Sailing aboard a 111-year-old beauty at Chester Race Week

Sunday’s practice didn’t get off to a great start.

It took hours to figure out a way to hoist the mainsail with a new halyard that had too much wire spliced onto the rope.

Fog made it tough to see the carts zipping around Chester’s nearby golf course from Chandlers Cove, where Hayseed IV was moored.

Light wind didn’t promise much in the way of speed as we pulled away from the cove with a small motorboat in tow, just in case this 16-metre engine-less beauty couldn’t make it back to her mooring if we were completely becalmed.

But the 111-year-old sloop did not disappoint. With barely a breath of wind, she picked up speed but felt almost graceful at the same time.

“It’s a freight train,” said her skipper, Derek Prest.

“We call it basically a tractor-trailer with no brakes. She’s 32,000 pounds. There’s no stopping her. She’s just majestic to sail.”

Pursuit racing

Chester Race Week kicked off Wednesday in light winds.

We’re competing in a series of pursuit races where Hayseed starts last and must catch the other seven boats in our class to win. It’s a complicated math game, but basically the boats are all assessed at how fast they should be able to sail and leave the start line in that order.

“We started 18 minutes behind the first boat,” Prest said after the first day of racing.

“Technically, all the boats should be at the finish line at the same time if everybody is doing their thing.”

Our 22-kilometre course took us out to Tancook Island, across to Blandford and back into Chester.

On the final leg of the race, we sailed inside Mountain and Mark islands while the rest of the fleet went outside, likely thinking they’d find more wind out there.

‘Scored big time’

“We went to the left side of the course today – the east side – and we scored big time,” said Stephen Dauphinee, the tactician aboard.

“And then we just reeled them in from there.”

The gamble paid off and we beat out our closest competitor by about 45 seconds over a race that took almost three hours.

“I’d like to see it keep going just the way it went today,” Prest said with chuckle after Wednesday’s win.

“It’s a crap shoot. It really is.”

Built in City Island, N.Y. and launched in 1912, Hayseed weighs just over 14,500 kilograms.

“She’s been in Nova Scotia most of her life,” Prest said.

‘Bare bones’

A new owner rebuilt the wooden boat more than three decades back, covering the hull with a skin of fiberglass, changing out the wooden spar for an aluminum mast and stripping the interior.

“It’s definitely bare bones,” Prest said of the Spartan cabin. “There’s nothing down there at all. There’s a curtain, and a port-a-potty.”

Nobody’s used the facilities yet this week.

“When they’re offering bottles of water, I’m saying, ‘No, thank you,’” said Heather Doane, who is new to the boat.

“I’m a teacher; I can hold it for eight hours.”

Thursday didn’t go so well for the 15-person Hayseed crew.

The course was shorter and the wind stronger, but the folks on the foredeck had trouble with the spinnaker on the first downwind leg and couldn’t get it up at all on the second.

‘Absolutely fine’

“Coming fourth on Hayseed is absolutely fine,” Doane said. “It’s a great experience, and actually, the snafus we had today are great opportunities to learn more about how the boat works.”

Moving from a modern boat to one that was built before the First World War isn’t that tough, she said.

“The basics aren’t difficult to translate; keeping track of all the extra ropes on this boat – that is confusing,” said Doane, who was flying the spinnaker from the cockpit Thursday.

This year, they’ve added modern instruments, which helps with the fine-tuning that should, in theory, make Hayseed go faster.

“I can see my wind speed and my boat speed,” Prest said. “So, I normally know how fast the boat should be going if it’s blowing 10 knots. And if we’re not (going that fast) we’re doing something wrong.”

Hayseed’s owned by the Wurts family out of Pennsylvania, who have been summering here for generations.

‘We’re just passing through’

“The owner of the boat says this boat is time, we’re just passing through,” Prest said, gesturing towards the tiller he uses to steer.

“Do you know how many pairs of hands have been on that tiller? Think about how many people have raced on this boat. It would have to be thousands.”

He’s been part of Hayseed’s crew for 15 years.

“I’ve put a lot of people through this boat myself and I’m brand new to it,” Prest said.

Calm in the chaos

Despite all the chaos of tangled rope and sail, nobody aboard seems to raise their voice much, other than to relay directions to the folks handling the foredeck.

“Yelling doesn’t do anything,” Prest said. “It just makes the tensions rise on boats.”

He doesn’t believe in the “old school way of sailing, where the skipper is 100 per cent in control of the boat and he makes all the calls.”

Instead, Prest tries to listen to the other members of the crew, some of whom have been sailing Hayseed longer than him.

“It’s a concerted effort. You’ll hear us back here talking about when we’re going to tack, what we’re going to do, the sail trim. We’ll sit here and we’ll chat about that for a long time rather than me just belting out an order.”

The crew has jokingly divided Hayseed up into three areas.

Frontierland is the bow where people are handling spinnakers while coping with the fact that Hayseed doesn’t have any lifelines. “The very first thing you think is, ‘This is scary,’ but it doesn’t bounce around,” Dauphinee said.

Adventureland is the more controlled middle, where people like me clamour up to hang our feet over the edge of the heeling boat, which should, in theory, make us go faster.

‘Grandiose ideas’

Fantasyland lies in Hayseed’s stern.

“We’re back here with all these grandiose ideas about how it’s all going to unfold, but it doesn’t necessarily unfold that way,” Dauphinee said.

He doubles as safety officer aboard Hayseed, giving newbies a lecture on respecting Hayseed’s brawn.

“Most people aren’t used to sailing really, really big boats,” he said. “So, we always give a little safety briefing before Chester Race Week to tell them that the boat is big, it’s powerful and you may have sailed a small boat before, but if another boat is coming at you that’s going to run into us, keep your hands inboard. Don’t try to fend them off.”

Hayseed’s inertia is tremendous.

“This boat is heavy. And two big boats coming together, even a big boat and a small boat, you’re going to get hurt,” Dauphinee said. “It’s not worth it. The boat can be fixed.”

‘What a privilege’

For Doane, this is more fun than racing a modern boat.

“There’s something very retro about it … People were racing this boat before lots of people had electricity,” she said.

“What’s running through my head is what a privilege it is to be able to do this. It’s amazing. It’s tranquil. It’s exciting. It’s a once in a lifetime kind of opportunity except that perhaps it might happen twice or three or four times.”

Doane wonders how long people will keep sailing Hayseed.

“Hopefully for another couple hundred years,” she said. “Imagine sailing this boat when we have flying personal aircraft and everything’s automated and you come on this boat and you have to read the water and read the wind and read the weather coming and do it all with your brain.”

‘Bring your foul weather gear’

The races are slated to run through Saturday.

By Friday morning, the plan was to try our luck with Hayseed again, despite the forecast for rain, high winds and the chance of lightning.

“Rain is supposed to diminish some and it doesn’t appear we will see any lightning during race time,” Prest wrote in an early-morning note to his crew after checking the radar picture.

“Wind may reach 20 knots so we will need to change the jib and have the main ready to reef.”

That would be blowing about 37 km/h for the landlubbers in the crowd.

“Bring your foul weather gear,” Prest said.