Doing the maths

Dick Johnson looks at the lighter side of the St Maarten Heineken Race Week

While some of the aficionados of Caribbean racing - or racing anywhere for that matter - will be dribbling over the sleek and technologically superb Z86 Maxis Pyewacket and Morning Glory, discussing CBTF technology in suitably learned tones and hotly disputing the relative merits of the boats' skippers, Dee Smith and Robbie Haines, the vast majority of the participants at the St Maarten Heineken Regatta, and it's supporters around the world, will be waiting with baited breath for the annual issue of the beer statistics.

Well, wait no longer!

As usual, Heineken has imported a shipment of special regatta cans to St Maarten in place of the ubiquitous green bottles. With the massive beach parties that are a major feature of the St Maarten regatta, it would be too dangerous to chance breaking the glass bottles on the sands.

This year, the Heineken depot in Philipsburg has a stock of 25 pallets, each carrying 160 trays of Heineken cans. Each tray contains 24 cans, so there are 96,000 green cans, each of 25cl. That's a total of 24,000 litres of beer. With this year's entry of 256 boats, that's 93.75 litres per boat. Mind you, it should be said that many visitors and a lot of local people also come to the parties and drink the beer, so let's say that it's 93 litres per boat. . .

But we thought that statistics like that are only of minimal interest, so we got out the tape measure. Lay all those cans end to end and what do you get?

You get just about 13km of beer, that's what. And 13km of beer will stretch from Simpson Bay to Grand Case, more or less from one end of the island to the other.

That figure got us thinking about how far our fleet of boats would stretch if we laid them end to end. So with the help of the regatta's Winscore Regatta Management program, we found that we had a grand total of 11,413ft of boats - with an average length of 44.9ft - that's roughly 3.5km of boats.

All this concentration on length got Heineken General Manager for St Maarten, Roelof Segers, thinking too. He came up with the Heineken Regatta Beer Metre. Not a misspelt new instrument to measure beer consumption, but a special packaging that wraps 13 cans end to end, making a convenient purchase for a boat's crew.

96,000 cans of beer might create an insurmountable problem for the Island's hard pressed garbage disposal operatives - dustmen - but Heineken has made special plans for a clean-up at every party and at the end of the regatta to ship the cans away for recycling. We hope that they might eventually come back as a complete alloy boat, but we are reliably informed that we will have about enough for a mast after this year's efforts.