by Maksim Ziurin

May 11, 2024

Here are some highlights of Anais trip around the Tokyo Bay this Golden Week:

We had a crew of 5 people (Captain Claude, Ogi, Remi, Nikolai and me) for a 2 day cruise from Yumenoshima Marina to Misaki and racing back to Yokohama.

The weather was nice but not much wind on the first day, so we had to motor almost all the way. On the race day, at the start there was no wind at all, so most of the racing boats couldn’t even cross the start line for a long time. Wind picked up a little later though, and we had a smooth sail. We were enjoying the sunshine, playing guitar and enjoying nice Nicaragua cigars.

We were going on a spinnaker fairly quickly. But then we decided to try to jibe with the spinnaker up and that ended up in a disaster. The spinnaker wrapped around the forestay as the wind picked up, we lost control of the sail and had to drop the mainsail and motor to the nearby marina. Luckily we were accompanied by Darren on Halcyon, and he had a harness on board. So we had Remi go up the mast and the forestay and bring the spinnaker back down.

We finished the race as DNF, but when we arrived to Yokohama, we found out that all of the race participants in the cruiser boat class were DNF, except one, who got the winners trophy.

Day 3 and 4 was just Claude, Maksim and Ogi, we went across the bay to Hota along with Halcyon, spent the night in Hota drinking British rum, Russian cognac and Romanian wine and had 2 remaining Puerto Rican cigars.

Anais crew decided to go back to Yumenoshima on day 4 due to weather forecast warning of strong winds and possible storm, Halcyon spent another day in Hota and later went to explore Izu islands.

Here are some pictures we took during the trip. It was a great adventure, made a lot of good memories during this Golden Week.