Star District Championship

The longest day of the year, Father’s Day, and a win at the Star District Championship. That was June 21 for me. Now I am driving up Highway 5 to San Francisco with my son Danny.

Last Thursday, Danny, Allie and I departed San Francisco onboard the TP 52 Flash (formerly Atalanti) and raced to Catalina Island off Long Beach. It was a windy first 20 hours running under fractional gennaker down the California coast. With the wind peaking at 30 knots and boatspeed in excess of 26 knots, it was 20 hours to Point Conception which is 260 nautical miles from SF. Apart from going fast in the pitch black dark, we had more excitement than we needed with the rudder tried to slip out of the top bearing. The rudder dropped down about 3 of the 3.5 inches that it is captive in the bearing. Had the rudder slipped completely out, I don’t think the boat would have been afloat for long. We managed to get it back up to its proper location, and go on to push the boat as normal. We learned a lot about the boat on the trip down and have a fairly long worklist for this week. The Trans-Pac starts in two weeks on July 5th for us on Flash.

So after finishing at Catalina at midnight Saturday morning (all day Friday doing the 100 miles from Conception to Catalina), we motored to Long Beach where we got into a hotel room at 0430. Up at 0830 and down to Newport Beach for the first 4 races of the Star District Championship. Luckily my crew Austin Sperry got there on Friday and rigged the boat so it was an “arrive and go” for me. Yesterday, the wind was light and it was raining. The Catalina Eddy was in effect and the conditions were squirely. Today, (after an awesome night’s sleep!) we woke up to bright So Cal sunshine and a nice westerly wind. We had three nice races where Austin and I managed to cross the finish line first in each. This gave us the win over Eric Doyle in the second, and Eric Lucidius and Mike Marzahl in third.

So there has been a lot of life taking place in the past four days with not a lot of sleep. That’s ok because you can sleep later.