Ready, set, sail at Swiftsure!
No need for sea legs for this weekend’s 74th annual Swiftsure International Yacht Race. The nautical event has a lot to offer landlubbers, starting with an open invitation for the public to take in some of the 187 vessels, large and small, old and new, as they assemble in the Inner Harbour in front of the Empress Hotel and Ship Point Marina on Thursday continuing into Friday during daylight hours.
The racing gets underway Saturday morning at Clover Point. “It’s a grand spectacle,” said Swiftsure chairman Vern Burkhardt. “Swiftsure is the largest race in the Pacific Northwest. The thing about Swiftsure is that anybody can win,” he added, given that all entrants are handicapped by their length, weight, and the number and size of their sails.
“Best time to arrive at Clover Point is 8 a.m. to enjoy a pancake breakfast put on by the Central Saanich Lions Club and a blessing of the fleet by elders from Songhees and Esquimalt nations,” Burkhardt wrote in an email. “There will be two experienced racers giving commentary so the public will know what is going on in the water.
“The warning signal for the first start is at 8:51 a.m. and the public will want to be at Clover Point before then to see the boats jockeying for the best position in the start, which is to be right at, but not over, the start line and have clean air, which is to say no boats in front and to windward as they will disturb the wind and therefore a boat’s speed.”
At 9:45 a.m., excitement takes the form of a Search and Rescue demonstration of a rescue at sea using a full-size dummy that is “saved” by members of 442 Squadron’s Cormorant helicopter. “It’s pretty spectacular,” Burkhardt said, noting “the down draft is over 100 kilometres per hour because of the helicopter’s blades.”
The oldest vessel will be the classic wooden Schooner Martha out of Port Townsend, dating to 1907. “She is a sight to behold,” Burkhardt said, not to mention a race winner in the past. The boat is one of 92 U.S. entrants, making up just over half the fleet. Another 47 are local boats including one of the two longest, at about 70 feet, the Westerly owned by locals Stewart and Joy Dalgren.
Twenty per cent of the entrants are first-timers. Overall, numbers are down a bit due to the racers taking part in the two-week VanIsle 360 race out of Nanaimo starting June 10, along with one sailor’s new baby arriving late and damage to other craft, he said.
The one to beat for multi-hull entrants: Richard Ackrill’s Dragonfly — which races out of the Royal Victoria Yacht Club — set a course record in 2001 that still stands at just over nine hours, he said.
All five races, short or long, start between HMCS Brandon and a red flag on a tower placed on Clover Point. The public can see the start line and whether any boats cross the “imaginary line” before a gun fired by HMCS Brandon signals the start, Burkhardt said.
Four of them are overnight races, the fifth a so-called long day in shore classic.
Winds are forecast to be light, making crews even more focused on their timing and strategy. “There is always some breeze,” he said, “And you always deal with the current., ebbing or flooding.”