In the pantheon of Caribbean regattas, St. Martin’s Heineken Regatta is right up there with Antigua Sailing Week. After Team SAIL’s assault on Antigua last year, where we campaigned a 50’ Beneteau charter boat during a hard-fought week against some very good German and Brit crews, it seemed only logical that the motley crew should turn its attentions to St Martin. The timing was perfect – right at the beginning of March. After a long, hard winter, the crew was ready to rock and roll.
The hard core of Pete and Charlie from Marblehead, Massachusetts, Charlie from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Pete from Annapolis, Maryland, was joined by Christian from Connecticut, who served as the tiebreaker during introductions. He’s also the marketing honcho for Heineken, a fact that did not at all influence his invitation to join the team. Honest.
After last year’s Antigua experiences punting a heavy 50-footer around in unusually light airs, we thought we’d sail something a bit lighter and faster on its feet this time around. The Heineken regatta is famed for big winds and big seas, but you never know…
The two Charlies and one of the Petes collected our nearly-new Sunsail Jeanneau 39i from the Sunsail base in Tortola and motorsailed to St Martin in a little over 12 hours, arriving in the small hours of Thursday morning. It was a roughish crossing, which was good because it got the seasickness out of the way before racing started. By the time I’d met up with them in Simpson Bay, on the island’s west side, they had stocked up the boat with victuals and many cases of the sponsor’s product. Game on!
We’ll be running a feature article about this hairy Heineken in SAIL later this year, and I don’t want to pre-empt that with too much detail here. All I can say is that the sailing was great, if tiring. I’ll long remember the 40-knot gusts on the first race day, the relentless beat into 12-foot and bigger sea followed by surfing at 12 and 13 knots down the big rollers. Yep, surfing under main and jib. We were really glad we weren’t on a 50-footer, with its bigger sails and heavier gear all round. We were also glad we weren’t on a trimaran – Nicola Massey from Horizon Yacht Charters on Tortola was crewing on a tri called Triple Jack and reported broaching under spinnaker (!), with the lee float 6 feet under water, the windward float airborne and the kite flogging itself to death. No thank you.
Our 4th-place finish out of 18 starters was well earned, and we didn’t break the boat or ourselves – not that day, anyway. You’ll have to wait until the October issue for the rest of the gory details.
The dire economy was reflected in the bigger spinnaker classes, which were noticeably thinner this year. With 105 bareboats entered, as opposed to 125 in 2008, the charter boat class was the least affected.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens at Antigua this year, since the main sponsor of Sailing Week, “Sir” Allen Stamford, was at last report behind bars. And not the kind that serve dark & stormies.
