Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Sailing Photo of the Day - Schell 2006

Tillerman found some photos of the Schell Trophy regatta, held October 28-29th at my alma mater. Some of my best memories from my college years involve sailing on the Chuck. I once windsurfed in the remains of a hurricane on the river, I have fallen into it while shoveling snow off the dock to go sailing, and I have won regattas there. Even so, a Tech dinghy planing with a storm sail is not something you see everyday.


In the words of MIT Sailing Master's Franny Charles: "This event will be remembered for a lifetime by all who saw it."

2 comments:

EdShift said...

Hi.
Great blog.
I sail a 420 which, being a laser sailor and having crapped all over the 420 fleet in anything under force 4, you will appreciate takes a pretty high wind to be competitive on PY handicap. Here in Dundee, Scotland I'm doing a winter series and today the race was cancelled due to "High Winds".

This drives me nuts.

It was probably only a force 5 tops.
The race commitee had a good sailor by the name of Peter Hay who is a really good Nationally competitive fireball sailor go out to see whether it was too much or not.

He was out planing madly with his kite up and capsized once in about an hour.

Upon coming ashore the race was cancelled.

I talked to him afterwards and he said it wasn't too bad.

The problem I think is that there is a fleet of Kestrel 2000s in the club that is being developed in the club side to be a full dinghy class racing fleet.

They are hugely over-powered and don't do well in high winds.

The consequence of which seems to be that unless the kestrels can hack it there will be no racing.

Up against that if you're sailing a 420 it's impossible to compete over a whole series.

IMHO if people want to choose an overpowered boat that's great in low-average winds then in the interest of fairplay there still have to be races in the high winds as well.

In low winds the 420 is seriously underpowered but my crew and I go out in 32mph+ winds and have a ball.
Break nothing, maybe capsize once but since when is that a problem.

Someone explained that a club sanctioned race where someone hurts themselves makes the club liable.
Thats' just wrong.
It comes down to the decision of the helm as to whether he feels capable in a given set of conditions.

If the kestrels want to go out and get blown over so be it. Otherwise they should stay onshore and take "did not compete" points for that race in the series.

Ed.

Anonymous said...

It would appear that we have something in common...your wife Anne, is the little sister of my sister's best friend, Kathy. You probably met my sister, Debbi, at your wedding. Small world, isn't it. I only found this out because Anne left me a message on my blog and your father's blog. :D