Enduring Nirvana
Sailing World’s Dave Reed joins the crew aboard FLASH for a day of intense racing at Les Voiles de St. Barth.
As David Welch peels foil wrap from the neck of a Champagne bottle he’s just stepped off the stage with, he advises his team-mates to step back. His crew, in matching blue T-shirts, fan out into the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd inside the regatta village at St. Barts’ Gustavia Port Marina. He wrestles the cork free, and with a muted pop, it soars into the star-filled sky above. Welch’s grin is ear-to-ear as he fills the plastic cups of his crew and toasts his team’s success at Les Voiles de St. Barth Richard Mille. Judging the enthusiasm of this impromptu celebration, you might think Welch and his teammates had won their five-boat offshore multihull division—but no, that honor goes to Kent Haeger’s team on the undefeated silver Gunboat 62 Mach Schnell. Still, on the fifth and final day of this grind of a Caribbean regatta, Welch and his crew on the HH 66 catamaran Flash have sailed their best race. More importantly, they and their boat persevered where so many others failed in St. Barts’ big-breeze, trade-tossed seas, eight-hour race days and nightly soirees. “This is definitely a war of attrition,” Welch says, “but the sailing... It really is incredible.” That’s the one statement heard round the waterfront at Les Voiles de St. Barth, now 11 editions running. It’s a unique regatta, with winners and losers up and down the scoreboard. But as the cliché goes in the upper echelons of sailboat racing, “yachting is winning,” and when it comes to yachting on the blue waters surrounding this fantasy island of wealth, beauty and charm, everyone’s winning. Put it this way: First, second, third or dead last are equally Champagne-worthy. Thus, corks soar over the course of the hourlong awards fête, just as they were a few days earlier when dozens of the sailors gathered for the legendary Nikki Beach lay-day party, where over-size sushi boats sail from the kitchen to beachside tables, and waiters wander with rosé rehoboams slung over their shoulders, refilling glasses as if it were water. Tug of wars between leg-bruised and bikini-clad crews and the hulking grinders of the big boats follow the traditional Champagne scavenger hunt, where sailors rush into the surf and dive for bottles tethered to the seafloor. It’s a scene. Pop, pop, pop, all afternoon. The attrition continues. Not everyone is into the whole Nikki Beach bacchanal. Others have scattered across the 10-square-mile island to pristine beaches, hillside villas with infinity pools, and the restaurants, boutiques and cafes that give this French outpost its reputation as the glitziest getaway in the Lesser Antilles. If it weren’t for the easterly trade winds blowing streaks of sargassum across the racecourse, you’d swear you were racing in the Med. Les Voiles has everything wanting of an upscale and Med-caliber regatta too, and the late-April race week’s reputation for big breeze, big waves and high-quality race management attracts the elite of the yacht-racing world, as well amateur teams that sail to the island on their own bottoms, or sign on to charter boats, tie up stern-to Gustavia Harbor’s seawall, and endure sleepless nights riding the surge. Late-night boarding can be so perilous that piles of sail bags and crew gear often suffice as bedding to sleep off a boozy night. But enough of the afterhours. This regatta is physical racing, and an estimated 900 sailors are here to play hard. Sixty-eight teams have signed on for this edition, spread across six Caribbean Sailing Association (the regional handicapping system) divisions, two multihull classes and a Diam 24 one-design trimaran class. The crown jewels of the regatta are the glamorous Maxis, moored in the deeper water of the outer harbor. This year, there’s George David’s silver Rambler 88; Jim Schwartz’s mint-green Maxi72, Vesper; Hap Fauth’s dark-blue Bella Mente; and the newest of the fleet, Wendy Schmidt’s 80-footer, Deep Blue. The full might of the American Maxi fleet is present, each loaded with 20 or more professionals. Having arrived midweek, just in time for the Thursday lay day, I’ve hitched two very different rides for the remaining two days: Welch’s Flash and David’s Rambler 88. Chris Bailet, a professional boat captain who commissions and manages the big cruisers and racers for HH Catamarans, picks me up from the seawall at 0900 as planned and shuttles me out to the big blue catamaran where I meet the crew: a mix of friends and professionals, including America’s Cup veteran and US SailGP Team wing trimmer Paul Campbell-James. Welch, a fiber-optics engineer and social philanthropist from Los Angeles, is relatively new to this whole big-cat racing thing, but he’s hooked and tells me he’s on the hunt for something bigger and faster. So far this week, his family cruising boat has been unable to match the pace of Mach Schnell or the space-age- looking Fujin, campaigned by Greg Slyngstad. The results are getting repetitive: one, two and three across the line no matter how hard they try. Flash’s sailmaker, Alan McGlashan of Doyle Sails, opines they’re plenty quick upwind, but lack the proper downwind sail. The boat’s butchered red spinnaker-in-a-sock (not built by his employer) is more triangular, he says, and would be better served as a tarp. They’ve rigged a system to pull the spinnaker tack to weather to get it out from behind the giant mainsail, but even that’s not helping much. The day’s course is a 29-miler that starts outside Gustavia Harbor on the island’s south side, and heads east around the end of the island before snaking through anchored buoys and rocky islets. The race committee has 28 different courses at its disposal, all of which include rocks, islands, and open stretches of Caribbean runway. One by one, classes set off every 10 minutes. When it’s Flash’s turn, we run for the line with Mach Schnell to leeward. Campbell-James, steering for the start, appears to have timed his approach well, but Welch and keeps him attentive to the jib’s telltales. Meanwhile, Campbell-James tippy-toes across the traveler beam, peering over Flash’s rooftop solar panels for a better view of the racecourse ahead. The rest of the crew is either piled into the for- ward cockpit managing the big ropes, jib sheets and halyards, or scrambling from side to side to reposition their weight. For the remainder of the day, there are long stretches of ideal time interspersed by action on the trampoline as the spinnaker sock goes up and down. The wind is strong, pushing the catamaran around the track at respectable speeds, and despite precision layline calls from the navigator, Flash’s crew is simply lacking in its sail inventory. After Welch glides the boat across the finish line after nearly six hours of racing, there’s word on board that Fujin has retired from the race—and the regatta—having hit a submerged object and damaging a daggerboard. “Well, that’s a bummer,” McGlashan says. “But we’ll take the second.”