I had the great honor to captain my first regatta -The 2015 Tadmor Cup -here in Marsala, Sicily.

My motley crew consisted of two marsalian locals: Giacomo “Power” Borruso and Pietro “Speedo” Chirco.

The route was from one yellow marker to a black buoy (return) off the east coast of, Isola Favignana. I’m still unsure of the race distance but it seemed to have taken us all day. Actually, it did take all day!

There was mostly NO wind for the first half of the race, however the wind picked up later on.

Half way through we got bored and decided to turn the motor on to keep a closer tack, a totally illegal cheat. We also used auto pilot but keep hands on the wheel to make it look like we were manually steering. Also an illegal race cheat.

Unfortunately my gennaker sheet was dragging overboard when we turned the motor on and got caught up in the propeller (appropriate karma). We sent Pietro Speedo Chirco over board with a knife and European speedo to cut the sheet. Ironically the sheet was brand new, having de-boxed it only 30 minutes prior to the accident. 200 euros.

After a 30 min delay we continued to put skin in the game and headed toward the black rounding buoy, aggressively passing the #3 place boat.

Turning back towards the finish line the wind died out and blew from a undesirable direction forcing us to tack endlessly. Having no food and barely any water on board we decided to take the sails down and abandon the race.

Crossing the finish line with ALL sails down and engine on we were yelled at by the race judge “hey!! u need to cross the line between the judge-boat and the yellow buoy!!!!”. For some unknown reason the judge had failed to notice our bigger infraction – NOT SAILING – and instead fixated on the race technicals. We all laughed.

All said and done we did very well, finished 4th place; and in a race with a total of four boats we prefer the semantics of 4th place.

Italians being generous hosts to their foreign guests graciously honored the idiotic efforts of Esodo and her crew with a proportionately sized generic trophy.

Via Italia and via the ongoing adventures and misadventures of Esodo.

Huge thank you to my firends at Sail&sailing in Marsala.

Captian Noah, June 11th, 2015. Marsala, Sicily, Italy.