My girlfriend and I took my Corsair Sprint 750 over to the MS coast for the weekend. Had a lovely sail and picnic/beach day out to Ship Island on Saturday (about a 12 mile sail from Gulfport). Nice sail home in the evening with the chute doing about 9-11 knots the whole way.

On Sunday, we participated in the annual Race for the Case from Gulfport YC to Biloxi YC. It’s a 14 mile race with a staggered start based on your PHRF rating. I think there were about 22 boats total (Spin A, Spin B, Non-spin, Centerboard (where they had some Scots, a Sunfish, and an E-Scow racing with converted from Portsmouth PHRF ratings)). We were the only multihull entered so they registered us in Spinnaker A which had four boats (us, a Melges 32, a J-130, and a J-35). The breeze was out of the SE around 12-14 knots so it would be a one tack starboard beat to the Biloxi channel (about 10 miles) followed by a 2 mile broad reach in the channel, and then another 2 mile run up the channel in front of the casinos to the finish. In our class, the J-35 (75 rating) started first followed by us (33), followed by the J-130 (30 rating), and the Melges (15 rating). All the other boats would start 30-60 minutes in front of us. Well shortly before the start, told us they had changed our rating to 0 where we started last (about 3 minutes behind the Melges) and of course we became the last boat to start in the overall fleet. The J-35, J-130, and Melges all had 8-10 sailors on the rail. My girlfriend thought the rating change was “rude”, I thought it was a challenge! We started and passed the Melges in about 12-14 minutes. We then slowly grind through the lee of the J-130 (we were sailing 8.5 – 9.5 knots, I think they were doing 7-8 knots) and we could see the J-35 getting closer and closer (we had given them around a 15 minute head start). About 1 mile from the mark where we turned downwind, we were 100 yards in front of the J-130 and were able to free off a bit and blew right by the J-35. We rounded and set our chute with Elise driving and me trimming. We weren’t sure if we had enough runway to catch the Spinnaker B boats (4 of them about 1/2 mile ahead of us at the turn). We started gaining and then turned back on the wind in the inner channel except now the water was flat (it was real choppy in the sound) and the boat just started ripping at 10-11 knots. We blew by three of the four we had to pass about halfway down this leg and had one more to reel in. The breeze lightened a bit and that last boat made a pretty good effort to pinch us off but with about 20 yards to the finish we squeezed by.


We tied up the boat at BYC and headed in to the club for a beer and the awards. The Melges driver was razing me about our speed but hey, they would have killed us if the wind would have been 5-10 knots. I asked him if he would take a rating hit in that scenario! But the final slap in the face was they took us out of Spinnaker A and gave us an award for top multihull after they registered us in Spin A, guess they could not stand it! It was an awesome sail back that evening to Gulfport with the chute up doing 10-14 knots the whole way. We showed them how fun, easy, and simple these boats are and I guess you can lead the horses to the water but you have to wonder if these guys will ever consider taking a drink!