Madison Recap 2014

Oh Madison…. You are a consistent one; I’ll give you that. In the cold, hard, and brutal sort of way that twister’s always manage to hunt down trailer parks and wreak havoc. Madison is also the Capitol of Wisconsin, (true story), what it is as well, is the hub of capital punishment in CRAW. The wind is always fluky, it’s always cold, and it’s never forgiving. Saturday started off sailable though, albeit cold. Checking the forecast, as all sailors do, you’d see that it was going to die off around noon. But honestly, how often do these clowns get anything right anyways? I’m sure at the end of the day on Saturday there was a room somewhere packed full of meteorologist’s high fiving one another in an orgy of congratulations. Phone lines lighting up as tear filled calls to depressed parents were made, thanking them for their degree from the local community college, because they flat out nailed it that day.

I digress. We left the beach. Nothing gnarly, but there was certainly enough to work with. There was the typical shifty wind, and the classic gusts confirming that you are sailing on Lake Mendota. But that didn’t last long. Half way through the first race things were already taking a turn for the worse, the wind was backing, and getting weird(er). Weird be pretty characteristic of Mendota. But, what the heck, lets throw the kid’s college fund on green and give the roulette wheel a spin and fire off another race. In the sequence the wind is going left. Hard. I believe the Marstrom Tornado crewed by Mr. Hearn and Mr. Malcheski, was the first to actually cross the start line, a good forty seconds after the start of the race. Dale and I tacked off about as quickly as we could without hitting the committee boat, and managed to scream across the start line at a whopping two knots of boat speed about thirty seconds after the Tornado while the rest of the fleet coped with carrying on up the left side of the course. It was looking really good for us. Dale and I were busy breaking our arms patting ourselves on the back, when the wind died. I mean died. Not like when your childhood pet “went to the farm”. It was more like the end of Old Yeller, but from Yeller’s perspective. Things got unpleasant. The wind was behaving like a drunken, bipolar, schizophrenic, cult escapee going through withdrawals. One second it was there, the next not. It was coming from over here, then over there. Not sailable. After spending a good fifteen minutes watching a bubble in the water not go anywhere, racing was kindly abandoned for the day.

Sunday. Behold unto you, I present the wind, in all its terrifying glory. Not really, just thought that sounded cool. Still behaving poorly though, but it was breeze on. Also cold again, though not as cold as Saturday, but with the wind being up there in strength, it felt colder. Capsizes here and there due to the Madison wind behaving as it does, was a common occurrence throughout the four races raced on Sunday. The shifts were horrendous. We auto tacked while double trapped numerous times and scrambled to get things going again. Losing precious ground, and losing precious patience for the tiresome shifts. Falling out of sync with the shifts and knowing when to tack were solid skills to have. We didn’t have it, though. We’d tack on a header, only to be headed again. Go figure. Who knew the wind would be so moody in the space of thirty seconds? Then there was the gusts. Early in the day they were manageable. By the third and fourth races it was a constant battle to keep the boat moving and upright, (both being key to sailboat racing), while going downwind. I pretty much turn into a floating disaster in these conditions when I’m singlehanded, so congratulations are in order for Dave Foster for toughing it out in some quirky conditions, and Mark Thomson deserves an award for being smart enough to have headed in, because I would’ve done the same thing on the F16 alone.

Will I be back to battle Mendota’s fickle, cranky, and outright belligerent wind? Most definitely I will.

Big thank you to everyone who continues to make this happen. To the Hearn family for turning their home into an asylum for sailors, and to the Winders family for hosting us for pizza, and housing so many of our ranks for the event.

Karl Brogger