Rick is in Clearwater, Florida covering the Alter Cup (United States Multihull Sailing Championship). He has already posted an initial story (see our welcome page for the lead-in and link to the full story), so keep checking that location for future stories and photos. You will also find links there to the Clearwater Community Sailing Center and the Clearwater Yacht Club, who are jointly hosting the event. There is a photo of a Jav 2 in action at the Yacht Club website.

In addition, Alter Cup Chairman Jamie Diamond is posting updates and results right from the water on the US Sailing Multihull Council website. URL is http://www.ussailing.org/alter

The racing is today, Monday, April 7, through Friday, April 11.

If Rick calls in any exciting news from the water, I will post it in this thread.

Stay tuned.

(Sorry, I have corrected the url for US Sailing site. Well, maybe I will eventually get that url right. YES! Success!)

US Sailing is posting the results real time as well as position information around each mark.

Thanks Jamie

Great fun!

Just thought I'd add a couple thoughts from the beach - the event is going really well again this year. The boats had the typical brand-new boat quirks (slick lines, knots coming untied, getting tape in the right places, etc.), but the beach crew (Tyler Smith, et.al.) gave each boat a short shakedown before the practice races Sunday, and with the conditions we saw Monday, looks like all the bugs have been squashed.

Conditions were pretty sporty Monday - reading other reports didn't quite capture the challenging combination of plenty of wind (mid-teens), 2-3 foot chop, puffs with a great deal of volume in them (except for the last race), and an extremely tight fleet.

Everyone on the beach was pleased with the courses and the wind, though many were suffering from multiple boat bites, sun burn, sore hands and fatigue. With the wind up for every race, it was real work getting these speedy, nimble boats up and down the course.

Today, I'm a bit stiff (did five of six races on Monday), but like everyone else, I'm smiling and ready to get back at it. Had some thunderstorms come through last night and it's a little grey out right now, but the forecast still looks good for the whole rest of the week. Can't beleive I have to do this for four more days!!

Thanks Rick and Mary for the coverage - I'll drop another post if my hands don't swell too much!

Well, our coverage is being cut short because Rick is flying home Wednesday morning -- he has to come back to work. He was very honored that he was asked to go up and do a talk at the welcome dinner for the Alter Cup this past Sunday, and he had planned to be returning home Monday. He stretched it out by a couple days so he could get some pictures for the magazine.

He hasn't been able to call me from the water because he forgot to take his cell phone charger with him. And he says it is kind of hard to know who is who on the water because everybody is sailing a different boat every race, plus different groups of people are sailing every race.

And as he said in his story from yesterday on our welcome page, it is hard to tell who is winning overall because of the different numbers of races teams have sailed.

But since he only has one more day, he said he may call me today from the water because it doesn't matter if he runs his battery down.

When he called me at 10 this morning, the boats were still on the beach with a postponement because of lack of wind, but I heard the horn blow at about 10:10, so apparently they are going on the water now.

For all the best and most frequent updates and instant results, stay tuned to the US Sailing site I gave in my initial post on this thread.

Rick has something posted about the Alter Cup linked from the welcome page.

If you're a weather nerd (go on, admit it!) here is a site to watch the conditions at the Alter Cup.
http://tidesonline.nos.noaa.gov/geographic.html

You have to click on Florida, then Clearwater. Notice the second graph, today's wind. Once it kicked in it was a steady 15 all day (gusts to 22). The water and air are both 75. If you're going to have a championship, the condtions should be perfect! Yo, Clearwater! Yeah!

Cool graphs, eh?

The two links you need to have... regularly updated reports and an interactive webcam on Clw Bch!

http://ussailing.com/alter/alter03/reports.htm (refresh this page every 20mins or so)

http://wtsp.com:8080/skycams/clearwater.aspj (control the cam and select the Sand Key location then pan right and zoom in for the race course)

Ryan R.
N6.0 #397