V15 Team Racing

I made it back from Nova Scotia on Thursday after a long 17 hour drive.  I wasn't home for long though!  On Friday morning, I umpired the Barclay Cup Opti Team Race at Little Egg Harbor Yacht Club.  It was a pretty uneventful regatta from a judge's standpoint (a good thing), but it was cool to see how enthusiastic and excited the young teams were to be team racing.

That night, I drove up to Toms River to load my Vanguard 15 on my car for my own team racing regatta.  Friday night, I headed up to Wianno Yacht Club for the Midsumma V15 Team Race.  The regatta was really well run and proved once again why I love sailing on the cape.  There was great breeze for the whole event (probably 12-18 knots), the club was very hospitable with food and drinks for after sailing and a great team of volunteers to run the regatta smoothly, and of course there was some good competition.

For the event, I sailed with my normal team racing team, the "Cantab Tall Boyz."  I skipper one boat with my crew, Elyse Dolbec.  Kyle Kovacs and Christina Dahlman were on the second boat.  And Sean Doyle and his wife, Susan Doyle, were in the third.  We sailed 25 races over the two days against 11 other teams.  Overall, I think we were either third or fourth.  The results were still being sorted out as we left.  Silver Panda--Colin Merrick, Pete Levesque, and Tim Wadlow-- proved once again why they are the team to beat, winning the regatta pretty handidly.  But Team Extreme--made up of Stu McNay, Zach Brown, and Justin Law--were very competitive too to take second.  Our team made the final four, which we were pretty happy about, but we were definitely a little rusty compared to the other top teams.  We also had a bit of handicap when Kyle broke his tiller universal for a few races before getting a new one.  That didn't help.  But overall, it was a really fun weekend.

I find it pretty important to take a break every now and then from laser sailing to do some other type of sailing.  Team racing is a great way to do just that.  For one thing, I was sailing a two person boat, but also part of a larger team.  It was also a different type of sailing (sailing as a team, instead of just racing the fleet) which highlights different strategies than I would use when racing by myself.  It's a nice change of pace.

This upcoming weekend is the Larchmont Team Race in V15s again.  Then the following week I'll be sailing the E-Scow UpBay regatta and the Eastern E-Scow Easterns with Russ Lucas from Bay Head.  It should be a fun two weeks before I hop back in the laser for the US Nationals at Brant Beach and then our World Championships in Nova Scotia at the end of August.