Marblehead Harbor was placid at first light. Pure sheen. Not a whiff of wind. And it remained that way as the Race Committees of Eastern, Boston and Corinthian YCs soldiered out to the open ocean with best intentions. The sailors followed. And wallowed until nothing came. Yet while the others drifted on the swirling currents of Marblehead Channel, race officials of the Archers Line made a calculated retreat to inner reaches of the Harbor where the Town class regularly sails.
The Lasers retreated as well, and while fleets from the offshore circles motored past en route to their moorings and hoists, a round green weather mark was placed 100 feet from Eastern YC’s launch dock.
Soon, a dozen Lasers were slaloming through one of the most densely populated mooring fields on the East Coast, and then doing the same downwind, fighting for clean air between themselves, and swinging Grady Whites, Regulators and Sunday afternoon harbor strollers.
Yarmouth, Maine’s Jamie Carter won the race and the Laser series. And that was that.
The Townies were next, with nine competitors of the original 13-boat fleet piling up at the weather end with 20 seconds remaining. To leeward and forward of the group was the distressed black hull of Albatross, skippered by the wise ‘ol Rex Antrim from down in nearby Nahant.“We’re ahead in points,” Antrim says when interviewed before the race. “So far so good.”
The tips he shares for speed in the Town class are simple: “Don’t sail with any weather helm, if you can. And sail around the course faster than the other guy. Sail the shortest distance.”
His daughter Heidi is crewing with him today. “He’s had a different crew with him every day,” she says. “My mom, my daughter Callie, and then myself.”
Antrim has owned the boat since 1980, and his black beauty may be 90 years old, but for this edition of the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series at Marblehead Race Week, he’s been the quickest of the fleet over three days of light winds and strong currents. After five races, he’s locked into a three-boat battle for this year’s Townie title, which is a big deal round these parts.
A one-shot windward/leeward race will decide the series, and Antrim is all alone near the pin end of the line at precisely 2 seconds before the start. He and Heidi trim their sails in unison and skirt past a big yellow Harbor Master buoy, duck a powerboat, and then speed off the left.
Some of the fleet sail up the middle, tacking on shifts and obstructions. A few disappear to the right flank of the harbor. Somehow they’re soon on top of each other at the weather mark, calling room and then blanketing each other’s winds with their long footed mainsails.
Individual scrimmages weave through the moorings, and within a hundred yards of the finish line, the top three converge in a bottle neck between powerboats.
Antrim and skipper Nick Cann on Tonic are closing in on Bill Heffernen’s Sweep, ghosting up to him with a puff of their own. Twenty feet from the finish line, Heffernan hooks his mainsheet on a motorboat’s bow pulpit and his white boat comes to a brief halt. He breaks free quick enough to accelerate and win the race by a boat length.
Antrim and Cann are overlapped and then abeam of each other. Antrim is in the black boat to leeward. Cann is in the bright yellow boat to windward. Their jibs are poled out, their mainsails out to their stopper knots as the two of them see-saw places.But as they strike the line, Antrim gets the call and earns this year’s Town class championship by 3 points. A victory earned in the harbor, and another sidebar in the Town class annals: that time Rex Antrim won the lightest Race Week in a long, long time and proved once again that the really good ones are always faster in the light stuff.
With no results to change for the remaining fleet, the standings remained unchanged as the final regatta of the Regatta Series came to a close in Marblehead, but as is tradition at Race Week, there are perpetual trophies that come hard earned. First and foremost is the Cressy Trophy, presented annually to the “top performing skipper in the most competitive fleet at Marblehead Race Week.” That honor, presented by co-race chair Jud Smith, who with his wife Cindy, together held the reins of this edition, went to top ILCA finisher Jamie Carter, of Yarmouth, Maine. The young sailor emerged from a close series of five races with 8 points.
The Leonard Fowle Trophy, presented to “an individual who has made noteworthy contributions to sailing and racing in Marblehead, was presented to Smith, for his leadership of the regatta and working with his wife to modify and create new racecourses to add to the regatta’s traditional courses.
A new perpetual trophy added to the haul, the Widnall Trophy, which is presented to International One Design winner, was won by the man himself, putting up his 29th Race Week win in the class.
The final award of the night, the overall title, presented to an individual class winner drawn at random, went the way of the squad on the J/105 No Quarter, from nearby Beverly, Massachusetts. As a group of friends that have been racing with or against each other in different classes, together they’ve been quick to get up to speed, winning the regatta in what is now their second season with the boat.
They battled with perennial champ Merlin throughout the regatta and No Quarter co-owner Matt Herbster, says the win was bittersweet. “Merlin beat us on the water, but one bad spinnaker set did them in on Saturday. We wanted to go out and win today, but we were robbed of that [opportunity] because of the weather. “But we are happy to go back out with them and settle the score.”
On the boat with Herbster for Race Week and headed to the British Virgin Islands with Sunsail in October was Jonathan Dragonas, Julie Femino, Noah Flaherty, Ted Johnson and Chris Small. Small says their success over the weekend was “about keeping the boat rumbling, and working together with the trimmers to make sure we’re maintaining boatspeed and our lane.”
They’re confident they take their collective skills to the Caribbean and do just fine against the regatta series’ five other challengers and the defenders. “We’ll go down there and do what we do,” they say. “We’ll figure out how to sail the boat, get it fast and have fun.”
