Racing

A U.S. Naval Academy grad, a U.S. Marine and a U.S. Patriot Sailing Ambassador, this intrepid sailor is taking on his biggest challenge in the Mini Transat.     What is your sailing background, and how did that lead to Classe Mini 6.50 and the Mini Transat? Originally from the suburbs of Philadelphia, I grew up sailing Optis on the Delaware River at the Corinthian Yacht Club of Philadelphia. In high school, I spent the summers racing 420s…

By Dave Hemenway Photos by Robert Deaves     Fifty-eight sailors from sixteen countries contested the 2023 Finn Gold Cup, hosted by the Coconut Grove Sailing Club in Miami, FL January 27 – 31. The Finn is a popular, performance oriented 14’ 9” single sail dinghy that was developed for the 1952 Olympics by Scandinavian designer Rickard Sarby, based on an International Canoe design. The original wooden boats were made by home builders in the Scandinavian countries….

By Phil Dickey, MD   It seemed like every sailor on the docks at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club had been on a boat where the A2 kite had blown up during the first day of the 2022 Newport Bermuda Race. Though there are no official tallies of the number of torn sails, Jack Orr, North Sails expert in Bridgeport, CT, said, “Our shop was full of them.” Jack points out that his folks repaired kites from…

By John Storck III     The third running of the Seawanhaka Invitational for the Cruise Cup was held on October 29 & 30, 2022. The fleet racing regatta hosts yacht clubs and sailing associations from throughout the region surrounding Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club in Oyster Bay, NY. Each team is required to have at least one sailor of each gender. Races are targeted at 30 minutes, and teams rotate through the provided Sonars throughout the event….

By Tom McKeon The Peconic Bay Sailing Association held their 29th Annual Whitebread Race on Saturday, October 1, 2022. Taking place on Long Island’s Peconic Bays, the event’s name derives from the significantly more arduous Whitbread Round the World Race. Like all Whitebreads, one thing is for sure. This one will certainly be talked about for many years to come.   At the beginning of 2022 I planned my calendar, and my fall in particular, around the…

By Nick Bowen The Twenty Hundred Club had their sixth and final race of the season on Saturday, September 24. For such a windy fall day we were quite pleased to have twenty-seven boats competing in five classes. Fifteen spinnaker boats were signed up to race, but because of a high wind forecast and general difficulty raising crews in late September, we had three (of seven registered) boats race in Spin-A and six (of eight registered) in…

Wisconsin Badgers dominate, and College of Charleston’s first-ever all-women team win their division By Ron Weiss Photos by Stephen R Cloutier After the Storm Trysail Club’s 2020 Intercollegiate Offshore Regatta (IOR) was canceled due to COVID, hopes were high for 2021, but were dashed when racing was called off due to strong wind and waves. Fortunately, this year’s event, hosted by Larchmont Yacht Club in Larchmont, NY on October 8 & 9, was sailed in beautiful fall…

By Tom Darling, Conversations with Classic Boats Photos by the author, Princeton 1975, and Hali Liu, Princeton 2025 Princeton University Sailing, which lays claim to being the oldest intercollegiate sailing team, has entered into an innovative collaboration to house its dinghy sailing activities at Anchor Yacht Club, a member owned and maintained club on the Delaware River.   The collaboration, or CoLo (“Co-Location”) as I call it, went into its second year in September 2022 with the…

Have you ever, in the dead of winter and a long way from sailing, looked back to a stretch in the prior racing season where it seemed you could do no wrong? This was midsummer 2022. The place was Nantucket, Harbor and Sound. The boat was a Nathanael Herreshoff design, the Nantucket Alerion, a boat we profiled in our second Conversations with Classic Boats podcast exactly two years ago. The story of the modern evolution of this…

By Greg Gilmartin I still remember one of the first sayings I learned when I tried out sailboat racing. “One hand for you, one hand for the boat!” Couple that with a legendary comedy bit where the punch line was God asking Noah, “How long can you tread water?” These sayings are still with me and through nearly fifty years of setting sails, running races, and watching some of the very best sailors, I still believe that…