Thank you for supporting Nathan Sih and I on our three-week Club 420 trip out East this summer. We warmed up by competing in the Junior Olympics at Mission Bay Yacht Club, placing third in the 23-boat fleet and just missing qualifying for the US National double-handed Championship, the Bemis.
Immediately after JO’s, we jumped on a red-eye from San Diego to Brant Beach, New Jersey for the C420 US Nationals, followed by the Hyannis Regatta on Cape Cod, and the C420 North Americans in Buzzards Bay.
Nathan and I are a new team and also new to the C420, so we knew we needed a good coach to help get us up to speed with the more seasoned teams as quickly as possible. We were fortunate to join up with the five-boat Peninsula Youth Sailing Foundation, out of the San Francisco area, and to be coached by 470 Olympian Udi Gal. Udi introduced us to many new techniques that had us, at times, going as fast as the top boats.
The biggest challenge for us this trip was learning how to adjust from the 20-boat starting lines we race in at home to the much larger and competitive 80-boat starting lines out east. Everything from starting to tactics is completely different than what we are used to, and provided extraordinary learning opportunities during our three-week East Coast campaign.
We were continually reminded that “You can’t teach experience”, and no 20-boat fleet prepares you for a 173-boat fleet! Coach Udi was former Israeli military… need I say more!? We started our days early, with Udi holding a 40-minute chalktalk. After sailing every day, we’d complete what Udi called his “checklist”– every part on every boat on the team had to be checked off by five sets of eyes. We flipped boats on the land, and examined every pin, every ringding, while methodically re-doing any taping. Udi then conducted his debrief – for two to three hours! Debriefs were like Shakespearean monologues. Udi wasn’t messing around, and addressed us like a drill sergeant. Luckily, I got his humor because I’ve never heard anyone scream so loudly, as he did one day in the boatyard afer racing, when his team wasn’t up to standard. When we first met Udi, we told him we placed third at JO’s and he responded with , “You mean, second loser.” Ha! That was the way Udi expected things; you do them right or not at all. The best or nothing.
We were one of the youngest teams competing, and you just have to learn through experience, before you are ready to progress to the next level. One conversation I had with Udi on the water after a bad race that should have been a good race will stick with me for a while. I was in about fifth and I let a few boats cross me, overstood, and the race went downhill fast. Udi asked me, “Why did you let those boats cross you? Small things like that ruined your race!” I responded, “It would feel mean to not let them cross.” (That was the dumbest thing I have ever said.) At that moment Udi started screaming as loudly as he could about a bunch of different things. Eventually he shouted, “Take my anchor!! That way you can let everybody go by you, because it’s the nice thing to do!” He stood up and handed me his anchor.
It’s worth mentioning that the first day of C420 Nationals it blew upwards of 25 knots and half of the fleet went in. Half of the remaining sailors that actually stayed out were upside down. Nathan and I stayed upright, using the old chicken jibe on the last downwind leg (which Udi almost killed us for doing.)
We wound up 27th out of 146 boats, and hit the road that night after racing, headed for the Hyannis Regatta. We had a couple of days off before the regatta and had the opportunity to train with the Wyanno YC team and visiting Tufts University Coach Kenny Legler. We got to sail downwind from Wyanno to Hyannnis,, about 17 miles, in the ocean in about 22 knots. Only two words, unfortunately, sum up the conditions we sailed in during the regatta: light and shifty. Almost every race we would be top ten or five, then mess up and wind up with about a 16th average. Eventually it was made pretty apparent that boat speed doesn’t matter when you’re just learning to sail in big fleets. Out of 108 boats, Nathan and I finished 32nd. We weren’t very happy about it, but I wasn’t out there to be happy. I was there to learn. I was there to get experience that I hadn’t had before.
We arrived at our final event, C420 North Americans, held in Buzzards Bay. We were hoping to get our best finish at this regatta, with 173 entrants. Nathan and I qualified for Gold in windy conditions, but then basic fundamentals in big boat fleets began to unwind us. Again, you can’t teach experience. For example: we were in third going into a weather mark, just below starboard layline, made the rookie mistake of letting a boat duck us and then tacked… simultaneously with the other boat. Had to spin a 720, and that put us back. With two days of NA’s left, race management cancelled racing because of thunderstorms, so we missed a day of racing. And then Nathan came down too sick to sail, so I picked up a new crew to finish out the last day.
This trip is part of our long-range plan, building for future regattas in the C420 class. We learned a ton, gained the necessary experience to get to the next level, and had a blast on our first trip east, making new friends. Our goal was to place in the top third for all the events, and we are happy to report that we were able to achieve our goal.
US Nationals: 146 boats 27th place ,18th percentile
Hyannis Regatta: 108 boats 32nd place, 30th percentile
North Americans: 173 boats 45th place, 26th percentile
This trip was huge for Nathan and me. We trained hard in preparation and learned more than we could have ever imagined over three weeks of intense training and racing. The support we received from the Foundation gave us the opportunity to learn and grow as a team, and hopefully share the lessons learned with our local sailors back home. Thank you so much for your support!
Morgan Pinckney (and Nathan Sih)