Why Annapolis to Newport? There are a lot of offshore races Leading the Change! could have campaigned for, yet we chose Annapolis to Newport. What specifically about this race drew our team to it?
Well, we loved the multi-dimensional navigational thought that goes into this race.
We (Chelsea and Maya) are a mentor/mentee pair in The Magenta Project’s mentoring program. We were paired together because of our shared interest and passion for navigation and weather routing. We have been working together on this front since October 2022. Maya has been taking Chelsea’s online courses. We meet on Zoom to discuss any questions and unpack the ideas of the course. We have also done hindsight tactical reviews of offshore races, specifically the 2022 Newport to Bermuda race, focusing on Maya’s team – Team Bitter End. We pulled up the Yellowbrick tracker, Expedition Grib files, and satellite images and discussed the logic behind the strategy and the effectiveness of those strategic decisions. Maya has sat in on some of Chelsea’s weather briefings for her clients. We’ve done some work on Expedition. We’ve done a lot, and it’s all been great. But, we wanted to go a step further. We wanted to get out there together and apply all the work we’ve been doing remotely together for eight months to a real, on-the-water situation.
Hence, collaborating in the Annapolis to Newport race.
Both of us have a good deal of familiarity racing on the waters of the route. Chelsea has navigated Annapolis to Newport twice, and Maya has spent a couple of years racing on the Chesapeake Bay – both buoy racing and down-the-bay overnight racing.
Last week, we got on a Zoom call and started unpacking the race route and thinking through the “big picture” of our navigation. This is what we determined.
We’re looking at this race as two different races. The first half of the race–the first hundred miles or so–is coastal. It’s down the Chesapeake Bay. The race's second half is open ocean – up the Atlantic to the finish in Narragansett Bay. These two races-within-a-race will bring different challenges and require unique strategies tactically and meteorologically.
The Chesapeake:
Both of us won’t be sleeping during this portion of the race, that’s for sure. As skipper and navigator, we’re going to have to be alert and attuned to everything happening. The Chesapeake will bring with it a lot of complex and ever-changing currents, and thermally-influenced winds. Of course, we’re going to be observing the weather beforehand and making a plan before we set out, but we’re expecting a lot of what Chelsea called "ABRs", or Adjustments Based on Reality.
The winds on the Chesapeake are very affected by land since the Chesapeake is a bay shoved between Maryland and Virginia. This means thermal effects and local sailors will know the Chesapeake has its own Bay breeze along with a larger-scale sea breeze that affects various parts of the Bay in different ways. This is something else that we'll be analyzing pre-race. Storms can be dramatic in the area. Both of us have sailed through intense lightning storms on the Chesapeake in the past, and have experienced the classic “puff and suck” where you’re floating along through no winds, then suddenly get hit with a squall. We’ll be actively watching for those systems to move through the course and we’ll be watching the clouds for indications of the thermal wind behavior.
The land also leads to more friction resulting in big wind shifts. We’ll be keeping that in mind, and attentive to sailing our fastest course in conjunction with the shifts. So, the bow crew might be busy with sail changes during this stage.
Also, (and a big contribution to why we won’t be sleeping), we’ll be hyper attentive to not hit any obstructions, like the many unlit, unmarked fishing nets and crab pots. There’s a lot of traffic on the Chesapeake. We’ll be very attentive to the VHF and AIS. The Chesapeake is notoriously shallow. The average depth of the Chesapeake is 21 feet (7 meters.) More than 24% of the Bay is less than 6 feet (2 meters) deep. We’ll be attentive to keeping the keel off the mud.
Once we turn the corner out of the Chesapeake, we’ll enter the open ocean, which we’re viewing as the start of the second race.
The Atlantic:
In a sense, this part of the race will be easier. There will be fewer considerations. We’ll be thinking more about big-picture weather – what systems are moving through and where we want to be relative to them. We’ll be prepared for open ocean conditions – bigger swells, potentially confused seas (swells coming from multiple directions), etc. We’ll also be even more focused on tactical decisions relative to the rest of the fleet.
This part of the race is about getting to Block Island, which is where our biggest navigational decision will happen.
Block Island
Which side will we take? That is the question. The race rhumbline goes straight through Block, so the fleet often splits around Block Island, depending on the wind direction and currents. You can take either side, however, one side may have more advantages. We don’t know yet which side will be favored because it is dependent on the prevailing wind, and the complex currents around the island, which don’t necessarily have a set behavior.
The currents split around Block Island. They hit the island from whichever side they’re flowing from, and they split around the island, resulting in a bunch of weird eddies. The most important thing for our deliberations on our decision of which side of Block Island to take will be making sure we have the best available data to determine the current movements around Block Island. We’ll have that data.
Our excitement is building, as we enjoy the process of planning our strategy, and we can’t wait to make those live-time strategic decisions together. While navigation is a big part of performing well in this race, sailing the boat fast and efficiently to the navigation route is just as important. We’re lucky to have a team with the talent and skills to do just that. We can’t wait to put the skills we’ve been building through our mentoring relationship to the test in the ultimate 2-in-1 coastal-to-oceanic race.
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