Home Grown

The City Sailing Championships is a relatively informal competition between financial institutions based in the City of London, and is held in the South of France in JOD 35s. The idea is to pile down to the Med for a few days, eat lots of seafood, drink copious quantities of beer and champagne (one of the main sponsors is Mumm Champagne) and do a little bit of yacht racing too. Of course that's the idea, but put enough sailing types together and the sailing can get quite serious!

We had competed last year on behalf of our employer and had a great time, but this time round the edict was no extracurricular activities outside England and Wales. Apparently the legal department was worried about what would happen if one of us stubbed our toe and then sued the company. With branches in over 100 countries you'd have thought they'd have that one covered, but apparently not. No big deal though, they couldn't exactly stop us going, we just couldn't represent the company. We explained our predicament to the organizers, and they were cool with us competing under a different team name, but with signwriting on the side of the boat included in the entry fee, the team name had to be a good one. Coming up with the right name took about half a second, and once Scot had given us the go-ahead Team Sailing Anarchy was go :-)

Unfortunately the crew shirts didn't arrive in time, we managed to improvise with some suspiciously cheap white shirts, a can of red paint. I still don't understand why two of the shirts still had their shop security tags on though...

The sailing's a bit of a haze, but I do remember winning the last race after totally screwing up the start, being forced hard left (right had paid all day) and then getting a massive left-hander.

Other memorable highlights:
The aluminum committee boat. Naval architects: if you're ever designing a military vessel and want to save on paint, make it out of aluminum. Guaranteed invisibility at any range over about a quarter of a mile.
SA forum regular Racing Ron, seemingly sponsored by a famous French singer and with a crew composed entirely of bikini-clad babes. He thinks he can dance, but we know different...

An excellent wakeboarding demonstration from one of the Deutsche boats, using what looked remarkably like a floorboard. Still, I'm sure the charter company didn't mind.

One of the teams (which shall remain nameless) asking for a postponement (with about two minutes to go) and "urgent medical assistance" for jellyfish stings sustained whilst swimming between races.
The same team calling everyone on the VHF during that race to tell everyone they had ripped their No.1 genoa and were switching to their No.2 The same team calling up the race committee (still during the same race) and asking for a replacement No.1 to be delivered to them for the next leg.

The support boat motoring up alongside Team SA in the same race, to question our VHF request for a replacement genoa (because the one we were using was a bit tired)

Overall, Deutsche Bank won decisively, UBS came second, and we were third overall with a somewhat inconsistent set of results. However, it's important in sport to remember that it's not the winning that counts. In fact, it's the prizes. And for some bizarre reason it was Team Sailing Anarchy that went home with the jereboam of champagne. Go figure!

Many thanks to City Championships for running an excellent event, to Sailing Anarchy for providing a team name (and therefore giving us carte blanche to behave even worse than we would have done anyway), to K-Yachting for not spotting the damage deposit cheque was made out in Italian Lire (and for not noticing the broken guardrail) and to Henri Lloyd for sponsoring our footwear...

12/01/05