Sail out into the Zuidplas and there is a line on the water now, between two orange pylons, with ten more pairs strung out beyond it in a loop.
Cross it and you are in a race.
There is nothing to press. The line is the entry, the interact key on this lake already means four things depending on where you are standing, and a race was never going to be the fifth. Sail through, and the marshals take whatever you turned up in and lend you a race boat: a hundred on the clock, which is three times a hire dinghy and faster than anything else on the plas. Then they put you in a slot on the grid, stop you dead, and count you down.
Five other boats come out to race you. They are not decoration. They take their own lines through the corners, one always on the inside and one always wide, and over three laps the whole field tends to come home within seconds of each other. You will lose to them.
The lap is a kilometre and a half. Three of them takes a couple of minutes.
Nobody has sanctioned any of this. There is a nine kilometre an hour limit on this water and you are doing a hundred, and the water police have not stopped working just because somebody painted a start line. They send a boat out to it, and it runs the circuit the wrong way round, so you meet it head-on somewhere around the back straight, once a lap, closing at fifty. You get about three seconds to decide whether to come off the throttle or take the ticket.
There are boxes on the racing line, three abreast, so there is a choice of which one to take. In them: a duikfles to throw at whoever is in front, a cone of chips for a short and glorious burst of speed, a coil of rope to leave in the water behind you, and best of all the marine band, which lets you get on the radio and tell the water police exactly where the leader is.
What you draw depends on where you are running. At the front you get things to leave behind. At the back you get speed, and the radio.
If somebody's rope goes round your prop you are down to a quarter throttle until you clear it, and you clear it by going astern for a second or two. Everybody finds this out the same way.
Cross the line for the third time and the panel turns into a result: who came where, in what time, and whether that lap of yours was the fastest anybody has ever set here.