The Best Sailing Post of the Year

Tillerman asks for nominations for the best sailing post of the year.

My nomination for this honor is this post from Stan Schreyer. I remember sailing against Stan on the Charles River back in college. At the time, Stan was a hotshot dinghy sailor for the BU Sailing Team (known as the BUDS). Stan was easy to spot because he had an unusual green lifejacket. Anyway, following a Tornado Olympic campaign for the Atlanta Games, Stan is now skippering the Tommy Hilfiger Extreme 40 catamaran.

Stan's nominated post is about the Centomiglia Race. The post combines great descriptions of racing action:

We had some equipment problems during this part of the race, as our jib sheet ripped off of the clew board on the sail. We were able to put it in another hole on the clew board, which quickly ripped out. So we lashed it through the remaining 5 holes in the clew board, and hoped that this would spread the load out. Fortunately, our fix held for the rest of the race. But our jib issues did not stop with the clew board. We were also ripping the jib luff out of the foil on the forestay. Only about the bottom 6 inches had gone by the time we noticed, and we were able to punch some holes in the luff of the sail, and sew it to the forestay before it ripped out any further. This was not an easy job though, as it required us to send someone out onto the spinnaker pole, and climb up the forestay bridle to the point where the sewing needed to be done. We were fortunate that we were able to get this fix done without incident. About the time were doing the fix, we were sailing through the bulk of the monohulls in the race, which had started before us that morning. While sewing the job to the forestay, I would catch an occasional glimpse of a monohull on its ear, or struggling with their own breakdowns. The race had gone from boring to out of control in only a few short minutes.

Great photos:

Photo by Roberto Vuilleumier/Slidebox.it.

And even some interesting discussions of wind on lakes to keep Tillerman happy:

We had a light (about 4 knot) southerly as we started the race, which meant we had our spinnakers up as we crossed the starting line. After about 15 minutes, the northerly overpowered the southerly in one of the fastest 180 wind transitions I had ever seen. There was virtually no transition zone between the two breezes, one instant we were in a 4 knot southerly, the next, we were furling our gennekar because we were going upwind in a 4 knot northerly. The 4 knots became 8 knots, which became 12 knots, and in about 8 minutes time we were sailing upwind in an 18 knot Northerly breeze. The breeze continued to build as we sailed up the lake, and it probably topped out over 25 knots sustained (and puffs that were higher) as we sailed through one particularly narrow area on the lake.

Stan doesn't post that often, but his post deserves to be nominated as a top ten post of the year.

From left, Randy Smythe, Jonathon Farrar, Mark van Gelderen, At van Barneveld , Stan Schreyer, and Roberto Benamati.
Photo by Roberto Vuilleumier/Slidebox.it.