Un Día Típico en Menorca

Tuesday was a typical day at Minorca Sailing.

Typical for me anyway.

7am - get up and go for a run. On Tuesday I ran to the Torre Fornells and back, about 45 minutes.

Torre Fornells

8:30am - breakfast at the hotel on the terrace in the sunshine with friends. I usually have a bowl of fruit and a roll with some ham and cheese.

10am - briefing on the beach followed by instruction. On Tuesday the lesson of the day was about sail settings and then we did some sailing around a triangle and a blast around the bay. The wind was about 15 knots from the north and we beat up towards the entrance to the Bay of Fornells. As we got farther north we were in some swells rolling in from the open sea. I joked with one of the instructors that I was going to make a break for freedom and go sailing outside the bay. But I didn't. Instead we sailed a glorious downwind blast the length of the bay catching rides on the waves.

1pm - lunch at the hotel, again hanging out on the terrace with friends. I usually have a beer and a sandwich, but there are plenty of other items on the menu.

1:30pm - short nap. I am good at napping. It is one of my few talents.

2:30pm - afternoon racing. Some afternoons this week I have gone off on my own, like the antisocial bastard I am, and practiced some boat-handling issues by myself. God knows I have enough boat-handling issues. But on Tuesday I joined in with the Laser racing. There is a mix of full rigs and Radials and 4.7s in the fleet and we race using Portsmouth Handicaps. It's good in that it encourages a bunch of people who are too light to handle full rigs in a breeze to race; on the other hand it means there are only a few full rigs in each race so there is not much close boat to boat racing. We were racing alternating triangle and sausage laps.

Triangle

Sausage

One of the racers in the full rigs is one of our instructors. He is seriously fast. We can't see why he's so fast but he is. And one of the other full rig sailors is a friend from home who came to Minorca Sailing because I recommended it. The two of us have been having some pretty close racing.

In the first race the instructor led all the way and just extended his lead but I was leading my friend most of the way around all three laps until the final gybe mark. After the gybe I discovered that (a) the traveller block was trapped under the shockcord and line on the tiller that they use to hold the rudder down on the Minorca Sailing Lasers, and when I freed that mess I discovered that (b) the sheet was also hooked around the end of the boom. A double whammy! By the time I had solved both problems my friend had passed me and he beat me to the finish line.

In the second race the instructor was OCS and I was to the right of the fleet in a huge righty shift that lifted me inside the whole fleet. I was first to the windward mark, led the fleet round all three laps and beat the instructor across by the line by a second or two. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than smart or fast.

4:30pm - shower, rinse sailing clothes and hang them out to dry.

5:00pm - have a large beer and do a spot of blogging.

6:30pm - on Tuesday we had been racing with GPS units on our Lasers and in the evening the instructors gave us a debrief using the GPS tracks. Very instructive. You could see every start you flubbed, every shift you missed, every tactical mistake you made, and exactly how much slower you were than the instructor.

7:00pm - stroll into Fornells the local fishing village, about a mile from the hotel. I took the beautiful Tillerwoman for dinner at El Pescador and I had fried whitebait followed by spaghetti marinera. I really can't remember what she had.

Whitebait

9:30pm - stroll back from Fornells.

And so to bed.

And then in about 9 hours it was time to get up for another action-packed day at Minorca Sailing.

Life is good.