Midwinters East

We had an epic Midwinters East regatta in Pensacola! Congratulations to Paul & Marie Abdullah and Karl Felger for coming back to take the win! This makes 5 MWE in a row for Team Abdullah. Conditions were pretty epic and challenging, ranging from light to stronger with chop. Looking at the results you can see it was tough to be consistent – everyone in the top 5 has at least one double digit finish. https://www.regattanetwork.com/event/30570#_newsroom+results Thanks to Suzie Domagala and the awesome Pensacola Yacht Club team for bending over backwards to make this a successful event. They accommodated us in every way, and even surprised us with hors d’oeuvres to go along with the keg beer after racing on two days! PYC is a great club and Pensacola Bay is an excellent racing venue. And thanks to PRO Matt Bounds and the RC team, they provided steady wind, square lines, and perfect courses. Matt is our PRO for Nationals in Eugene, it’s good to have him helping us with our regattas. Also thanks to Ken and Lisa Wright who coordinated the Vakaros effort and ran race sense during the regatta. There’s more to that effort than I thought, between getting rental compasses distributed, making sure all the devices were calibrated and registered properly, and then getting the rentals back after the regatta. But it was well worth it – we got 8 races off in 3 days of racing (no racing on Sunday due to threat of storms) with no general recalls. On the days that we had three races (Friday and Saturday) we started at 1100 and were done by 2:30, give or take a little. Here’s a summary from Lisa: Racesense was consistently finding more OCS boats than we could identify. What was phenomenal, was how fast everyone cleared and got back on the course! On the worst start, we visually identified 4 boats, but 12 boats were OCS on Racesense. Two more races had 10 boats OCS, about half were identified. Out of 8 races, only 2 had all clear. We would have had a lot more general recalls had we not had Racesense! As one of those who was OCS twice, I appreciated the chance to get clear quickly and get back in the race.