Ed. Note: All photos by Jan Anderson, and here’s her take on the weekend, “Oh, darn it, yet another fantastic weekend of weather. Early odds are that 2015 is going to go down in the record books as The Year of The Great Wind and Weather. Now if only Bruce Hedrick will (please) continue his fabulous forecasting streak! Gorgeous day, gorgeous racing conditions, and gorgeous fun! Enjoy these photos … heck, you’re probably in here! “ All of Jan’s photos can be seen here.
We have had the best breeze for sailing almost this entire year so far. Amazing. The weekend of CYC’s Puget Sound Spring Regatta on April 18th and 19th was no different except that it was warmer. The breeze never dropped below eight knots and never got above 15 knots. A couple of boats on the course north of Shilshole went to #3’s for the last race on Saturday however you could have sailed with the number one all weekend without any problem.
As usual, CYC divided the fleet in half sending the big boats to North Course while the smaller boats raced right off of Shilshole. The real disappointment was the size of the fleet. Only 54 boats turned out with 24 racing under PHRF with the balance in One-Design classes. The biggest fleet was the 12 Melges 24’s who are tuning up for their big event this summer in the Gorge. The other one design fleets were the Farr 30’s, J-105’s, and San Juan 24’s who all fielded six boats and not surprisingly had the closest racing.
In the big boat fleet, the 1D35 Shrek made a guest appearance and totally dominated that fleet winning by 8.5 points over Melges 32 Ballistic. The Farr 30’s enjoyed some great racing with the top four boats only separated by six points with the Chris Tutmark skippered Patricia winning by one point over Bat out of Hell. The other PHRF class on the North Course was the biggest fleet with nine boats and was dominated by the fastest boat, the Beneteau 40.7 Bravo Zulu, who took advantage of their boat speed and simply sped off to sail in clear air and not having to mix it up with other boats. BZ won by 10.5 points over the always fast J-109 Tantivy who won the tie breaker with Dos. The other One-Design fleet on the North Course was the J-105’s with Delirium winning by one point over Jubilee.
In the Melges 24 fleet which sailed on the South Course, Herb Cole brought the Judo Chop out of retirement and was nine points ahead of second place Brio skippered by Manfred Schmiedl. In the PHRF fleet the J-29 Here & Now skippered by Pat Denney won five of the ten races and ended up eight points ahead of the second place Wings. The San Juan 24 Grauer Geist skippered by Ken Johnson took six firsts in 10 races to win by five points over Return skippered by Mark Bradner.
All in all some great sailing and CYC, as usual, did a great job putting together some fantastic racing in some truly unusually beautiful conditions.
