The Most Shameful Race
From the log book of the Stay Gold for September 23, 2025: A day that will live in infamy.
Captain Anil Shukla
Main sheet Mathew Richkus
Jib Sheets Chris Friel, Ted Trafton
Foredeck scum Matt Bivens
Narragansett Bay was gorgeous, sunny, with temperatures in the 70s, clouds scudding overhead, and a bracing wind blowing. Weather models were predicting 15 knots with gusts to 22 knots. Even better, there were only three sailboats registered in our class. A three-boat race should mean a Third Place Glass (at least). What could go wrong?
The Captain’s main concern was the ever-unreliable foredeck. The rest of the crew were aboard the Stay Gold at her mooring. But the foredeck scum, who has to work for a living, was driving in frantically from Massachusetts, and reporting a 5:35 p.m. estimated arrival to the parking lot, for a race that would start at 6 p.m., far out in the bay.
Sitting dockside and dangling his bare feet in his little rubby dinghy, the Captain texted orders in reply: Drive faster. When you get here, run. Run straight to the dock and jump in the dinghy.
The Captain frowned as he typed. Only the foredeck scum could screw up such a beautiful evening. In fact, the foredeck had already tarnished last week — had committed borderline mutiny — by promising to enter a race recap into the Stay Gold’s log book, but then failing to do so.
Not a word about last week’s glorious win! Just a sulky silence, about the only First Place victory in the noble ship’s racing history. A First Place Glass — with no mention in the ship’s log? The Captain shook his head darkly at the thought.
And sure, it was true that last week no one else had been racing against Stay Gold. It seemed the foredeck was being sniffy about this — as if a First Place finish in a race with one participant was beneath celebrating. The foredeck was not alone in its embarrassed disdain. Even the race organizers seemed to find it all icky and distasteful. The Committee Boat last week, after having appropriately acknowledged all of the spinnaker-class winners, hadn’t blown a horn to salute the Stay Gold as she had brought up the rear.
“No horn?” the crew had muttered then, as we crossed the line last of all boats but technically first in our class. From across the water, some on the Committee Boat heard these plaintive complaints, and after a short pause they gave a little mocking “toot” of the horn.
“Bah,” likely thought the Captain as he remembered that, and continued his passive aggressive texting. Let the haters hate. It had been a good race.
First, we had won.
Second, the race had featured the smoothest downwind pole set in the ship’s history — because the Captain himself, trusting the wheel to First Mate Richkus, had gone forward to manage it. The Captain had been forced to listen to years of fearful foredeck fuss over the simple task of attaching one end of a dreaded, slippery, 15 foot, 50 lb metal pole to a little mounting peg on the mast, while hooking the other end onto a huge, flapping powerful headsail (or jib sail) sheet, while also attaching a topping lift to the pole’s far end to raise or lower that end, while also using a pulley system to raise or lower the mast peg end, while also keeping one’s balance as the ship’s bow see-sawed up and down over the waves.
But last week, as the wind faded to a light whisper and Stay Gold ghosted across lake-glass waters, the Captain made it look easy — so simple and easy, in fact, that the foredeck scum were vexed no end. They had just assumed the Captain would be bad at something complicated and physically challenging like the pole set because he so rarely does any real work. Instead, the Captain had casually made the foredeck look like chumps. Then shortly after, to a round of applause from his tony Rhode Island peers, he had strode to the front of the Barrington Yacht Club to collect his First Place Glass.
Yet the ensuing week came and went with no recap. From the perspective of the log book, officially there’d been no First Place Glass at all.
Even after the Captain had texted photos of a new “safety feature” for the pole, there had been only terse acknowledgements. Using bits of free junk he had lying around, including old rope and a carabineer, the Captain — his inspiration based on a single pole set in zero wind — had dreamt up a “system” to keep the pole base from falling off of the mast:
The foredeck’s response to texts about this was truculent silence.
The foredeck hates innovations, almost more than it hates the pole and pole sets.
The foredeck also secretly hoped that this jury-rigged bunch of string and tape would somehow fail.
