Location: Falmouth Harbour, Antigua
And now for what you have all been waiting for: THE DAY OF OUR FIRST RACE!
Though we had an early wake-up, everyone was abuzz with excitement and ready to get a move on to the starting line. Decked out in our matching Sea|mester shirts and official Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta hats, we looked like a true racing team, and let me tell you. We sailed like one. We raised sails in mere minutes, and when the race started at 10:00 AM, we truly gave the other ships a run for their money. With Tessa, Miranda, Mari, Jules, Kyle, Steve, and our fearless captain Carolyn at the stern, Matt, Kylie, and Alex at midship, and me, Skye, Claire, Dan, and Tina at the bow, we performed all the sailing maneuvers like pros. Our race was approximately 31 nautical miles long, and we were racing against seven other classic schooners (BUT TO MAKE THINGS MORE EXCITING LIKE ESTIMATE HOW MANY BOATS WERE LIKE ALL OUT THERE TODAY. It will sound more impressive). Sometimes we would get so close to other ships that we held conversations with them, and the waves that were crashing over our decks got many of us completely soaked.
Overall the course lasted about six hours, with lots of yelling, tacking, hauling on lines, grabbing handfuls of quiche and trail mix, laughing uproariously, having buckets of water dumped on us every other second, and, according to the team of Columbia (a professional racing crew and the longtime winner of the Regatta) racing extremely impressively and that we should be proud of our outstanding performance.
Exhausted and covered in salt, we came back into port, had a quick dinner followed by our final presentations for Oceanography (We finally finished!!), and the rest of the evening was ours for chill and study time.
Wish us luck on our race tomorrow!