Whassat? Match-Racing? In Seabirds? You have got to be kidding…

This was the response we got when sailors were informed about the Match Racing Series conducted by the Royal Bombay Yacht Club (RBYC) in collaboration with the Indian Naval Watermanship Training Centre (INWTC) on 11 Nov 2007.

And who can blame them? We have all come to know and love the Seabird for her versatility and reliability in long cruises and races over the years. However, a match racing boat she was never designed to be. So it was with great trepidation that we arrived at the INWTC on race day, fearing many a beheading thanks to the Seabird Boom.

There were 4 teams racing that day, namely:

Farokh Tarapore, Sanjeev Chauhan, Balraj & Yuvraj (INWTC),
Naresh Yadav & Team
Ashim Mongia, Ninad Mayekar, Gulshan Chunekar & Chetan Fernandes (CSC)
Shahid Basheer, Prasad Shelar, M Nadar & Alap Mehandale (RBYC)

Match Racing national champ, Cdr. R Mahesh of the INWTC agreed to Umpire for the event and the teams were all very grateful for the same. Owing to the fact that we had only two equalised Seabirds (Darter & Petrel), it was decided to race in two seabirds and two J24s to save time.

Since there was no wind in the morning, the start was postponed to 1300 Hrs. Mr. Rajan from the RBYC was the race officer and rumour has it that he was seen all around the INWTC premises on an Easter egg-hunt mumbling something about flags!

Since we had only one afternoon to finish the series, Mahesh decided to hold a single round robin, where every team races every other team once, followed by a final and a petit final.

The racing was quite close and exciting with nobody coming out on top as a clearly superior team. Of course our team decided to give everybody a lesson on how to goof up a substantial lead to lose the race. In all our races, we won the starts, rounded the mark first, in fact even reached the leeward mark first and then decided to wait there for our opponent to sail past us due to a comedy of errors resulting in a series of unfortunate incidents. The most embarrassing of which being, making a port rounding instead of a Starboard!

In the end, Ashim & Farokh made it into the finals and Yadav and ourselves were left to fight it out for third place.

The last race against Yadav was pretty exciting in which Mahesh got a good arm workout. There were penalties galore, resulting in a Black Flag for Yadav which meant that we finished third overall.

Ashim beat Farokh in the finals via closely contested matches and was crowned the Mumbai Harbour Match Racing Series Champ.

It must be said that this series was not only an excellent training opportunity for the match racing teams but was sailed in the best of spirits and made it a fun experience for everyone concerned.

In retrospect, the Seabirds took the abuse quite nicely and were not as cumbersome as we had originally feared. Yes, No De-Capitations & No Damages!!

I feel we should have many more such events in different classes and do urge every sailor to be a part of Match Racing in one way or the other, it truly is an amazing experience especially with the recent efforts of the MRAI to popularize the discipline in India.

A big thank you to Mr. Cyrus Heerjee, who took the time to come out with us on behalf of the RBYC and ensure that everything went smoothly, Cdr. R Mahesh who sacrificed training time with his team to Umpire the event, Mr. Farokh Tarapore who spent time on the water equalising the boats for the event and Mr. Rajan who is now not only a good race officer but a qualified flag juggler.

Results:
1. Ashim Mongia
2. Farokh Tarapore
3. Shahid Basheer
4. Naresh Yadav