A Lake Ontario 300 to remember!

by Guy Perrin on 21 Jul 2010 Most of the fleet is in and the stories have started to flow! Racers are relating their tales of hurricane winds, high seas and resulting damaged sails and equipment. A record number of retirements, over 55 as I write this, most of them associated with the series of line squalls that went through the fleet a few hours after the start on Saturday afternoon. Many yachts got caught with too much sail up as the weather systems came in over their stern at very high speed.

Racing on Nick’s Café, a CS30 from PCYC, we got caught with our spinnaker up when the first storm cell barreled through and totally the yachts behind us. Asuming we had a few minutes to take sails down, we found ourselves dodging hail bullets running on deck when the storm hit; as a results, damage was sustained by the spinnaker and the mainsail. The only sensible option was an unfortunate early retirement.

Others fared much worse, getting knocked over, quite often staying on their side with the spreaders in the water for many minutes. Despite all the sail and equipment damage, the most serious injury was a few broken ribs after being tossed by the mainsheet following a crash gybe. The worst equipment damage was probably sustained on Ckeeky Monkey, Ron White’s trimaran, when they capsized in the vicious storms Saturday afternoon. Everyone is fine and the yacht has already been recovered. Storm Trooper also lost their mast in the same stormy conditions.

Taz, skippered by Dan Havlat, was the first solo racers to come in; Pearl. Brent Hughes’ boat came in a few hours later. The Solo event, under the Great Lakes Singlehanded Society umbrella was a great success this year with 17 entries.

Preliminary results for line honors show Sansei finishing first on the shorter Scotch Bonnet Island Course; Gamera and Gaucho were first to cross the line from the Main Duck Island Course in multihull and Monohull respectively.

Looking forward to many more stories from the competitors!