RESILIENT – Janice Anne Wheeler
Another week of SPARRING flies by! Your support is priceless. Thank you. ~J If you’ve just joined our engaging little community, please read SPARS & SPARRING, my introductory piece.…. ~J It was one of those mornings when, in our part of the northern hemisphere, there is an inherent change afoot; a crispness that is felt as the leaves turn and rustle on their branches, refusing to give up just yet. The sun is at the perfect angle for other-worldly reflections on the bottoms of the clouds, and even though castoff was imminent, I wandered, knowing it would be a while before we felt any peace. It was race week.  Mother Nature’s brilliance reflects the John Alden designed schooner RESILIENT. None of us had ever really sailed RESILIENT, much less raced her, and we all hoped she was aptly christened. The remaining sections of Baltimore’s Frances Scott Key Bridge, which shockingly collapsed like so many legos after a container ship struck a support tower in March 2024, were a powerful reminder of what happens when things go wrong on seagoing ships, large and small. Systems fail, forecasts are wrong.  Eastern and Western (under rebuild) spans. Below, also looking southbound, prior to collapse.
Before we left for the 118-mile Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race, studying wind and wave forecasts, I declared, more to myself than to Steve, that I must be either brave or crazy to keep signing up and living a life that sometimes clashes with my bodily functions so strongly as to cause debilitation. I’m what is referred to as a seasick sailor…some folks are lucky enough to never experience that nasty affliction; and now you know for certain that our ability to explore (among other things) must make all the complexities of living aboard a wooden sailing yacht worthwhile. I can control my malady most of the time and recover quickly, life’s full of tradeoffs. The race began at noon and when, during the moonless night, the forecasted 20 knots turned to 32 (near gale force) ‘on the tail’ with a huge following sea, well, I couldn’t quite control that or the wintery wind chill. In such circumstances boats ‘surf’ down the front side of the six-to-eight foot waves and a vessel such as ours, which averages seven knots of speed, was able to hit over eleven. The sensation is hard to describe when your stomach drops like a roller coaster and the waves crest like an angry ocean. You can see the results and details here. We crossed both finished lines with just four vessels ahead of us despite their far greater size and experience. We are proud although the corrected times took us down a notch or two in the final standings. “Line Honors” it is called in the complicated, competitive world of sailboat racing. I have an expensive vine-draped education and knack for numbers, but those calculations remain a mystery to me.
After celebrating with fresh local seafood donated and served by the men who harvested them we were prudent enough to know that if we stayed for breakfast we’d have a rough return trip for certain; the latest forecast had wind and rain whipping up hard in less time than the passage would take us. Eighty hours after our odyssey began, I half-knelt, half-stood in the cockpit of the striking little schooner for the best possible vantage point, one hand guiding the helm in an irregular back-and-forth rhythm as the vessel turns into the wind and needs to be corrected to her course, and the other resting easily on another spoke, our responsibilities over, for the most part, except to get the vessel safely back to her marina a hundred miles or so to the north. That task sounds simpler than it would turn out to be, as things so often are when SPARRING WITH MOTHER NATURE.
The first eighteen hours northbound was a reward, the reason we tolerate the whims, the moods, the watch of Mother Nature; our propulsion was southeast blowing fourteen to seventeen knots; the last six hours built right back to the near-gale, on-tail we had sailed in the race. We were more prepared, more knowledgable, but worn a tad thin. Just after true dark, the fifth-of-a-mile-long Baltimore-based Carnival PRIDE cruise ship overtook us in the channel with its propellers churning, contrasting significantly with our peaceful passage using only the wind.
When underway sailing, a vessel shows just three lights; a rear white, red port side and green starboard side. This brilliant, simple system tells other vessels whether you are coming or going. The cruise ship glowed with what looked like a light for each of the 3,000 or so souls on board. In comparison, this is the view from our open cockpit navigating at night. While admittedly those folks have more creature comforts, it’s our perspective that I prefer.
We’ve spent fifteen long months working on STEADFAST. The Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race, while we didn’t get much rest, reinvigorated and further inspired me to get back out there. RESILIENT was appropriately named, after all. ~J To read more about following seas, take a look at this strongly opinionated piece by yours truly:
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© 2025 Janice Anne Wheeler
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