There were thirty boats in our class, and two other classes with about five boats. Our class of boats was all one design Beneteau First 40.7s. They are about forty feet long and three sailed. (Check out the website here)
We had eight people on board sailing for the Beijing Sailing Center team. Alfie - our skipper from Scotland; Anuj - doing pit, American; Stephen - Spinnaker, Welsh; Martin - didn't really doing much, from Germany; Rick - was on the bow, British; his girlfriend Qian Qian was rail meat; myself on the main sail. It was a real fun group of people. Rick owns the BSC and Alfie is the chief instructor there. Anuj and Stephen work in Beijing and learned to sail this summer at the BSC. Martin works for the German embassy, and I'm still confused how he ended up on the boat. Overall a fun couple of days.
Sadly my flight to HK never got booked while I was in the US and therefore I missed the passage race from Hong Kong to the mainland of China where the inshore racing was located. So when I got to the Yacht Club in Shenzhen the next day, they had a temporary customs and border control station set up. It was really something. So the first thing was free cold beer, then you proceeded to passport control, then to customs. I was pretty jealous.
We didn't win, but we did all right, considering we had a couple people that really had not sailed before. Placing 19th of 30 is decent, considering there were a large number of semi- professional teams involved and most teams had been sailing together training for months, and our whole crew was together for the first time on the first day of sailing in Shenzhen.
Overall, a real fun experience and it makes me an international athlete... sort of.
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