Racing

By Christopher Cole, S/V Ticker Editor’s note: A popular part of Mudnite Madness is the Mudnite Photo Contest, and we’ve selected a few entries taken during Mudnite Madness 2021 to illustrate this report. The Mystic River Mudhead Sailing Association Race Committee always enjoins its competitors, “Go fast, pass boats, tell stories!” Having done the first two during this epic overnight race, I began a brief account of it – which grew ever less brief as I wrote…

  The concept of racing doublehanded got a serious boost last year. This was driven, apart from “distancing” restrictions, by the proposal to include a doublehanded co-ed offshore class in the Olympics. Well, like many of the highly caffeinated drinks one might imbibe during the O’dark-thirty watch, this boost went up and came down pretty quickly, surrendering the field of DH racing back to the folks who have been doing it, in some cases, for years. Competitors…

Doublehanded Sailors Ken Read/Suzy Leech Win Coveted Venona Trophy   Sailing doublehanded on the Jeanneau Sunfast 3300 Alchemist, Rhode Islanders Ken Read (Portsmouth) and Suzy Leech (Jamestown) collected a boatload of trophies for their ‘Round-the-Island (‘RTI) Race performance at the annual Edgartown Race Weekend, hosted by Edgartown Yacht Club in Edgartown, MA on July 22-24. The most impressive piece of silverware – the prestigious Venona Trophy, which dates back to the origins of the race in 1938 – validated…

Photos by Paul Todd/Outside Images The Northeast classic yacht racing season kicked off on a blustery weekend as the New York Yacht Club hosted the Robert H. Tiedemann Classics Regatta out of their Harbour Court clubhouse in Newport, RI on June 26 & 27. Members of the classic yacht community from Maine to New York came together to compete in three races on Narragansett Bay in winds that occasionally gusted close to the regatta’s 25-knot limit.     The…

The Ida Lewis Yacht Club in Newport, RI has teamed with the Narragansett Bay Yachting Association (NBYA) to announce a new trophy for a “Narragansett Bay Middle Distance Champion” in 2021. The trophy, made of pre-preg carbon fiber and gold-plated brass, will be presented to the PHRF skipper/team with the best overall combined performance in the Ida Lewis Distance Race IN BAY race (Saturday, August 21) and NBYA’s Inaugural ‘Round the Bay Regatta (Saturday, July 24). The Ida Lewis Distance…

Photos by Allen Clark/PhotoBoat.com As this issue went to press, the 29th edition of the Storm Trysail Club’s Block Island Race Week presented by Margaritaville (June 21-25) was underway with 158 teams competing in the waters off Block Island, RI.     Looking at the weather forecast for the week, the STC Race Committee chose Monday, June 21 for the Regatta Craft Mixers Round the Island Race. Although heavy fog prevented the ORC, One-Design, and PHRF fleets…

The 5th Annual Storm Trysail Club Ted Hood Regatta (named after famed Marblehead sailor, America’s Cup winner, National Sailing Hall of Fame Inductee, and STC member Ted Hood) is scheduled for August 20 – 23. The event will be hosted by Eastern Yacht Club in Marblehead, MA, in association with The Boston Yacht Club and the Corinthian Yacht Club. While Storm Trysail Club are optimistic, as befitting an organization very much focused on safety, we will also be cautious,…

By Amory Ross, 11th Hour Racing Media Crew Member Editor’s note: Our friends at 11th Hour Racing Team, Rhode Island’s “home team” for the next edition of The Ocean Race, earned the runner-up position in the five-boat IMOCA 60 class at the Inaugural Ocean Race Europe. Led by Skipper Charlie Enright of Bristol, the team won the Genoa Coastal Race on Friday, June 19. Victory in this final contest of the three-week-long, multi-stage Ocean Race Europe saw…

A doublehanded offshore racing newcomer takes on the Fort Lauderdale to Key West Race   By Ken Read Editor’s note: In our June edition, Contributing Editor did an interview with Suzy Leech (windcheckmagazine.com/article/women-on-the-water-suzy-leech/), in which she discussed her doublehanded campaign with Ken Read. In this article, Ken recounts the 2020 Fort Lauderdale to Key West Race in which he and Suzy raced Jeanneau’s new 33-footer. In January 2020, I broke a cardinal rule that I was told…

By Nick Bowen   The Twenty Hundred Club opened their season on Saturday, May 22 with the second annual “Bridge Fiasco” Race on Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. The rules are simple: start the race just south of Prudence Island and sail under each of the three bay bridges in any order: the Newport Bridge, the Jamestown Bridge, and the Mt. Hope bridge. The course is 27.8 nautical miles on the rhumbline. The format of the race is…