With a month on Lake Charlevoix doing little else besides sailing under my belt, I thought I was ready for the San Francisco Bay. After all, it does get pretty windy on the main basin. I found out quickly that on the Bay, sailing is the easy part, and racing is a whole other day at sea.
Thinking that it would be hard to find a boat in need of sailors, I put my name on every crew list in San Francisco. Barely 48 hours went by before I got my first phone call. Within a week, I had a choice of boats. Early one Saturday morning, I took the bus across town to the South Beach harbor where I was a last-minute addition to the crew on Akyla—it means Shark in Russian. The boat is aptly named, because five minutes after I stepped aboard, I felt like I had been thrown to the sharks, all my skills in doubt. What little I knew about sailboat racing—Tuesday nights in Boyne City followed by cheeseburgers and beers at the BRI—did not prepare me for the level of intensity involved in sailing on Akyla in the Champion of Champions race on the San Francisco Bay. I thought I was pretty fluent in the parts of a sailboat, until now. Moments after we shoved off, there were commands being shouted—fortunately not all at me—that may as well have been in Russian. I mean, what's a cunningham, a vang, or a running backstay? I couldn't have told you then, but I can tell you now, they all change the shape of the sail, though on a level that was far beyond my understanding.
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