As 5:30 p.m. approached, the Captain looked about restlessly and pondered leaving the foredeck scum ashore. But just then Bivens scurried up, hopped in the dinghy, and they were off!
The foredeck scum explained eagerly to the Captain how being late was actually going to work to Stay Gold’s advantage: We’d leap aboard, secure the dinghy to the mooring, fire up the motor, slip the mooring, hoist the sails and go bombing straight for the line. Heck, we’d probably come in hot just at the starting horn.
The Captain got caught up in this vision and was happy, and for a time forgot his impatience, and forgot about the near mutinous silence in the log book regarding last week’s so-called victory.
Stay Gold cast off the mooring and flew down the channel, headed for the open bay. The Captain had a reefing line attached, just in case the winds became too powerful, but for now, she was sailing nobly. As jib sheet officer Friel called out the minutes remaining to the 6 p.m. start, the foredeck prediction seemed spot on: We would indeed sail straight off the mooring to the starting line and cross just at the horn! It was early to say, but it already felt like we had a victor’s momentum, something we might ride to a legitimate First Place finish.
Big spinnaker boats were already jockeying for position, running back and forth in front of the line. There would be a combined start for all classes, and as the clock ticked down toward the starting horn, boats large and smaller were darting back and forth, weaving and dancing past each other, asserting rights of way while vigilantly avoiding collisions. Adding to the excitement were brief spells of hard rain despite the overall sunny evening; the spitting rainfalls only happened twice, each for about 10 or 20 seconds, before disappearing to reveal clear skies again.
The Captain sent Bivens to the prow to call out traffic. Richkus worked the main sheet, Friel and Trafton the jibs. The crew did not even know the course — we were arriving too late for that — so the plan was to follow the spinnaker boats and hope we’d figure it out.
With about 90 seconds to the start, bowman Bivens shouted unintelligibly back to the cockpit and pointed leeward.
The Officers looked about in alarm.
“What? What is it?” they called.
“RAINBOW!” Bivens repeated happily, pointing again at an enormous rainbow.
The Officers nodded in terse exasperation and refused to appreciate the leeward rainbow.
The horn blew and we were racing.
The big spinnaker boats rapidly pulled away. But it was not just the spinnakers; we were rapidly falling behind even the two boats in our class. Poor Stay Gold was suddenly struggling.
“I’m getting a lot of weather helm,” observed the Captain with concern.
We eased the main and the jib, then hardened back up, then eased again. But the good ship suddenly had no speed in her.
The Captain ordered Bivens back into the cockpit from the bow. Probably his being up there was messing with the wind and slowing things down.
The boom vang was off! This was surely the culprit. The Captain and Richkus discussed how we might be overpowered by the wind. (The foredeck wasn’t feeling a lot of wind; but vang adjustments were above the paygrade of a foredeck scum, and the foredeck overall mostly enjoyed looking at the birds, and had already philosophically settled for a guaranteed, low-stress Third Place finish.)
If the boom vang were tightened, the Captain explained, this would flatten out the sail and reduce the bellying at the top, which was probably contributing to overpowering the boat and making her gripe and steer wild. Tightening the vang might also probably help with an odd vibration he was feeling in the rudder, and with the weather helm he was battling.
The vang was tightened with a winch.
Not much seemed to change. The good boat labored on. The other boats had pulled embarrassingly far ahead.
The Officers discussed how the tide was coming in. Other boats weren’t having much problem swimming against the tide, but perhaps the line we’d chosen was dead center on a powerful underwater current?
The Captain ordered some dicking around with the jib cars. The car was probably too far back, he said. Earlier, he’d announced how he’d personally set the cars based on his study of the winds, and had declared that they should not be touched. Now, he ordered the foredeck scum to move the port car exactly “five finger-widths forward”. This was done first on port tack, and soon after on starboard tack.
