I recently (and very unexpectedly) competed in this year’s Orange Bowl Regatta at Coral Reef Yacht Club in the C420 class. It was about 1 p.m. on Christmas Eve, while my dad and I were at the grocery store doing some last minute meal shopping for dinner that night, when my mom gave us a call. She asked if I wanted to go to the Orange Bowl Regatta this year. Not really believing her, my response was SURE! Later, we sat down and I asked why am I all the sudden going to a regatta that I haven’t trained for, nor have crew for. She told me the team of Jean Wanlass and Alex Stauffer was prepping for this event when Jean, the skipper, came down with the flu and was not well enough to sail the event.
Orange Bowl Regatta 2017
Less than 13 hours later, I was on a plane on Christmas morning, flying out to Miami. What a Christmas present! I met Alex and her mom in the airport and we drove to the venue for our first day of practice together. Note this was our first time sailing the boat together and would be my C420 regatta, ever…in an 80 boat fleet! The practice was a bit rough. We were uncomfortable in the boat and were not in any sort of grove whatsoever. Later that night, we stayed up talking…getting to know each other’s sailing styles and abilities. This gave us our best chance at doing well in the regatta.
We scored in the low 20’s range out of a 40 boat flight. After 2 days of racing we qualified in the silver fleet, only missing gold by a few points. Although we were discouraged, we kept our chins up and saw this as a new opportunity to gain more valuable time on the water.
So, day three came and we were ready to go! We started the first race with a substantial lead and rounded the weather mark in second by 1/4 of a boat length. By the time we got to the leeward mark, we were in an all out dogfight for first. In the fury of the race, another boat slipped in between us and the first place team. We proceeded to fight hard but, ended up crossing the line in 3rd in that race. But, as we later found out, we must have had too good of a start because we were scored OCS, so we were disqualified from that race. Even though we were DSQ, we took it as a moral win. It showed us that we had the potential, even as a new team, to go and fight with the big dogs.
The second race was a bit more interesting. We started out around mid-fleet and rounded the mark in 11th place. Going downwind we picked off a few boats. As we rounded the leeward mark, Alex got caught by the boom and had a massive blow to her head and went down. She popped right back up and gave me the thumbs up, so we fought on. We passed more boats and finished in 6th place. A great comeback for us but, at a costly price. Alex had suffered a concussion and was feeling a bit sick after the 2nd race, so we were forced to retire from the last race of the day.
The next day she was feeling better, so we went out and raced. We had an okay race, but after the first one, Alex began to feel sick again so, we had to retire and sail in. Unfortunately that was the end of our regatta. We came out feeling quite good about ourselves. We were a last minute team, with no hope of winning due to our lack of experience. We gave it a great run and learned a lot.
We would like to thank the Wanlass family for supporting us even when their daughter was no longer sailing and the BYC Maritime Sciences and Seamanship Foundation for their generous support of our sailing.