Newport RI, June 16, 2016. As the nearly 1,700 sailors who will soon race to Bermuda make their preparations, loading food and gear into their boats and lining up to pre-clear customs and immigration, all of them have one question in mind: “What will the weather be?” And one answer: “I just hope it’ll favor my boat.” John Rousmaniere reports from Bermuda Race HQ, Newport:
Sailors don’t agree on much. Some prefer big boats, some small. Some like light displacement, others heavy. Yet there's one question and answer that can be counted on whenever two or three of us are gathered together. We all talk about the weather, and talk and talk. Weather is our obsession.
On land, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” to quote Mark Twain (or his friend Charles Dudley Warner—the sources disagree). But on water, we can do something about it. We trim or shorten sail, we change course, and we look around for better weather.
Weather is the deep concern of the 2016 Bermuda Race fleet of 184 boats. (There has been some attrition, some due to boat damage during deliveries and in a race, and one to the withdrawal of the Maxi 72 Bella Mente, a frequent candidate to be first to finish that is not sailing this time out of her owner’s weather concerns.)
Over the past three days, conflicting weather forecasts have stirred up concern about the conditions that will confront the fleet after the start on Friday. One forecast seemed to indicate high wind at the start, another suggested a hard blow down the course, and a third offered the specter of rough going, with a strong north wind.
That last weather alert has attracted a lot of attention because of the Gulf Stream. The body of water running northeast is Benjamin Franklin’s “River in the Ocean.” It’s more like a drifting octopus—a complicated patch of moving water turning in every which direction and greatly affecting the state of the sea. To quote the race’s Gulf Stream expert (and multi-time navigator), oceanographer Dr. Frank Bohlen, “Wind blowing against the current results in a significantly larger wave amplitude and shorter wavelength than what appears when wind blows with current or when there is no current.”
Click here for Frank Bohlen’s analysis of this year’s Gulf Stream.
Two Bermuda Race Postponements
Despite more than 100 years of excited sailor talk about the weather in 49 races, only two Bermuda Race starts have been postponed a day or longer. The 1968 start was delayed for one day out of concern about an early-season hurricane. Then in 1982, the race committee, chaired by James A. McCurdy (father of Selkie skipper Sheila McCurdy), postponed the start for two days because of a storm in the Western Atlantic. Once the weather settled down, the then-record 178 starters got off the line quickly on a spinnaker reach.
There’s another, quite startling weather story about the 1982 race. Carina (today owned by Rives Potts) was sailing almost directly toward Bermuda when her owner-skipper, Richard Nye, poked his head up through the companionway and took a look around just as a lightning bolt flashed down to the water.
“Tack,” Nye ordered. The crew looked at him incredulously. They were only 10 degrees off the layline to the finish.
“Tack! There’s lightning to windward. There’s warm water up there. The Stream’s up there!”
Carina tacked, sailed on the “wrong” tack for a couple of hours until she was well into hot water, tacked back, and with a 3-knot current on her stern, charged toward Bermuda at 10-plus knots over the bottom. She won her division by a comfortable 34 minutes. There’s one more good reason why we obsess about weather.
