Olympic Classes Regatta- sunny, windy and 'scary'

by Rich Roberts on 23 Mar 2009
Day one of a sailing event for little singlehanded boats this weekend was cold, gray and short on wind.

Day two Sunday was everything Saturday was not: sunny, windy and, as Chris Raab described it, 'Scary.'

It blew so hard---anemometers showed 25 to 27 knots, gusting to 35---that several boats were blown over … off their trailers in the parking lot.

So it was at Alamitos Bay Yacht Club's annual Olympic Crashes---er, Classes Regatta Saturday for Finns, Lasers and Laser Radials, all singlehanded classes for daring people. Two red flags signaling a gale warning flew from the harbor master's headquarters as the boats headed out to the course, and conditions became so rough during the first scheduled race that principal race officer Mark Townsend decided before it was over that there would be no more.

There were no complaints. Observers had lost count of capsizes, most of them Lasers but also some Finns.

Vann Wilson is an ABYC member who prefers sailing his Laser in robust breeze, so he was keen for racing Sunday after finishing 7, 8, 8 and 10 the first day.

But after winning the only Laser race in a runaway he noted, 'You've gotta be careful what you wish for. I think I was 10 knots over my limit.'

Raab, another local, hung onto his first-day lead achieved with a 3-1-2-1 afternoon by finishing fourth despite capsizing four times. But, like the others, each time he muscled his boat upright from the cold water and kept on sailing.

'I haven't flipped four times in the last five years,' he said. 'Every time you flip it takes a lot out of you.'

Actually, he would have won without sailing at all because after five races he was allowed to discard his worst finish, and that was the only one sailed Sunday. Several others considered the conditions and took the bailout. Of the 43 boats entered in three classes, only 21 ventured out into the elements Sunday.

Wise move. Even after Townsend noticed the breeze building from the west and moved the race course inside the breakwater from its previous location in the open ocean off Seal Beach, the competitors found seas building to short series of waves with troughs 10 feet deep.

Another successful heavy weather exception alongside Wilson was veteran Finn sailor Darrell Peck, 44, of Gresham, Ore., to whom wind light or wild didn't seem to matter---or so it appeared. He won four of the five races, including Sunday's.

'It was awesome,' Peck said. 'A lot of fun.'

But he also filled his boat with water by slamming into a wave and described the adrenaline rush of surfing a humble Finn downwind over a course of whitecaps.

'It feels like you're going 200 m.p.h. on a go-kart because you're out of control,' he said. 'I was hollering like a cowboy. I've been coming to this event for a long time, and it's always a lot of fun.'

One of his rivals was Keith Ives, a local veteran of sailing various larger boats, including Bob Lane's Andrews 63 Medicine Man that raced from Los Angeles to Tahiti last summer. Ives was racing a Finn for the first time, and what an introduction it was.

'We never saw 25 knots going to Tahiti,' he said. 'I flipped twice. I was just trying to stay alive today.'