It’s Fireweed Regatta time! Here’s a message from Brie Busey, our fearless Racing Vice Commodore:
Ahoy, Wonderful Sailors New and Old!
It’s time for our Ladies’ Fireweed Regatta!
I want to encourage sailors of all experiences to join. The main rule for our ladies’ regatta is that it is women skippers only so anyone can crew. So we can get lots of boats out and can still get everyone on the water.
Our skippers’ meeting (the meeting for everyone to learn about the race rules for the weekend) will be at 2 pm on Saturday, and we are shooting for a 3 to 7 race series this year, weather permitting. And even though we will have a semi-early meeting, plan for the potluck to be a late lunch/early dinner potluck since our best wind is likely to be in the evening. The current forecast is looking like it will be fairly warm but rainy, so cross your fingers that changes this week, but we will be out and having some great races either way! The first race on Sunday will be set for 11:00 am, and no race starts after 3 pm. When you arrive on Saturday, please check in with the Race Administrator to register your boat for the regatta. I have attached the Sailing Instructions, and we can go over any questions at the Skippers’ Meeting for our new racers.
If you need someone to sail with or would like to volunteer for Race Committee, please let me know, and I will get you set up.
And to give our sailors some context regarding why we have a regatta requiring women skippers, here’s a great article from Sailing World:
The article is worth a detailed read, but just to summarize, our sport does a lousy job getting women on the helm. And it doesn’t need to be that way since women can obviously sail as fast and competitively as men. This is slowly starting to change, but not quickly enough. So the Fireweed Ladies race is the ASC’s bid to be part of improving the culture of sailing. And if you haven’t ever skippered a boat in a race before, don’t worry! This is a perfect venue for your first race. It’s a friendly crowd, and we’ll help answer any questions.
And in order to make it easier for folks to find sailing partners, I’ve created a quick Google Sheet to match up interested skippers with available crew. So if you’re planning to crew and are looking for a skipper, add your name and contact number on the “Available Crew” tab. If you’re planning to skipper for the race, add your name to the Skippers tab. And if you need crew, you can pull a name from the crew list and add them to your boat. Here’s the link to the sheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yXR5QQ1nt1P3xdwA1C1pz-Hi2ZYaPqYQPpM6RpYpzzw/edit?usp=sharing
And I’ve started the list by putting my name on the available crew list. Hopefully, somebody will sail with me! 🙂
The featured image on this post is this from this year’s Women’s Intro to Sailing Class. Hopefully, we’ll see all of you out there. And just because of the title of this post, I’m going to leave everybody with a little something from the Beastie Boys. (Sorry … couldn’t help myself!)
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