Chaos Race 2025

 The Chaos Race has been held in August for the last 4 years. In the past it has been a two handed race but this year boats that planned to raise a Spinnaker could take as many as 4 crew on board. I think I have done it with Rick twice and Gord once. One year I bailed on him because it was very windy.

The night before we had supper at Hoovers Marina in Nanticoke, watching the small boat traffic and the heron.

 

The original start time was to be 8am but there was a bit of a rebellion on Wednesday night and it was changed to 9am. I must admit I voted in favour of the later start. Rick even hoped to pick up his cinnamon buns at the market, prior to the race, but was foiled by a late arrival by the bakery.

Bill and Jan, our committee boat for the start, often come out on Wednesday nights and take photos of the race, only fair to take one of them.

We started in handicap order, so, as  the slowest boat, we started first. Sunny, 10+knt wind and hot.

Heeled over on our tack up to Bluffs Bar

It is called a Chaos Race because you have to go around the buoys of Long Point Bay but you can do them in any order. Some went to Turkey Point, then Bluffs Bar, then Nanticoke Buoy and then back to ED2 (Port Dover). Some went in the opposite direction: Nanticoke, Bluffs, Turkey and home. We (and one other boat, Trident) decided to go diagonally across the square (its roughly a square course), Starting across to Bluffs Bar, then to Turkey point, then down to Nanticoke and then home. The beat up to Bluffs Bar was fast and bumpy and Rick and I spelled each other off on the tiller every 20mins to half an hour.

Rounding the mark at Bluffs Bar. This marks where a sand spit sticks out from the north side of Long Point. Behind it there is a protected anchorage where some boats can anchor safely overnight.

As we headed up to Turkey point, along the north shore of Long Point, we started to meet boats who had chosen to go there first. Messenger.

Followed shortly by

Racer X

This was a much more comfortable sail with the wind on our beam and we were able to get out the comfy seats and eat some wraps, grapes and cookies.

We consider these 2 to be our usual competition;

Grey Escape and

Islay.

Great Day for Enigma, just

rocketing by us.

We had a very enjoyable sail to the Turkey Point buoy and then headed down wind towards Nanticoke, about 10 nautical miles. We were doing about 5 knots so figured about 2 hours. Then the wind gradually dropped. At the half way point, 5 miles we were doing 3 knots, then 2. We were gradually getting closer but whenever we did the math, it was still an hour away (2miles away doing 2knots is an hour, 1 mile away doing 1 knot is an hour!!). We played with the sail, tried wing on wing, tried taking the wind a bit more abeam, nothing made any difference, we began to think we were only moving at all because the left over waves were pushing us.

It was no longer fun so we radioed the fleet that we were retiring from the race. Neither of us very happy to quit but we were hot, tired and frustrated and wanted to remember the fun parts of the day not the last 2 hours. We weren't the only ones, many of the other boats retired too. 

As we motored up to ED2 we saw Nexus finishing at about 4:30. They had gone clockwise around the course and sailed spinnaker so were able to go faster downwind.

 Very hot and very tired we had cold drinks and dinner at the Yacht Club and commiserated with others.