Sailing / Sailing Races

I found out several months ago that a brother in my ward had bought himself a sailboat. It was a 27 foot McGregor keelboat, that means it is about twice as long as my little dinghy. (By dinghy I simply mean centerboard boat boat as opposed to a decked over keelboat.) It is also much more designed for open water sailing while mine is more for sailing in marinas and bays.

I had been bugging him about when we were going to take it out and finally on Martin Luther King Day he said let's go. I was a bit disappointed with the date as it meant missing out on the family's first trip to the Aquarium, but I've been making a goal of improving on my male friendships (an area of my social life that has been week for decades) and I had been wanting to try his boat out for a while.

The boat needs a lot of work, but seemed to be sea worthy enough. It was fun to ride and both faster and smoother than my boat. Don't get me wrong, I love my boat and am more than willing to take it on adventurous trips, but this was a nice change of pace.

One thing that I thought was really exciting was that we saw a lot of sail boat racing. It did make sailing a bit more difficult as we had to stay out of the way of the racers.

As we headed back in the racers were also heading in. Between talking with them and looking things up on the web I discovered that we had seen the tail end of the 2009 US SAILING ISAF YOUTH WORLD QUALIFIER and U.S. YOUTH MULTIHULL CHAMPIONSHIP REGATTA. The were sailing single person dinghies (laser radials for both boys and girls), two person dinghies (420's with a slightly different version for the boys than for the girls), and open (both boys and girls competing with and against each other) multi-hulls (Hobie 16's). They were all fast agile little boats that were a lot of fun to watch. I never got very much into racing but it sure looked fun.

(Incidentally, my boat is two person dinghy rigged very much like the 420's. My boat is not nearly as high of performance boat.)

So the day was a double treat. Not only did I get to go sailing but I got to see some world class racing too.