It was a spectacular day on Chesapeake Bay on Saturday with great wind and as the day wore on, beautiful clear skies. We had 5 Alerions registered for the regatta and were able to field 4 on the starting line. Many thanks to Bob Spann and Miles Reedy who sailed Jim Kizziar's boat "Escape", because Jim was out of town. On "Caroline", Rodney McNeil filled in for his brother Kevin at the helm. It has been this great kind of cooperation within the fleet that has enabled us to be successful in having a full complement of boats to complete each regatta. Magic (Jonah Seiger) and Skimmer (Jack & Marti Detweiler), rounded out the fleet.
SpinSheet Magazine has a few more images on their website
We sailed with Fleet A which was set up Southeast of 1 A-H. There were 5 Starts consisting of PHRF A and J/35's in the 1st start, J/105's in the 2nd start, J/ 80's in the 3rd start, J/30's in the 4th start and the Alerions in the 5th start. The EYC race committee did a great job in setting up 2 windward marks, 1 for the boats in the 1st 2 starts and a shorter mark for those of us in the next 3 starts. They also had to juggle the starting sequence after the 1st 5 rolling starts in race 1 to keep things moving, as everyone was finishing at different times.
3 races were completed, all being windward/leewards of 4 legs. The 1st race had a windward mark of .8 miles at approximately 30 degrees with wind speeds in the 15-18 kt. range. The race committee increased the distance of the weather mark in the second race even though the winds were starting to moderate to 12-15 kits. A 20 degree wind shift saw the race committee set the windward mark at 50 degrees and .5 miles for the 3rd race. The wind had by then moderated further to around 8-12 kts.
The racing in our Alerion fleet was quite interesting, competitive and fun. All 4 boats that raced had at least 1 2nd place finish and Skimmer and Caroline traded 1st place finishes in the first 2 races. Unfortunately, Caroline had to retire after the 2nd race as 1 of their crew had to get back to shore to go to work, otherwise, the 3rd race would have possibly decided the Regatta between the 2. Hopefully, we will see that duel renew at the EYC One Design Classic, although they will be most definitely challenged by a good turnout of the rest of our fleet, which continues to be more competitive with every race.
The 1st race provided an interesting twist. Since the race committee set 2 different marks for the different classes, they used 2 different colors. The mark for the 1st 2 starts was orange and ours was lime green, With all of the wind and the waves, the lime green cylinder was harder to spot and some of us over stood the mark on the 1st leg of race 1 by a whole lot, because we couldn't find it. After that, by figuring out how they were positioned between the 2 huge tanker ships that were anchored off of our course, we got better at spotting it for the rest of the day.
Complete race results are as follows:
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