It all seemed so simple…let’s charter an X-Yacht of some sort, pile on a plane, get a couple of apartments and sail the X-Cup Adriatic, in Venice, Italy. I had sailed on an X-412 the previous year as a guest of Mureadritta, a new sailing wear company. It had been a fabulous experience in a city I really enjoy. So why not take the crew, find a boat and see how we do on the Adriatic.

For two months we searched and finally found an X-46 from Slovenia. The crew was a bit concerned since the sail number was SLO 410. Obviously, this became the ‘slow boat’. But, at least we had something to blame any performance issues on: “if you hadn’t gotten a SLO boat, we’d be doing better”. Next, we got a couple of apartments for everyone to stay in and went about finding a crew.

Harry Pattison (principal at E/P Sails) agreed to come along. Harry sails with us on a regular basis in SoCal. Mike Hanna, our regular driver also agreed to come. I have sailed with Mike since we were 8, so I always enjoy his company. Of course, my father would not miss an opportunity to sail again in Italy. Additionally, SF65 agreed to join us. We had sailed together on our Santa Cruz 40 during the Big Boat Series in 1996. Thus, our joke became “we sail together every decade, or so, whether we need to or not.” Added to the SA mix was Thievpal, who lives in the UK. We filled the crew out with three people from Mureadritta and the owner of the X-46, Miha Spendahl.

We sailed Cal Race Week on the Saturday and Sunday before, losing a frustrating tie breaker for second. The next day Harry, Mike, my father and I met at LA airport to begin our adventure. An overnight flight to London got us to Thievpal and our flight to Italy. We arrived in Venice later that night. SF65 had kindly offered to go in a few days earlier. This allowed her to check into the apartments so that they were ready for our late arrival.

For those that have never been to Venice it is a magical place. Frankly, there are few arrivals that compare to taking a water-taxi from the airport to your hotel. Even late at night it was very cool. As the plane was landing, there were lightning and thunderstorms in the area, but somehow they found the good nature to leave the area. This made for a lovely trip out to the island.

So far everything had worked out perfectly. I should have taken this as a good portend of impending problems. We arrived at the assigned meeting point at about 11pm. Or at least the location at which I had interpreted we would meet SF65. Of course, she had a different interpretation of the location. She was two bridges away from the point at which we arrived. Thus, we sat there for an hour and a half as I worked to find her. Luckily, we were standing in front of a hotel I’ve been to before and a swipe of the credit card had us nestled in beds after almost 24 hours of travel. There is little an owner enjoys more than paying for rooms when not more than 100 yards away are rooms, sitting empty that have already been paid for that night.

The next day we sussed out the apartments and found a note from SF65 directing us to a new meeting place. Sure enough we found her and the adventure was back on track. Because several of the group had never been to Venice before we used the first day for sightseeing and a nice dinner.

On Thursday the boat arrived and we went across to San Giorgio Island, the base for the regatta and marina in which we would keep the boat. Miha, who had spent much of the previous night delivering the boat from Slovenia, greeted us and we began the pre-race process. Of course, this was a cruising boat so we began pulling everything off and looking for a place to store it all. A couple of hours later and we were off to our first practice. So far so good.

Friday was the first day of racing. We were in Sport Class and had a good class with a couple of IMX38’s at the bottom, two 412’s, three X-43s, ourselves and a very successful X-46 Il Colore del Vento. Of course all of the racing classes start on the line together to make for more enjoyable racing and starts.

One word of caution on racing in foreign lands: make sure you have someone on the boat that understands what the Race Committee is saying. We were under the mistaken impression that we had a couple of minutes to the first start when we noticed that everyone, but us, was loading up for a start. Assuming we had about a minute to go we went into damage control and pulled a decent start from the claws of defeat. However, we immediately went the wrong way on the first weather leg and gave it all back. We ended up second after sailing well on the next couple of legs.

As the wind built from the first race of 8-10 we turned to Miha and asked about switching to the Heavy 1 from the Light 1. He explained that the wind usually died at about this point and that we should stay with the light one. What he didn’t mention was that he didn’t think the sailmaker had re-cut the heavy one to fit this boat, and that he ‘hoped that the wind would not build anymore.’ Sure enough we’re sailing upwind to the last weather mark…doing really well…only to have the head blow from the light one in about 19 knots of wind. Yup, I am seeing my damage deposit disappear before my eyes. You know, the proverbial hundred dollar bills in a cold shower situation.

The good news was that we were close enough to the weather mark that we only lost one boat. Again we were second and headed home without a light one and a couple of seconds under the belt. We’ll we’d survived our first day of racing in Venice and were felling pretty good…especially after a couple bottles of good Italian wine on the way back in. We arrived at the dock and thought ourselves pretty smart for bringing a sailmaker along. This was especially true when we learned that there were no sail repair services available. This was kind of a surprise since UK owns about 80% of the market in Venice. You’d have thought with about 25 of their boats racing they’d have had a van there. But no.

Two and a half hours later we had the head back on the jib (hopefully for a while) and were off to the drinks and food at the tents. That’s one thing I’ll say for the Italians and X-Yachts. There was absolutely no shortage of wine, Sangria or food. It was on night one that we found our regatta bar…a little place, off the beaten track that had cheap beer and good music. Frankly, a must for any good regatta experience.

But sailing in new locals can be very interesting. In the first race on the second day we had a great start and were working all of the boats around us. The other X-46 had a bad start was buried deep and jumped on to a port tack early on forcing her to take a bunch of transoms. I turned to Harry and said “the X-46 got buried at the start, has tacked over and is going behind a bunch of boats.” He responded with “hmmm…he really must want the right side.” Well, guess what…the right side paid big and we were on the left side.

The second day ended up a rather blissful “more of the same.” We started with the light 1 for the first race and then switched to the smaller pentex cruising jib. Somehow, we kept it all together and finished the day with a 3 and a 4. It was enough, with the allowed throwout, to have second sown up and no way of reaching first.

The third and last day of racing brought another interesting situation. At the morning briefing the race committee explained that there was a surprisingly (to them at least) low tide and that some of the larger boats could not get out of the marina. Thus, they wanted everyone to wait at their boats for them to give the all clear and we’d rush out to the race course and try and get the last race in. This was a new one…a surprisingly low tide. The tide rose and off we went and got a third.

Overall, it was an awesome experience. The sailing was great with the majority of it spent in 14-16 knots of breeze. The light #1 held, the wine and beer never ran out, and the crew and I had a great time. I would certainly recommend taking the jump to a new local any time you have the chance.

The only caveat I would add is to be careful about the boats you sail against. There were some local rules I had never seen before. For instance, we rounded the weather mark on Starboard and were bearing off and hoisting the kite. Two boats were coming up on port and started screaming at us to get out of their way…this was a new. There were a couple of additional run ins with a boat called Umana. One of which they tacked directly in front of us from port to starboard, and we damn nearly drove up their open transom. Another time we were at the start and below them. We screamed at them to come up and guess what, they did. But only to the line then they turned their backs on us and sailed down the line. Did we hit them? Nope, it was a charter boat and I wanted my damage deposit to remain intact.