The Southern Sound Series is Puget Sound’s biggest winter racing series, and the hosting club and race course are changing for its last stop in March 2025.

The Southern Sound Series (SSS) will be familiar to most racing sailors in the Pacific Northwest, drawing boats from around the region for the best attended, most competitive, and most fun offseason series in the area. It is comprised of four monthly events, each co-hosted by a home club and the South Sound Sailing Society. The series kicks off with Tacoma Yacht Club’s Winter Vashon Race (this year on December 7), is followed by the Duwamish Head Race hosted by Three Tree Point Yacht Club (January 4, 2025), and then down to Olympia Yacht Club’s Toliva Shoal Race (February 15, 2025). Traditionally, the fourth and final stop has been hosted by Gig Harbor Yacht Club, but this year the hosting duties have been passed to Corinthian Yacht Club of Tacoma for the series’s last installment. 

The final race will keep its name, the Islands Race (taking place March 15, 2025), but it’s a brand new course for 2025, and should be an exciting new adventure even for the longest-tenured SSS racer. According the Sailing Instructions, it will bring sailors from a start/finish area near Brown’s Point, northward to a turning mark north of Blake Island. The instructions indicate that racers must keep several marks to port both going out and returning, which is likely to create some interesting decisions for navigators and tacticians. Even with those course stipulations, the route generally should involve a broader and more diverse sailing area than the previous Islands Race course in Colvos Passage. At the very least, it’s something new to try. The total distance is approximately 32.5 miles.

You can read more at the series website, and be sure to keep up with CYC Tacoma for more information if you’re attending the Islands Race in 2025.

Title photo of the Islands Race by Jan Anderson.