Three days chasing the wind: aboard the bay regatta

A sailing race rarely has a grandstand. The course lies a few kilometres off the coast, and from the shore all you see is a row of small white sails. Last weekend the city's open regatta was sailed in the bay, and our photographer went out with the committee boat for three days to bring the racing back to land.

Nine races were sailed over the three days, with twenty-six boats of one design on the same course. The boats are the same and the sails are the same, so the result comes down to how a crew reads the wind: which side it reaches first, when to tack, whether the spinnaker goes up early or late at the mark. On the second afternoon the wind rose to force six, the hulls drove forward through the swell, and the people on deck were in the spray almost all the time.

On a small boat that never stops rolling, the photographer says, eight frames in ten come out crooked. From more than six hundred pictures three were kept: the coloured spinnakers spread across the sea on the downwind leg, four crew pressing down side by side on the rail, and a sail filled by the wind at the moment of rounding the mark.