Ah, spring in the Pacific Northwest. Birds are singing, trees are budding, and the pollen is, well, everywhere. On top of that, the boat racing calendar is as busy as ever. The pillar of the springtime buoy racing season in the Seattle area is Corinthian Yacht Club of Seattle’s Puget Sound Spring Regatta (PSSR).
This year‘s event combined the large and small boat weekends into a single fun-fest with two courses—the South Course with RS Aeros and the North Course with J/80s, J/105s, and two ORC fleets.
The vernal excitement was palpable with the weekend presenting the season’s warmest and sunniest weather to date. Unfortunately, the wind didn’t quite match the enthusiasm on Saturday. The Aeros managed to get a race scored, but the North Course boats saw just one sequence started and then pretty quickly abandoned.
Luckily, Sunday made up for the prior day’s windlessness. Rod Hearne was captaining the J/105 Jaded and declared Sunday, “One of the best days of racing I’ve had in a while! 12-18 knots all day, it was warm, the seas weren’t too bad, and the current was semi-predictable if not always favorable.”
Continuing with their fleet momentum, the J/105s represented the biggest fleet on either course, 14 boats, as they ramp up for this fall’s North American Championship. The racing in the 105 fleet was punctuated by a couple of collisions. Though he was glad to have avoided those moments, Hearne was reassuring, “Collisions are always a bummer, but our fleet has been and continues to be remarkably collegial with one another.” Outside of those incidents, the races were fast and fun. The conditions allowed for some notable differentials in boat speed throughout each fleet, especially upwind. Hearne observed that starts are always important, but they weren’t as impactful at PSSR as they sometimes are; and props to the committee for lines square enough as to limit advantage on one end or another. He said, “There were a couple of times I thought we had the best start, but got rolled or didn’t stay in front upwind.” The boat atop the leaderboard among the J/105s was a familiar one, Moose Unknown won the weekend; but the surprise was Counterpoint, a new boat to the fleet who landed on the second step of the podium. Hearne says, “She’s fast.”
In ORC-B’s varied fleet of fast boats in the 30-40 foot range, the awesome Cascadia Sailing Team who are preparing for the inaugural International Women’s Championship sailed to an impressive class win aboard their IC37 training boat, Westerly. The podium was rounded out by Farr 30 Nefarious and J/111 Lodos. Frequent 48° North race reporter, Stephanie Campbell was sailing on Lodos and said, “The Saturday sunshine gave us lots of opportunity to tune our rig just right. And Sunday was as perfect as you could ever hope for. We had a mix of Canadians and regulars on board, which made for extra fun on Lodos, chasing after the Cascadia Team on Westerly. It was hard to go to work on Monday!”
Since, as Hearne said of the racing outcomes, “It was fundamentally about boat speed,” those who were in good form at PSSR showed it. A bit unusual for our competitive fleets full of talented sailors, all the class winners had at least a three-point margin at the end of the weekend. Of course, thanks to the limited number of races and larger fleets, it was all still to play for in the last race of the day. In the end, those class wins went to Dan Falk in the RS Aero, TP52 Smoke in ORC-A, and J/80 Airtime, to go along with the aforementioned Moose Unknown and Cascadia Team.
Sunday of this year’s PSSR will live in racers’ memory like a skier thinks back on an epic powder day. It just doesn’t get better. Spring sailing in the PNW—when it’s good, it’s so, so good!
Full results at www.cycseattle.org
Feature Photo by Katie Biely.
