Day #0 of North American Championships

It is Sunday afternoon and we are sitting on a screened porch by the water, in a house two doors down from the Lake Norman Yacht club. The wind is gorgeous! About 10 mph steady from the northeast. The women and the juniors’ championships are finished, though I couldn’t tell much from my view. 

Racing for the rest of us starts tomorrow. We are divided into four fleets and will sail, round-robin style, against the other three fleets over the next two days. The top half of the finishers will then be in the Championship Fleet and the other half will be the Challenger Fleet and the finals will begin on Wednesday.

We are all wishing we could bottle some of this lovely air and save it for the coming days because most models predict maybe 6 or 8 tomorrow and then absolutely nothing, with the wind boxing the compass, until Friday. Plus temperatures in the 90s…Yikes! Well, time will tell, of course.

It’s been wet and cool in North Carolina, just like in the Midwest (best line I heard today was from Stuart Cofield of Privateer Yacht Club in Chattanooga , “last summer was so hot and dry fishermen had to check their catch for ticks!”). LYNC has gotten so much rain in the last few days that the usual field where we park is a swamp and they had to reorganize all the parking places so they didn’t tear up their field.

Best part of the regatta so far? The Loch Ness/dragon-style gumball dispenser (in keeping with the theme of the regatta “Loch Norman”). You put a penny in it and turn the contraption and a gumball comes out. Green, blue or yellow and that tells you what measurement you get. Yellow is the biggest pain in the neck; you have to get your boat weighed, among other things.

We have about 70 boats registered, based on my last information and there are several boats representing our district: Frank (who will become President of FSSA at the end of the regatta) and Marianne Gerry, Ryan Malmgren, Bill Vogler, and Ben and myself.