Racing

By Ted Decyk Photos by Fran Grenon, Spectrum Photo This August brought the 93rd Atlantic Nationals to Niantic Bay Yacht Club in Niantic, CT. The Atlantic, a 30-foot Starling Burgess design primarily built by Cape Cod Shipbuilding in Wareham, MA, loves the wind, but as we know, the dog days of summer in Connecticut can deny us a breeze and that’s exactly what happened on day one. The 23-boat fleet and crew sat at the dock telling…

By Diane Kropfl & Emily Smith, Ms. Race Co-chairs The Atlantic Highlands Yacht Club (AHYC) in Atlantic Highlands, NJ hosted the 18th Annual Ms. Race on Saturday, August 20 on Sandy Hook Bay under clear skies and a favorable breeze. A record showing of accomplished women racers from five New Jersey Bayshore yacht clubs raised their sails to pay tribute to the life and legacy of Eileen Campbell, a woman who had participated in every Ms. Race…

Good Decisions Yield Winners in Four Classes Fully expecting light and variable breezes overnight, forty-three sailing teams started the 2022 Ida Lewis Distance Race presented by Bluenose Yacht Sales on Friday, August 19 and returned throughout the day Saturday, August 20 to complete the event’s 17th edition. The wind conditions wound up ranging from 8-10 knots at the start to high teens and 20s out near Block Island to nearly nothing at points near the finish, making…

The Mixed Offshore Doublehanded European Championship By Barbara “Basia” A. Karpinska Between the pandemic and tough competition for new Olympic sports, we now know that the efforts pioneering Mixed Offshore Doublehanded as a new discipline in Olympic Sailing will need to continue beyond the Games in Paris 2024. Initiated in 2019 in a one-design boat called the L30 (developed by Rodion Luka and designed by Andrej Justin), over the course of the last three years the event…

By David Schwartz The Narragansett Bay Yachting Association held its annual ‘Round The Bay race on Saturday, July 30. NBYA worked with The Nature Conservancy, a global conservation organization dedicated to conserving the lands and waters on which all life depends. Working in this state for fifty years, The Nature Conservancy has helped to conserve 35,000 acres of land in Rhode Island and to protect the quality of the waters we sail in. The seventeen boats racing…

In the spring of 2021, we embarked on a four-episode podcast tracing the development of the International Six Metre Class. The hubs of that furious design and competitive scene were Seawanhaka Corinthian and Larchmont Yacht Clubs in New York. The sailing characters included Briggs Cunningham, Herman Whiton, and many future 12 Metre skippers. We still get podcast listener comments today on those episodes; Sixes stories abound. The drama of the competition played out between designers young and…

By Nick Bowen   The Twenty Hundred Club had their third race of the season on Saturday, July 23. This was also their first of two destination races. The “Cuttyhunk Race” starts just south of Rose Island near the “G3” buoy, takes the sailors about four nautical miles south to buoy “R2” at Brenton Reef. This mark is about two nm south of Castle Hill where the boats turn east for a 19.5 nm run across Rhode…

By Sarah Wilme Last September, I along with the core of Team Bitter End was lining up for the Stamford Vineyard Race aboard two separate boats. For most of my teammates, this was their first offshore race. The experience ignited something in each of us, and nine months later we were hurtling towards Bermuda in the Gibbs Hill Lighthouse Division as one of the youngest teams in the history of the Newport Bermuda Race onboard Oakcliff’s Farr…

By Buttons Padin Vying for the title of ILCA Atlantic Coast Champion, 153 sailors descended on Larchmont Yacht Club in Larchmont, NY July 9 & 10. Competitors came from up and down the Atlantic with many from Long Island Sound clubs, as well as major contingents from Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, and St. Petersburg, FL, Charleston, SC, Annapolis, MD, and more…including Bermudian and European entries. The host club, one of the first to adopt this single-hander in the…

Thirty-two sailors from across North America and the Caribbean, representing ten states and territories and three Canadian provinces, participated in the 20th Anniversary C. Thomas Clagett, Jr. Memorial Clinic and Regatta, hosted by Sail Newport in Newport, RI June 21 – 26. Founded in 2003, the organization recently rebranded as Clagett Sailing honors the memory of Tom Clagett (1916-2001), a U.S. Navy World War II veteran who learned to sail on Chesapeake Bay. As a youngster he suffered temporary…