2011 East Coast Tour – Sears Cup & US Youth Champs     

by Ryan Davidson

This August, I travelled to Toms River Yacht Club, located on the Toms River in New Jersey, with Gregg Kent and Shane Corwin to compete in the US Triple Handed Jr. Championship for the Sears Cup.  We arrived a day ahead of the regatta to get situated for the big event. We met up with our housing family and went for an evening wakeboard session where we enjoyed a warm 80 degree river and a beautiful sunset; what a great way to start off a trip.

                The first day of the regatta was scheduled for thunderstorms all day. When we arrived, it was cloudy, but hot and humid out. Not knowing anything about the Flying Scot, we had a brief tuning and boat knowledge talk from the boat builder himself. At the end of the talk, the rain started and along came the thunder and lightning. We all huddled inside the yacht club and talked of other regatta stories and met the other teams. The following day was the first day of racing. We were able to figure out the boats quite fast and banged out two bullets to start the regatta off. Unfortunately the other teams then figured out the breeze and boats as well which made the next couple races tougher. After 6 races and a breakdown in our last race, we finished off the day in third place.  The entire 11 boat fleet was only separated by a few points.

                The second day of racing started off very hot and extremely humid, a lot like the previous day. However today we were not blessed with the nice 15-20 knot breeze we had before. Instead we had a much lighter day. We had three races that day which were good enough to keep us in third place. By now first place had a nice gap from second but second through fifth were still only separated by points which left it open to anyone.

                The last day of racing we had no breeze.  Any breeze we had, decided to shift a full 180 degrees within 15 minutes and proceed to glass off again. We were able to get one race off that day which was in poor conditions. We ended up taking 4th place by two points in the regatta. We knew it was not the best we could do but we accepted it and walked away knowing we left it all on the water.

                The day after Sears, my dad and I dropped off Gregg and Shane at the airport and proceeded our way up the coast, through 5 states, to end up in Cohasset, Massachusetts where we picked up Korbin Kirk from Alamitos Bay Yacht Club. Korbin and I would be sailing in the Youth Championship in Newport, Rhode Island the next couple days. We got dropped off at Sail Newport in the rain the next day and got our C420 rigged and ready to sail.

                We stayed with our friends in Newport who own the Oakwood Mansion. That was a trip inside itself.  Korbin and I got lost trying to find breakfast the next day. We arrived at the venue, again in the pouring rain. We rigged up and they sent us out to the race course in Newport Harbor.  On the sail out we were amazed how hard and how much rain there was. It rained so much that I was constantly bailing water out of our boat to keep us from sinking. We had our first race abandoned that day due to lack of breeze. But our next race however built to a nice 15 knots. We ended our one and only race that day not happy with a 23rd.

The next day we were ready for redemption. During our sail out, we noticed how much current there was in the harbor. Neither of us had ever seen so much current. Our only game plan for the day was to go left to get out of the current line. It ended up working and we jumped to first place with a 3, 1, 1, 1. Due to competitors filing for redress for one of our races, one of our firsts ended up getting thrown out. This became a huge controversy as to whether or not the race was “fair” or not to every competitor; only nine boats had finished the race due to breeze and extreme current. 

The second day brought a new breeze direction but the same current. We however could not figure out this breeze direction. Two of our three races that day were some of the most frustrating races we have sailed. At one point the current carried us past the windward mark which caused us to hit the mark as we were ducking it to go back around it the right way. We ended off the day though with a third place. Due to the inconsistency of the fleet, we still managed to keep in third place overall.

The last day, the breeze was the same direction as the day before but we had a nice 12-18 knot velocity to go with it. We were able to figure it out a bit more however it wasn’t enough to keep us in third place. We dropped back to 5th place; 1 point out of 4th and 4 points of 3rd.

We did not walk away from Youths empty-handed however. In the race that we won that ended up getting tossed, we had taken down our kite and luffed before the finish so more boats would up making the time limit of 15 minutes after the first finisher. We had an 8 minute lead before we stopped. Because of our actions to stop and wait to let more people finish, we were awarded the Dave Perry Sportsmanship Trophy for the C420 fleet. We were very happy walking away with that.

Gregg Kent, Shane Corwin, Korbin Kirk, and I would like to thank the Balboa Yacht Club and the BYC Maritime Science and Seamanship Foundation for their generous funding to help us travel to and compete in these national regattas. We would not have been able to do it without your continuous support to Jr. Sailing. THANK YOU!!