The Stay Gold lumbered on, like an exhausted horse being whipped forward to her death. The trailing edge of her jib sheet flapped sloppily. First Friel and then Bivens were sent to the leeward rail to try to tighten the jib sheet leech line. The Captain, continuing to steer wildly, buried the leeward rail into the sea while Bivens struggled with the leech line, soaking his foredeck scum shoes but failing to wash him overboard. With the boat heeled over in a heavy wind, it felt like we should be flying. But the land crawled slowly by.
The Captain continued to comment in frustration on the weather helm he was battling. The other boats were so far off, the crew worried we wouldn’t be able to find the course. The foredeck squished forward in wet shoes to scan the horizon. Boats could be seen far, far off, rounding a tiny green buoy.
Slowly, slowly the Stay Gold fought her way toward the green buoy.
Richkus on the mainsheet asked about barnacles. Had the Captain had the bottom cleaned recently?
The Captain, a cheap man at heart, had not.
Wise remarks were passed back and forth about the way a fouled bottom can collect seaweed, barnacles and other detritus to dramatically slow a boat. The Captain talked vaguely about having someone come clean the bottom.
“Maybe they’ll find a 14-foot remora attached and swimming against us,” Bivens joked.
As he worked the main sheet, Richkus later remembered thinking, “Maybe Stay Gold is just a dud.” Could it be that she just didn’t have any speed or heart left in her? After all, she’s 37 feet of racing boat, but also part family cruiser, with a comfortable cabin and a little bourgeois kitchen below …
As the buoy approached, new crew assignments were handed out. Bivens and Richkus were sent forward for the pole set. Trafton took over the main sheet.
A pole set in a race this far lost seemed excessive and pointless. But the foredeck had its orders, and if those orders demanded broken fingers, shattered teeth or the loss of a man overboard, such was the foredeck’s fate. The foredeck crew moved to the bow and discussed strategy for managing the 15-foot metal pole in high-ish winds, which now had to include the Captain’s new jury-rigged “safety system.” With intense satisfaction, the foredeck found that the Captain had put his rope-and-carabineer device on upside down: It only works when the pole’s hook is brought down onto the jib sheet, but that is not the foredeck practice, we bring the pole hook up under to attach to the sheet. The base of the pole was thus rotated 180 degrees, which left the Captain’s rope-and-carabineer thingy dangled uselessly from underneath it, too short to reach the mast.
The pole was set, and the foredeck returned to the cockpit. On our new course, now running downwind, it was far quieter. We were moving more slowly than ever. Night was falling. The foredeck studied the land, and the far-off cars with their white headlights and red taillights. The cars were moving fast, but the land seemed to be moving not at all.
Jib sheet officer Friel was sent below to turn on the running lights.
He emerged reporting a mechanical sound from below. What was that noise?
“It sounds like the motor is on,” he said.
The Captain dismissed this. Obviously, the motor was not on.
But there was a strange vibration that all could feel now in the quiet.
“I wonder if we’re dragging a lobster pot?” said First Mate Richkus. And for a moment that seemed almost likely. What else might explain this strange race?
Bivens stuck his head down into the cabin. It reeked of diesel. It smelled like an engine that had been screaming and struggling for hours and was about to catch fire. A rhythmic thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump could be heard.
“Uh, some kind of motor is definitely on,” he said.
Richkus went below to investigate. After a long, doubtful pause, he called up to ask if perhaps a bilge pump was running?
(The foredeck suddenly wondered: Wait, are we sinking?)
Because if it’s not a bilge pump, Richkus continued, then some other kind of motor or engine is running.
The Captain moved the engine throttle slightly forward, and the mechanical noise roared louder.
Shock and horror came over his face. The motor was indeed on. It had been on the entire race. In reverse gear.
Poor Stay Gold! We had been flogging her forward with the sails, even as we’d been dragging her backward with the motor!
The engine controls are on the port side of the cockpit, at about knee height. As we’d motor-sailed up last minute to the start, the Captain had leaned down and pulled out the choke valve to cut the engine. He had also reflexively thrown the engine into reverse gear: When sailing with the engine off, Stay Gold’s engine is supposed to be in reverse, because in that gear her feathered propeller blades are designed to fold in on themselves, to reduce drag.
