 12,000 pounds, not including fuel, dinghy or the various furnishings brought onboard. On smaller racing vessels, the intensity is far more pronounced. “The real Governor’s Cup experience,” Holzman said with a laugh, “is on one of those single-hull boats, where you’ve got the saltwater in your face, your feet are wet, and when you show up the next morning you’re exhausted.” Holzman would know. He’s been sailing this race since 1978, four years after the first Governor’s Cup was dreamed up by three St. Mary’s College students in 1974. The Ratries sailed on his boat in the annual race for some 15 years before this year, which was the TabbyCat’s first. Around 7:45 that authentic experience came to life. A single-hull boat off our starboard did what Leon referred to as a “death roll.” The boat tipped over in the wind so far that it looked like it was going capsize. After it happened again, the TabbyCat’s crew watched, transfixed, giving advice to the crew and yet talking to themselves. “Let out the mainsail.” Finally the troubled boat’s crew shredded the spinnaker — let the front sail out to the point where it was nearly in the water — and the other boats, ours included, passed them by. “No way they’re going to place,” Leon remarked. Sailing, it seems, is unlike any other sport or avocation. The jargon is not unique — golfers, motorcycle enthusiasts, musicians and engineers talk shop in a similarly indecipherable way. But anyone with a five-iron can get into golf, anyone with a motorcycle can learn about how to gain torque, and anyone with a subscription to Guitar Player magazine can run a cost-benefit analysis between .11 and .9 gauge strings. Sailing, by comparison, did not used to be a sport or hobby. Two hundred years ago, it was the fastest mode of long-distance transportation on earth, the means by which goods reached their ports and empires waged war. Today the desire among these select few to harness the winds is the same that has inspired captains for generations, even after the sailboat became technologically obsolete. Sailing combines the great elements of a pastime—strategy, luck, competition and teamwork—into an ethereal experience that many, once they have tried it, are hooked on. When one thinks of a yacht race, the image of a throng of the idle rich immediately comes to mind. But this crew defies that image — it is not a rich or an idle sport, but rather a commanding impulse to sail. “I think of it as a stress reliever,” said Cindy, a social worker in Anne Arundel County. Her husband Phil, an industrial welding engineer, was more pronounced — “The first rule is never to talk about work on the boat.” TabbyCat’s crew all got into sailing in different ways. Leon met his wife through sailing. The two of them, who at the time were only friends, decided to go in on a sailboat together in 1981. They had roughly $60,000 between them to spend on a boat, and they were deciding between a less expensive Tartan and a more expensive C&C. They opted for the Tartan and placed a $5,000 down payment on the vessel. “Back then,” he explained, “interest rates were around 18 percent, and it was hard for brokers to get boats off the lot. So the C&C broker called me and offered to bring his price down from $79,000 to $59,500, within our range. So we put another $5,000 deposit on the C&C.” The Tartan dealer couldn’t come down on his price, so they took back their deposit and bought the C&C. “That was in 1981,” he said, “and in 1983 we were married. We had many years of happy sailing after that. “Everyone’s got a story,” he added. Phil Wadsworth was introduced to sailing by an employer in his native Loughborogh, England. By the time he came to the United States to attend graduate school at Ohio State, where he met Cindy, he said, “I had a boat before I had a car, and I’ve had more boats than cars ever since.” “I still think he married me because I saved his boat,” Cindy said with a smile. During an apartment fire, she went to save his Hobie Cat while he went to retrieve his Visa and passport. “He was afraid of getting deported, and I was afraid of not having a boat to sail on,” she laughed. Marriage and birthright seem to be among the primary means by which one gains entrée into the sailing world. Susan’s father, for instance, had been a yacht broker in Ft. Lauderdale when she was growing up, and by her account had been “sailing all her life.” Her father used to take her out on excursions with potential buyers, occasionally letting her take the helm or pull a line, with the selling point, “even a child can sail this boat.” She met Mike—who grew up outside