Here is Genesis powering along under gunter rig main, staysail or headsail and her jury-rigged racing jib. Joining her as a new boat on her second race on Falmouth Harbour Roads it was amazing to witness her Carriacou boatbuilders, onboard for her inaugural regatta, fashion an 18ft jib-boom from fresh-cut green bamboo. A notch secured the tack rope with the high-footed sail sheeted aft. With a knot and a half of extra speed I promptly named it bamboo nitro! Calistus Enoe (right)… son of the famous boatbuilder Alwyn
moored off as they’re getting going for the morning’s race. This is so much more cool than starting
an engine. And I’m already in the groove of sailing 19th-century style. Everything looks plain, neat and so simple. The loose-footed bermudan mainsail is laced to the mast, and there are no cars, or clutches or winches or even ropes over the deckhouse. The rig is attached and tensioned to the
chainplates with three wooden dead-eyes per side. These basic wooden blocks have lanyards of rope bowsing them together. This sometimes horrifies modern sailors
who like to tension everything down to a taut twang of tightness, especially in a 20kt breeze, but Carriacou sailors mostly swear that the boats are faster when things are left just a bit loose. It’s how these respected workboats used
to be, as they went for day and sometimes overnight fishing, and for some trade among the islands. I get to meet the crew, with Antoine
Bavay from Paimpol in Brittany, Karen Portch, an American Olympic class sailor. John is Lancastrian, Douglas Compton runs a local café and Terry is Antiguan. We also have aboard the master builder Alwyn Enoe’s sons, Calistus and Chris, from Wind- ward in Carriacou where Genesiswas built. Once in clear water, and after coming
into the wind to hoist the main, it’s only a few minutes before we have cleared the headlands of Blacks and Proctor’s points. Falling off to the west to wait for our start we are in pale sapphire waters with the white sand clear below us in 20m of depth. There’s a slight chop over the low swell out to sea where the waves are navy blue with just a few white caps – ideal sailing weather. With Karen counting us down to the
gun we get a cracking start hitting the line at full speed – just on the back of the B of the bang. We are right out in front and auspiciously a whale crosses our course a
50 SEAHORSE
few boat-lengths ahead. Later we’ll see humpbacks broaching out to sea, rearing out of the water before throwing them- selves backwards, like drunks on a haystack, confident in their cushy collapse into the waves. The boat’s motion on a fine reach is
easy in the swell. The motion is a feature of these sloops but here it may also be down to a novel addition. Genesis has been fitted with an external ballast keel – a lead shoe weighing 1,100lb which is bronze fastened under her green heart timber keel. On most of these vessels you would
expect to find stone ballast, which might, or might not, be battened down – depend- ing on whether they were regularly filling up with cargo or not; the world’s harbours are littered with foreign stones. For trim I’d noticed that Genesis also
has a box of lead ballast abaft the mast. Even so, without any of her expected fur- niture and fittings for cruising, Alexis had pointed out earlier how she is floating high on her marks. It means that when she gets settled her waterline will be slightly longer – the extra weight probably won’t slow her down at all. And she is showing a turn of speed;
we’ve been romping off out to sea on this windward leg. Everyone has started smiling saying how special and fast she is; imagine how she’ll be when she is fully ballasted. It’s only her second race. Early on we’d pulled away from the
other Carriacou contenders, Summer Cloud and Sweetheart, and while we’ve been overtaken by two larger schooners, only one other boat of our size – the yawl- rigged Hinckley Bermuda 40 Moon- shadow, Bill Tripp’s masterpiece from 1958 and apparently the longest-running production boat in America – has been able to catch us up and pip us to the mark. And this was after we had been fine-reach- ing and then beating for seven miles.
I’m on the foredeck helping tack the
headsail and as we reach the mark it’s time to help Cal to set the boat’s secret weapon – a down or offwind jib-boom from which we fly a small jib. The thing is simplicity itself. Like the rest of Genesis it seems to have involved a hike into the forest to find the timber and then putting it in the boat. Here it’s a length, perhaps 18ft or so, of
fresh green bamboo, with a slot cut for- ward through which to run the tack of the jib. We tie it to the stem and cant it to windward, tying its inboard end to the long leeside foredeck cleat. It sets pretty well and you can feel the speed it gives us; perhaps an extra 1.5kt over our 7-8kt. After the first downwind mark on this
butterfly course I’m looking ahead for the Hinckley. Ah, she must have got a lift and is now obscured by one of those big schooners. Then I looked behind and saw her turning that last mark fully three cables* behind us. Wow! Like the other West Indies workboats that sail at Antigua, Genesis was expected to have a canny turn of speed, but really, I kept thinking, she had no right to be this fast. To a fan of the plain and simple, seeing
how that approach can put you on a win- ning streak is just such a crazy concept in this complex world of ours. So I confess I got excited and started waving at photo - graphers in helicopters, while the rest of the crew acted the part and stared ahead for the cool shot. ‘But hey! Look at us! We got bamboo nitro!’ Even Cal had to grin at that. Moonshadow had only just caught up
when we turned for our last downwind scoot in this 20-or-so-mile race. Full sprint mode! We set the bamboo again and bowsed the halyard on the luff of the jib until, with a little crack of upset, we snapped our green and pleasant secret weapon once again. Now we set the sail as a watersail, hanging it beneath the boom in bonnet fashion, but it was less effective
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