Ok, I know that with the warm weather we have had over the last couple of days we have all been thinking about spring, and getting our boats wet, but this video of Ice Boating in New Hampshire is totally cool. The sound track is awesome and oh so much better than the version we were subjected to during the Super Bowl halftime this year. Enjoy:

This is some great vintage footage from the 1930’s of E scows and A scows racing. Listen to the commentary. He talks about sailing with Buddy Melges when he was a kid. This is really good stuff.

Heres a cool “Quick Release” knot that you should know:

Wow, these kids really know how to get it done. Check out these optimists in action:

Well it was certainly a better race on Sunday than the first one. BMW/Oracle (AKA Dogzilla) won the start by 24 seconds, but then the two boats split tacks. Allinghi went right and B/O went left. The Swiss guessed right and a huge right shift helped them to an early lead. That lead extended to about 6oo meters, and they held on to that almost all the way to the Windward mark. B/O hung on though, and helped by a late left shift caught up at the port side layline. The two boats crossed at the layline with Allinghi in front by a couple of boat lengths. However they had to overstand the mark a bit, and then had a really slow sloppy tack which let Dogzilla squeak out in front. B/O rounded the mark 28 seconds in front of Allinghi and turned on the afterburners. They took off like a rocket and never looked back. B/O won the race by almost 6 minutes to bring the Auld Cup back to America where it belongs.

One interesting side bar: Prior to the race, Bertarelli (Allinghi’s owner) decided he did not like the conditions and ordered his RC crew to refuse to start the race. At his instruction they “went on strike”. The ISAF PRO was ready for this kind of Shenanigans and pressed one observer and a rent-a-cop into service to help him raise flags and get the race going. The PRO counted down the time manually as the Bertarelli paid RC team looked on. POOR SHOW on the Swiss! Find the full story here:

Scuttlebutt #59 Bennett Rises Above Tiff

Here is a video clip of the winners:

BMW Oracle Racing (BMO) won in two straight races — one on Wednesday, one yesterday (Sunday), in light-to-moderate winds, sailing far ahead of Alinghi in both races.   Race 2 was an equilateral triangle, 13 NM on a side, with marks rounded to starboard. Here is a link to more information, where you can see streaming video replays of the racing.   Race 2 reruns start every three hours today — at 0700; 1000; 1300; 1600; and 1900 ET.  Here is the link for the video feed.  Note the video rerun feeds are somewhat off the above schedule — at 0730 this morning for example we saw the A/P flag come down, which would be about 10 minutes before the start.   You can see BMO achieving 33 kts on the reach leg.  See boats round the gybe mark at 2:15 after the start.

Saturday, 2/13/10, 4:00 PM.

I first want to thank all of the slipholders who came down on Tuesday to clean off their boats. Many stayed to help out a neighbor. Without this effort many more could have gone down on Wednesday.  Related story, with photos, here.

The only boats still down are G-6 and D-2. If you have not cleaned off your boat yet please do so before Monday as we are expecting a few more inches. There are paths to each dock and down each of the docks. The paths down the docks are icy so be careful.

The dry slip area has been partially plowed. All rows except between A and B have a path. The rest will be plowed Sunday or Monday morning. At first glance there appears to be no damage done to the boats.

The parking lot has been plowed and there is plenty of space to park.

Team Allinghi is licking their wounds tonight after getting absolutely thrashed by BMW/Oracle in the first race. I was able to watch today and both boats were incredibly fast – sometimes topping out at over 26 knots of boat speed in just 8 knots of wind! It seemed to me, however, that B/O’s Wing mainsail is a technological game changer like we have not seen since the winged keel of 1983, and the race almost as lopsided as the catamaran vs. the 90′ keelboat Cup races of 1988. The B/O boat has speed and pointing ability to spare. The commentators kept saying that once the boats came around the windward mark and turned down wind that Allinghi would catch up by being able to sail deeper and faster due to its lighter weight, but it sure did not turn out that way. If anything B/O was even faster, leaving Allinghi far astern and beating them by about 2 miles and almost 15 minutes! Allinghi had better find some mojo if they hope to compete with the Americans in the next race. Here is a video short from team Allinghi talking about the days racing. Enjoy:

Photo by Cheryl Taylor

More Photos

Per Joe Warren’s Sunday night report, the marina roads are not plowed and snow has blown into 3′ drifts in places. Many Lightings were covered in heavy, wet snow, putting stress on their covers. Skippers will want to check on their boats this week, but at the moment there is a problem entering the marina — huge piles of snow from the plowing on the GW Parkway are blocking the entrance. Here is Joe’s report:

A word of warning–the entrance to marina off the parkway is closed due to a wall of snow piled up by plows. And, no plowing of the road inside the marina.

Joe Warren

We don’t yet know the impact of “Round 2″ (Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday night), but it did drop another 10 inches of snow and then whirled it around in 20 MPH winds with gusts above 40. The first person to make it to the marina today — please send pictures! Per Brian Pavlik, as of Thursday morning the entrance to the marina is cleared, but there is no place to park. Plowing is scheduled for today (Friday).

We had a great Sunday sailing last week. Near perfect frostbite conditions… Temps were in the 30F’s, sun was shining and the wind was blowing (a little light though…). Fourteen people came out and we had seven races in the cove.

Robert took these videos from the RC boat.