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Gybing a Finn calls for a special description because it is a special experience. Whereas in most boats a gybe is normally just another routine manoeuvre, in the Finn this move assumes heroic proportions, and provides lessons in humility that have made strong men weep.
If you've never jockeyed a Finn in a breeze over 25, this will mean nothing to you, but if you have, you are automatically a soul brother. Here's a typical sequence:
You round the windward mark with a nice 90-yard lead. The wind has been coming up steadily and is now gusting to 25. Vang down, board up, Cunningham off, ass out, kazoom - you're off on a screamer.
Sheets of spray and wild exhilaration as you blast out to a wider lead. And then suddenly, before you know it, there it is. "By golly hot damn, gee whiz, we better get set for the old gybe. The gybe!" Brow furrows, vision clouds, muscles stiffen, and a childlike whimper slips from your strong Nordic lips.
"Steady boy, there's nothing to this. We'll just wait for a little lull." This naive hope is quickly extinguished by a glance aft, which reveals a solid mass of hissing whitecaps racing down to join you in your moment of truth. "Well, we'll just get the board up a bit like Elvstrom says, so she'll slide to leeward and not tip." So you up the board six inches - a precaution your Finn greets with a wild, sickening lurch to windward. Only a desperate jab of the tiller and a frantic yank on the main keep you from instant oblivion via the famous Finn windward wipeout, or 'death roll'.
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Now the buoy is right off the port bow, and the puff hits full force. Down on your knees you plunge, neatly incising razor-like slashes on your legs from either the bailers or the hiking-strap mounting. Somehow straddling and backing into the tiller, you start the fateful arc. "The vang! The vang! Let off the vang!" (Failure to do this is a direct invitation to decapitation of the most primitive sort.)
Shredding your knuckles to the bone you manage to cast off the vang. You haul in on the sheet - "Gybe ho!" But wait, she isn't gybing, and instead she slows down to a queasy stall and hangs there, midst a sudden and unnatural silence as you haul manfully on the sheet and re jam the tiller around. And then she comes - that malevolent boom, screeched across the deck by a thousand devils. From long practice, you deftly duck your head and bear off slightly in perfect textbook style, counteracting the momentum of the turn. Except you forget about your elbow. ... When you bore off, you quite naturally raised your elbow several inches for added leverage on the tiller - an innocent and seemingly minor oversight that would go unnoticed in most boats.
No such luck in the Finn. With unerring accuracy the boom seeks the very point of your elbow and fetches it a smash that would make Tarzan gasp. In addition to the excruciating pain, this timely blow effectively numbs the entire arm, causing a critical delay in your downward correction. |
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It's all over but the jeering. The boom, which has already so cruelly punished you, now seeks to bury itself in the leeward bow wave. Your noble steed slops to a stop, sail pinned to the water.
Sensing a kill, the wind shrieks its delight at a higher pitch. You hurl yourself over the windward side to save your craft. But of course you aren't Elvstrom, so rather than sliding harmlessly to leeward, you dump ignominiously, quite probably fouling the mark in the process. The rest is almost too painful to recount. Your competitors rocket by like dervishes, and since you know their control is marginal at best, moving around so as to right your boat is like stepping casually out on a California freeway.
Beyond that, your centreboard has in all likelihood retreated up the trunk, leaving you the unhappy prospect of hanging by your fingernails from the slot, till your weary craft concedes and flops back up.
Someone should make a close-up movie of Finns at the gybing mark, if only to provide drama students with a study of how a man's expression can change in a flash from stark terror (before the gybe) to mad glee (if the gybe is successfully completed). Actually the Finn gybe becomes a great equaliser, since it fells the high and mighty as readily as the tail- ender. And the saving grace is that after the Finn gybe all gybes in other classes become a piece of cake, to be executed with insolent insouciance. |
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