Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta

I’ve been a fan of Antigua Class Yacht Regatta for years, although I’ve only ever seen it on film, never in real life. So it was with great excitement that on Tuesday April 16^th I took the mate along to our briefing for the Classics Regatta. We were told by our American organisers that we were going to be dinghy wranglers, not line handlers. What this actually means (in British English) is that we were to assist the boats coming into their berths as asked – in effect we were a tug boat. The thought of shunting some of these gorgeous classic yachts into place was a bit daunting at first, but we soon got used to the idea. Our own dingy, Pierre, would have no chance of doing this and so we were given a large rib with a powerful two stroke motor – one we enjoyed using very much after our own ‘deflate-able’ Pierre…

Classic yachts at Nelson’s Dockyard

However, before the regatta got going, the mate and I were looking at some of the boats coming in. I can usually spot a pedigree boat a mile away and very soon, I noticed a wonderful Nicholson 55. We were sat admiring this boat when the skipper came along and started chatting. It soon turned out that he and I had lived on the same road in Edgbaston many moons ago. Not only that he now lived next door to a mate of mine in Lymington, and his crew were all friends of friends, one of whom I’d sailed with in the Channel Islands a few short years ago – what a small world…

Eager – dressed overall

Eager and The Blue Peter

Back to the regatta, well, not quite. First it was the welcome party. As volunteers, we were invited to everything, for free, and the mate realised that the welcome party was at a restaurant called Boom. This is a very nice venue and I’m pleased to report that the mate and I did the welcome party full justice.

On the water and ready for action

Skip in his element talking about classic yachts

The next day, we started our dinghy wrangling duties and continued the same for the next four days. We hovered around at the entrance to English Harbour and when a boat arrived back from racing we followed her in and helped as requested. This help ranged from being not needed at all (unusual) to full on pushing boats against the wind into their berth and tying their anchor lines onto whatever they wanted them tying onto. It was actually hot and hard work, but we were enjoying ourselves doing it. At one stage, most of the boats had dropped their anchors in the water and left floats and lines all over the place. In fact it often looked more like a scene from the Battle of Trafalgar than a harbour. Sometimes the boats had disabled engines. Sometimes that had lines around their propellers and sometimes the crew were a little tipsy and couldn’t even manage anything! There was one particular instant when the mate and I were shoving a massive yacht into position, the skipper was asking for more ‘grunt’, I was giving everything our rib had, full revs on a big engine and still progress was slow. At the point where smoke started to come out of our own engine and it started spluttering we were assisted by another dinghy wrangler and it took the two of us full power to actually get this large yacht into its berth. Relieved that our engine was OK, we carried on with our duties, which generally ran from 1300 to 1700. The mate performed a couple of heroic feats – here she is in her own words…

At the tiller of our borrowed dinghy

Crikey, what an interesting few days! I always thought that classic yacht people would be pretty switched on and generally a cut above the average yachtsman/woman – I was soon to be proven wrong… the best way to describe the return of the boats from their day of racing is chaos. Not helped by the stern-to berthing at Nelson’s Dockyard. Most classic boats are long-keeled which means they don’t go backwards in a straight line very well. As they all arrived back at pretty much the same time (bar a few laggards who were always late in – on the first day eating about half way in to Happy Hour!!) and had all left their mooring lines and ground tackle in varying states of disarray, it was a challenge to get them all safely berthed. Luckily I am good at untangling things so teasing out lines that had magically knitted themselves together wasn’t too onerous. There were some hairy moments but no disasters! By the penultimate day we had figured out what each boat needed, where and when so we could be in the right place at the right time (which wasn’t necessarily where the skipper/crew were shouting at you to be!).

Skip heading out for more wrangling

At prizegiving, I was pleased to see that my ‘mates’ had won their class and won the singlehanded race too. How they did not win the parade of classics I do not know as they were perfect, still, local boats have to get some sort of prize I suppose (call me a cynic)…

We were also pleased to be told that dinghy wrangling this year was the best they’ve ever had – mmm, I’m not sure the mate agrees after her scrapes and bruises…

Antigua Classics, we love you, we aim to be back next year!

Still smiling!