The engine had seemed to stop, but in the excitement of closing on the line, the Captain had slammed the choke quickly back into place (otherwise the little plastic handle sticks out, and with Captain and crew jumping around the cockpit, it’s in the way, and likely to get stepped on and snapped off by a clumsy foredeck scum). But he did so too quickly: Just before the engine had died, the Captain had turned it back on. In retrospect, no one could remember hearing the engine shutdown alarm sound; while we also hadn’t heard the motor itself continue to run over the noise of the wind and the workings of the sails.
The entire stupid evening suddenly made sense. Sail trim adjustments, boom vang adjustments, car adjustments, jib leech line adjustments — all for naught. The horrible slow forward progress, the overpowering sense of weather helm, the strange vibrations in the rudder? It wasn’t a freak incoming tide, or a 14-foot remora, or barnacles or lobster pots. All night we’d been trying to sail forward, while simultaneously motoring backwards.
The Captain turned off the engine.
Stay Gold bobbed along quietly, but suddenly a little faster and lighter. Diesel fumes filled the air by the cabin door.
“Guys, we can’t tell anyone about this,” the Captain said. He looked green, and spooked. He cast a particularly nauseated look at his idiot foredeck, the keeper of the log, standing there in wet tennis shoes and grinning.
“Oh, of course not,” the foredeck agreed easily, after just the briefest of pauses.
“Seriously. I mean it. No one can know about this. This has to be a Stay Gold secret,” the Captain continued.
There were noises of agreement all around. But they were vaguely non-committal noises.
“Absolutely,” said foredeck scum Bivens, evasively looking out over the night-darkened bay. “Mum’s the word!”
The Captain was rapidly cycling through the five stages of grief, although not in any particular order. He abruptly announced the obvious: There’s no way we’ll be able to keep this a secret.
The Officers, clearly relieved, instantly agreed.
The Captain engaged in some quiet swearing and cursing, followed by a root cause analysis. There was discussion of the feathered propeller that is supposed to fold up when the engine is off and in reverse. There was discussion of the mechanism for killing the engine by pulling out the long plastic choke valve, and how a foredeck scum will step on it and break it off if it’s not quickly pushed back in, but how that choke valve also shouldn’t be pushed back in before the alarm announcing complete engine shutdown has sounded.
Of course, the real culprit — the root of all root causes — was quickly identified as the foredeck scum.
“Wait, this is your fault!” the Captain suddenly cried out, pointing accusatorially at the foredeck. “If you hadn’t been late —”
“Yes!” the foredeck cried in delight. “Yes! I knew this would be my fault! It just feels right, that this would be my fault!”
Of course it’s the foredeck’s fault that we sailed with the motor on and in reverse all night long!
Suddenly, before the crew could stop him, the Captain was on the radio to the Committee Boat. He announced Stay Gold was retiring — dropping out — due to an “interesting mechanical failure.” He said he would explain, with “a speech” upon arrival to the post-race awards ceremony at the Yacht Club.
What the hell was that! protested the foredeck. We still deserve the Third Place Glass!
The Captain disagreed.
“Having the motor on during a sailing race is a disqualifying event,” he said.
“This is bullshit!” fumed the foredeck scum. We didn’t “have the motor on”, we had the motor on in reverse. That’s not cheating! We were being held back! It shouldn’t be disqualifying! We earned a Third Place Glass!
The Captain turned the motor back on, put it in forward gear, and, with long practice, ignored the sounds of foredeck protest. He looked stolidly ahead.
He was a man of honor. There would be a speech. He would explain it all to his peers.
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As a former J-boat race crew participant myself (and by that I mean I was rail meat on a J24 at most like two dozen times) this was so much fun to read. I laughed, I cried, I nodded approvingly. It's so much fun to find out the hard way how only the big stuff truly matters in life. All apologies to Anil, but if the Captain gets to be the victor after the wins, the Captain has to be the villain after the losses. Good fun had by all, thank you so much for sharing!