Great regatta at American Yacht Club this weekend! I can’t do any better then this Viper sailor who wrote:


“Bowchick, John, Sally, KM, Donny, all the RC, waterfront staff at AYC, Heineken - Thank You for a hell of a weekend. Thank you for hosting an "Open" which brings back the essentials of racing fast sailboats. Thank you for high performance camraderie.............and of course a very big thank you to the membership of American Yacht Club for welcoming us to your gorgeous club and turning it for one weekend into a messy, fantastic mecca of high performance small sailing boats.”


PLUS 1

HPDO stands for High Performance Dinghy Open. Cats have the high performance thing down pat and we fudge on the one hull thing.

The A class was joined this year by the New England F18 fleet (they bring their own keg!!!) along with some really cool high tech dinghies. The breeze built from 10 or so leaving the beach to a stiff westerly holding at 18 to 20 or so for most of Saturday…. And then the 4th race got started in the same breeze… but the actual front crossed the sound.…. The RC reported gusts to 28. Ouch! Sunday moderated with breeze in the 10 to 14 range.


Great organization is essential for a first class regatta and it really shows when the wind picks up. The cats shared a circle with the flying Moths and the Portsmouth fleet of boats that did not make enough for a separate start. American stepped up the race organization this year by running two race circles with 4 starts each. American YC went all out. Their signal boat trawler sported a mast with an RC flag that you could spot from across Long Island Sound. In addition to mark boats at the upwind and down wind marks, they provided three safety ribs on each course. Pre Race, they spelled out what they would and would not be able to do for you when you blew up. High speed crosses with moths on foils is a complete mystery… since you have no idea what’s best since these things just seemingly twitch left or right as you close… … As Tracy noted… screw it… I would just keep going and let him figure out what he wanted to do.

Results are found here.
http://www.yachtscoring.com/emenu.cfm?eID=276

Congrats to A catters Jim Godbey, Danny Gortiski, and Tracy Oliver and to F18'ers Mike Easton,Chris Titcomb and Todd Ricardi and their crews.

Next year they are shooting for 100 boats!

Great summmary Mark, awesome regatta with spectacular conditions. I would like to share an example of how welcoming and helpful the support boats were....
In the first race on the first day, we broke our tiller extension and figured we would need to sail in to find a spare after finishing the race. Upon sailing over to notify a chase boat of our intentions, they offered us their extendable boat hook. With the e-tape we carry, we connected the two and sailed around with a 'captain hook' for the rest of the day.
Thanks again to AYC for hosting and inviting the F18 fleet this year.
We did bring our own keg, but didn't flaunt it until the regatta sponsored beer ran out. Figure if we are going to party that hard, we should at least contribute... but not piss of the title sponsor of the event (Heineken) by showing up their beer with our series sponsor (Naragansett Beer).
Great way to finish the local series and we will be back next year... if invited.
Chris
Regatta photos here: HPDO photos from photoboat.com

My shoulder still hurts. It was a ton of fun and good to get back in the swing of cat racing. Blew up a Spinlock and tack block. It made for some tough spinnaker sets.

This is a great regatta report from Viper640
It gives you a flavor for the regatta!

AMAZING two days of racing. The only possible excuse for not being at the HPDO this weekend was kite boarding.

Here is one perspective from one team in one fleet.

We had to sail my Viper from Stamford YC (scene of the Viper NAs three weeks ago) to Rye, getting up at crack of dawn and sailing 10 miles with 15 knots on the nose so we were pretty tired by the time found the start line . All that vanished when the racing started and the breeze kicked up with gusts up to 30 knots. A North Westerly on LIS gave us that rare combination of relatively flat water and big breeze so all the Vipes sheeted hard, hiked hard and drove for shifts. We’d arrive at the windward marks with barely 3 boat lengths between the top 5 boats and then turn the corner for whooping sleigh rides downwind. The breeze built all day until the last race was solid mid twenties with some good size gusts coming down the course. Dave Nickerson from Stonington, Lee Shuckerow from Detroit and my team(the Mambo Kings) were really on their game on Saturday. Jonathan Nye from Greenwich was always dangerous upwind. Charles Goodrich with Kay Van V on tactics were on our heels sailing bullet proof 3rds and 4ths. The finishes were scary close but Lee and the boys from Doyle/Boston pulled off slightly better mark roundings and caught the edge of one or two winding shifts a fraction better than the rest of us, so after 4 races they were the winners for the day, often by less than a boat length. We were in second. Dave/Moise in third and Charles/Kay in 4th.

There was a fair amount of carnage around the race course. The 5-0-5s had some broken rigs . They play the game hard and fast. Even Ben Hall broke something on his A Cat. I guess looking on the bright side Ben can gets his stuff fixed and these kind of days are good for business. When we called for a damage report In the Viper fleet we had one dislocated shoulder on their way to hospital from Thin Ice. On Mambo Kings we had pulled out the retrieval patches on the chute (which severely affects takedowns). Sadly there was a large hole in the side of El Toro (Charles/Kay) from a high speed collision at the start of Race 4. Fortunately the Viper fleet pulls together in a crisis and we had another hull down to AYC by 7 am on Sunday. The crews pulled the rig of El Toro and put it on El Toro II and everyone was back on the water for day 2.

Sunday was forecast to be lighter, but it was never below 12 knots and again gradually built all day. Sunday was Stu Hebb/Ched Proctor’s day on Thin Ice. With Charlie Proctor as their replacement third they came out thirsting for revenge for their ignominious opening day and they delivered with aggressive tactics. The overall battle plan was the same for all of us. There was plenty of power all around the race course but with big shifty gusts. You had to be inside the wind ups on the gusts, and they could be as much as 40 degree wind ups. We would get close to Stu and Ched but they would stick a cover on us that was harder to shake off than crap on a blanket. Five races, we finished right next to Stu in all five but they got us in 4 out of 5. El Toro II got a well earned bullet and we got one bullet. The other three races went to Stu and Ched.

We were beaten fair and square by Lee on the first day and thrashed pretty good by Stu on the second day but we finished every race in the top 3 and that was enough to give us the regatta.

The coolest thing about the HPDO is the high performance sailing camaraderie at this regatta. If you have never been to the HPDO, you have to visualize this beautifully manicured yacht club on a stunning point of land overlooking LIS with a Manhattan skyline, except it is totally overrun by this crazy event. There are hulls everywhere. A cats and F18s on the lawns, 5-05s, Fds, K6s, Vipers, 14s, moths and those wacky intl canoes filling every conceivable piece of the property (and it’s a large property)…..and spinnakers drying , and people in wetsuits and harnesses and everyone carrying free beer, ogling at each others boats and helping fix boats and talking tuning. Its hard to describe how they got this so right. I guess you just have to bring your boat.

So many people make this happen but we have to say something about John Wyles from the 5-0-5 class. he has built this event from a good idea and 20+ boats to a high performance mecca with a 100 boats participating. It has a totally different and cool atmosphere from any other event on the circuit and in the process it has turned one of the Long Island Sound’s most prominent yacht clubs into a dinghy racing club. John showed up from Tanzania with his 5-0-5 several years ago when his wife got posted to NYC. This is his last year as co-host because John and Sally are retiring and will live in Ireland. He has left a legacy with this regatta that Bowgirl and many others will build on. Of course he will be back. He has too many friends here and I think AYC plans on saving him a dry sailing spot for many years to come.

Vipers will be back next year!