If you’re into sailboat racing and fun hospitality, the Bellingham Yacht Club’s (BYC) PITCH Regatta is a great place to be on Labor Day Weekend every year. This year was the golden anniversary of the event, which made it just a little more special—we got a history lesson along with all the fun of “coming for the wind and staying for the party!”
As most great events started, the regatta began as a bar bet amongst friends and rivals at the Bellingham Yacht Club in 1974 and
included all the different classes of “ton” measurement boats. After all, it’s the Pacific International TON Championship. The tonnage of a sailboat is a formula that calculates the length, girth, and sail area to create a sort of displacement number where boats raced level without handicaps. The original One Ton boats were 6 Meter sailboats, and the 1/4 Ton boats were predominantly SanJuan 24s. The 1/2 Ton boats are about 30 feet long and favored the San Juan 30, and the 3/4 Ton boats were generally about 34 feet. That is the Ton boat that really took off in Bellingham.
In the fall of 1977, eight of the most keen racers and PITCH regatta founders at BYC went in on a group order of eight brand new C&C 34s. They were delivered one per week and the sailors worked together to commission the boats for racing. At one point there were over 30 of them in the Pacific Northwest and many came to the regatta each year. As time went by, the new Ton class boats were adapted to the IOR rule and the boats were not able to race level. Many one design fleets joined in for class racing, and by 1990 PHRF fleets were included.
That’s around the time that I joined the fun that is PITCH. As a student at Western Washington University, it took place when we all arrived back in Bellingham for school and PITCH was huge! I remember 80 or more boats in the regatta and the house was rocking on Saturday night. Etchells was the fleet to be in, with boats from all around the region and many fun Canadians participating every year, but there was plenty of great racing in the PHRF fleets as well.
Fast forward to 2024. One design is still alive and well at PITCH with the J/70 fleet drawing in 11 boats for a weekend clinic and competitive racing, along with three divisions of PHRF racing. On Friday afternoon before the regatta, the J/70s had a tune-up practice and visiting boats rolled into the guest moorage in front of the clubhouse to receive champagne and gift bags. The barbecue was going and the tunes were playing, and on my Santa Cruz 27 Wild Rumpus the battle flags were flying!
The wind forecast for Saturday was decent pressure, but not from the usual direction. The breeze looked a bit light when we arrived at the boat in the morning, and it was a longer than usual motor to the race course to the far southwest end of Bellingham Bay to catch the best pressure of the forecasted westerly. PRO Charley Rathkopf and his enthusiastic crew of race committee volunteers worked hard to get off three races in conditions where it was occasionally at the top end of the big headsail with 10 knots or more, and then progressively lighter as you sailed to the bottom end of the course, where you were sometimes barely making way. There were some big holes to try and stay out of, and they moved around.
I can’t definitively say that there was a favored side of the course that you could count on, which is actually a good change from the prevailing wind direction of the bay in where you almost always go left upwind no matter what. We almost finished a fourth race and were getting pretty close to the last leeward mark when Charley wisely decided that it was no longer a fair contest of skills and sent us in for another night of parties, this time with tamales and dancing!
Sunday looked REALLY light in the morning, and the forecast was not calling for a lot of anything. Maybe a lot of foggy brains after a night of dancing. We all left the dock on time in the morning, and spent a couple hours drifting around watching the J/70s doing practice starts. Stereos played and there were intermittent shenanigans, but mostly we sort of wondered when Charley was going to call it, but then a support boat got on the radio and reported 10 knots of breeze back in the same southwest corner of the bay. Off we went!
In a quick turn around and mark set, the race committee got off two solid races. The first race again had more wind at the top mark, this time around 6 knots max. The leeward mark was in that same ugly light spot as the day before. Charley wisely shortened the first race at our second upwind mark so that we could get in a second race.
Race two was slightly lighter breeze, but definitely raceable. Again, you were searching for all the intel you could get from the other fleets to avoid the holes on the course. By the end of race two it was getting light, and we were approaching the regatta time limit. In our hearts we were really dreading a dice roll going into the last race of the regatta. Charley called it, but not until after the first PHRF fleet had already started. Whew!
Back to the yacht club for raffles and awards we went. Thank you Bellingham Yacht Club for a wonderful weekend. The love in their hearts was absolutely obvious! So many smiles and kind words and helpful people, they absolutely make you feel like family at BYC. Until next year, thank you to all who made it great once again.
Congratulations go out to Dave Steffen and crew on Vitesse for the win in PHRF 1, Boris Luchterhand and crew on Riff in the J/70 fleet, our crew on Wild Rumpus in PHRF 2, and the dynamic duo of Gabe Hill and Chad Saxton and crew of Juan Solo in PHRF 3. This year BYC won back the Kelly O’Neill Memorial team trophy, congratulations! Overall results can be found at byc.org.
