For a few days I am back out on the sea, but not on our own boat and not sailing either. The Scottish Series is a race event for sailing boats of all sizes which has been hosted locally for many years. Entries can run into hundreds of boats so our marina becomes packed out for the duration - 4 days - and the village full of sailors doing what sailors do whilst not sailing, making a lot of noise and having a good time.
An event like this needs support boats which can move around quickly, lay out the race buoys and move them again if there is a sudden change in wind direction. I am signed up as a volunteer and, given my experience on boats, out on the water is where I can be most useful so I find myself riding around on a large rigid inflatable boat, big enough to carry three or four enormous inflatable orange race buoys. Our job is to follow instructions from the race officer who is located on a yacht at the race start line and once the buoys are laid we can sit back and watch the fun. Yacht racing is a serious business, the skippers and crews all wanting to end up on the winners' podium at the finish so there are close encounters with lots of shouting, all within the rules, of course.
One interesting challenge for us was using for the first time some autonomous racing buoys. These strange things have propellors underneath driven by small electric motors, making them self propelled. They can manoeuvre themselves at a speed of about five knots under remote guidance or alternatively they can hold themselves in one position on the sea using electronic satellite navigation. Using these things is something of a game changer for yacht racing, particularly in Scotland where the lochs can be hundreds of metres deep. Instead of having to anchor the buoys to the bottom using lengths of chain and masses of rope, the new gadgets are simply carried or towed until somewhere close to where they are needed then tossed overboard. Their internal electronics takes care of the rest, making the job of laying the course buoys much less labour intensive. At the end of the day though, recovering them and getting them back onto a boat which is bouncing about in a lumpy sea did turn out to be something of a challenge.
For the Scottish Series, in our boat we were using the smaller of two types of these automated buoys which had short fold down legs with propellors at the bottom. Before recovering them from the water the legs had to be folded up so they lay alongside the control box and would not risk getting damaged. In addition the motors should be switched off manually. Having pulled the boat alongside we would have to reach down by leaning over the side in an almost inverted position, something that required a certain athleticism, particularly when the waves were tossing the boat about in an open sea. As it turned out the only way to guarantee the buoys were switched off was to open up the waterproof lid and activate a switch inside, where all the electronics were housed, so it made sense to bring the thing onto the boat first to avoid the risk of water getting in. Unfortunately for one of my fingers, this proved to be a very unsafe thing to do. The small propellors spin very fast and are quite capable of inflicting injury, so I discovered, after one had inflicted a deep cut at the end of my middle finger.
My four consecutive days bobbing about at sea thus came to a sudden end since the cut finger now needed treatment which meant I had to go ashore. I was speedily driven back to the harbour using every one of the 150 horses powering the engine on our boat, itself quite an experience, and I am grateful to all those who assisted in this.
At the time of writing this I am glad to say that my body has healed up and everything is back in working order again.
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