of Baltimore and had never sailed—in the early 1980s in Florida. “One of the first things she told me was that she would be sailing for the rest of her life,” Mike remembered, “So I said, OK.” “When I took him out on my Hobie Cat and he didn’t turn green, he had passed the first test,” she said. The TabbyCat herself is an illustration of the addictive nature of sailing. Unlike perhaps any other boat participating in the Governor’s Cup, Mike and Susan were not only racing their boat, but their home. Over the years, Mike, Susan and Leon had talked about “sailing south” — loosely meaning that they should give up life on land and sail to the Bahamas, but more metaphorically meaning giving up those cultural expectations of mortgage, bills, job and annual vacations in favor of following their mutual passion, sailing. “Mike was working in the telecom industry, and people were starting to get laid off,” Susan explained, “and at some point I just told him, ‘The next time you get a buyout offer, take it. We’ll sail south.’” So in the fall of 2005, they sold their house on the Nanticoke River north of Annapolis, bought the TabbyCat — which boasts a full galley, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a shower, heating and air conditioning — and moved aboard. “A lot of people have dreams like that, and they put it off until they retire, but by then they’re in their 60s,” Susan said. “We figured that if we don’t do this now, we’ll never do it.” Part of the decision, Susan explains, stems from an offer that was made to her when she was 17. “This friend of my father’s was sailing around the world, and he needed experienced crew,” she said. “I was invited, and I made it to the first leg, to the Bahamas, and I decided ‘I need to go to college.’” She attended Florida State University and majored in International Affairs. Disappointed in the sailing team, she bought her Hobie Cat. “Part of me always regretted not having taken that trip,” she said. “The hardest thing was getting rid of all of the possessions,” she continued, “You know, you don’t have to mow the grass every week, but you also can’t really keep a lot of ‘stuff’. You can’t have a library, you know. “So many people go through life — they go to college, get married, get a job, buy a house — and get into the idea of buying things, acquiring things. Breaking that mold is very hard because that’s what you’re expected to do. It’s hard to do something unconventional. But it’s kind of liberating, too.” The 16- to 18-knot northerly breeze that propelled the TabbyCat down the Bay slowed to a meager 4-10 knots as the vessel turned up the Potomac toward the St. Mary’s River. It was approaching four in the morning when the crew, feigning sleep or fighting boredom, wandered out of the main deck and gazed up at the stars. The night was clear, and one could see a shooting star in any direction if they were to gaze long enough. The light of the mainsail left a trail of light in the wake of the boat’s dual hulls. “This,” Phil said, taking in the salty breeze, “this is what it’s all about.” The horizon was dotted with white, red and green lights, indicating other boats and their trajectory. A blinking red light in the distance indicated the entry to the St. Mary’s River, and Leon, now at the helm, steered a course toward it. The high drama we experienced at the outset of the race returned as the many vessels congealed in the narrow straits of the St. Mary’s River. TabbyCat, tacking furiously along the banks of the river in an effort to keep the breeze, nearly collided with another single-hulled vessel that didn’t recognize her starboard-tack right-of-way. “I could almost hear the crunch of the fiberglass,” Susan remarked. As the sun began to rise, the boat lumbered toward the Dove, a replica of the 16th-century boat that brought the first English settlers to Maryland, and which today served as the finishing marker. A short burst of an air horn signaled the TabbyCat’s finish — it was 6:05 a.m., 12 hours and five minutes after they began the race. Dozens of boats were anchored in St. Mary’s harbor, having finished the race hours before. As the TabbyCat weighed her own anchor, the crew settled and discussed the race — what had gone well, what could be done better. I asked Phil what he loved about sailing so much. “There’s the techie bit,” he said, “then there’s the fact that it’s a team sport. Then there’s the aspect of navigation, which has always intrigued me. It’s a game of chess, really. It’s a matter of strategy, assessing any number of different elements at once. “And you can basically do it forever.” |
