IT'S A VIBE

The Melges 15 has something for every age, and for older sailors, it's a much-needed return to big-fleet dinghy racing

- MICHAEL HANSON

Just off our bow, an orange inflatable buoy bounces in the waves-our weather mark at the Melges 15 Midwinter Championship. The port-tack layline is not the smartest place to be, especially when there's a wall of starboard tackers visible beneath the boom. With 65 boats converging to a single point on Florida's Indian River, seemingly all at once, I know this approach is borderline stupidity, but we manage to tack into a miracle gap beneath a pack of fetching boats. Our rushed maneuver isn't pretty, but this is only my second day racing the Melges 15, and my dinghy skills are feeling a little rusty.

Up to this point, two days into the regatta, my teammate and I have made countless errors around the racecourse: bad starts, lousy gate decisions, and some pretty suspect fleet management-like that one time we took the low road out of the offset to hoist the spinnaker, only to get steamrolled by a third of the fleet. I haven't raced in a class like this since I was a young punk on the Club 420 circuit, and that was a long time ago. Here and now, at 32 years old, I'm lacking the muscle memory and spryness of my teenage dinghy years, and I sure could use them.

Somehow, we manage to round the mark with the leaders, and as we approach the offset this time, we make sure to stay high before hoisting. We wait for a gust to fill our neon-pink spinnaker before working down into a clean lane.