Light day!
Tag Archives: PRSA Fall Series
Breezy Fun at 2016 PRSA Fall Series #5
We had a great day for racing this past Sunday! Six Lightnings, two Bucs, two Albacores, and an I-20 came out to play on a sunny day that featured some great, albeit shifty, breeze. PRO Farley Will and his crew did a great job managing a “wacky west wind” in setting a course that gave us a mix of O2, T2, T3, and O3 courses. The wind reports from National Airport show a breeze of 12-15 throughout the afternoon with the occasional gust in the 20s.
On board Beedobeat I was shorthanded, sailing with Piercarlo but no third. Given some of the tight reach angles (and a short-ish downwind leg due to the wind direction) we didn’t fly the spinnaker at all, but we were still right in the mix with the rest of the Lightnings, winning a few races and enjoying some great planing rides on the reach legs under jib and main alone (though we did have to work our butts off to keep the boat flat going upwind in some of te puffs!). Some of the Lightnings and Bucs did get their spins up, which mattered more on the Olympic courses with true downwind legs, I think. It wasn’t a guarantee, though, as I saw some boats struggle with controlling spinnakers in the puffs and shifts. The wind was not that crazy, though, and after 5 great races we headed back to shore for a BBQ under a wonderfully sunny (and warm!) fall sky.
Scores will be posted soon, and I think we will also have some great photos taken from the RC boats to post as well. Stay tuned!
Summer Update from the Commodore
Greetings PRSA Sailors! As we head towards the fall sailing season I wanted to take a moment to share the latest news from PRSA and update you on our fall plans.
- Membership: with 114 members this year we are at our highest membership level since 2005! This is great news, and we are only partway through the year. On top of this, we’ve added a number of new boat owners in the Buccaneer, Laser, and Lighting classes.
- Upcoming Racing:
- Back by popular demand we plan to hold another PRSA Distance Race on the river on Sunday, August 21 if there is sufficient interest (we need at least 5 boats). Please let Aaron know if you’d be interested in sailing in this event. We will use the same NOR, SIs and Course Diagrams that were used on June 12.
- The PRSA President’s Cup will be held on September 17-18. The NOR has been posted. Register now to receive the early registration discount and make sure to invite your friends from other clubs! We will once again have the American Spirit as a spectator boat on Saturday as well. Finally, check out this great piece of PRSA history: the regatta booklet from the 1955 President’s Cup Regatta (thanks to Bobby Astrove for digging this up for us!).
- The PRSA Fall Series kicks off on September 11. Your PRSA Executive Committee will be providing food and beverages for after the racing, so come ready to race and then bring your appetites to the post-race BBQ!
- Regatta News: PRSA sailors have had a lot of success at regattas near and far this summer. Congratulations all around!
- Barney Harris and Mike Chaballa took 1st place at the Albacore Nationals and PRSA Sailors took places 1-4 in the regatta.
- Kyra Tallon and Will Phillippe took 1st in the Buccaneer class at the VA Governor’s Cup.
- Barney Harris and Matthew Rhodes took 1st in the Albacore class at the VA Gov Cup, winning the VA Governor’s Cup (congrats to the Albacores for having the largest fleet at the regatta!)
- Lisa-Marie Lane, Christy Dillard, and Karen Grefe-Jones represented PRSA and Lightning Fleet 50 at the Lightning Women’s North American Championships.
- John Van Voorhis, sailing with his daughter Rachel and Lee Ann Zaretsky, will be representing PRSA and Lightning Fleet 50 at the Lightning North American Championships.
- At the Buccaneer North American Championships Jeff Neurauter and Heather Howard took 3rd place, Kat Martin was the highest placing female skipper, and Connor Burke was the highest finishing youth skipper. Great job!
- Len Gunther took 2nd place at the Deep Creek Laser Regatta.
- PRSA/Lightning Fleet 50 Sailors Aaron Boesenecker, Bob Gotthardt, and Guy Barkwell will be sailing as part of Team USA in the 1st Annual Old Dominion Boat Club International Regatta. They will be competing against teams representing Australia, Canada, Great Britain in S2 7.9s right off the Alexandria waterfront. Come on out and cheer them on!
- Sustainability: if you haven’t already seen our sustainability page, take a look! Thanks to the efforts of Kyra and Laura we have had our major regattas and regatta series certified by the Sailors for the Sea Program as clean regattas. This is good news for the environment and good news for us as PRSA becomes a known name in the sustainability community.
- Media Mentions: perhaps you saw the article on PRSA Sunday Sailing (along with a great photo from our 2016 Rookie Regatta) in the August 2016 edition of SpinSheet? If not, check it out! The September edition of SpinSheet will feature a note on the PRSA President’s Cup Regatta along with photos from Lindsay Bach. In addition, WETA sailor Ben Arthur was featured in the May/June 2016 edition of Sailing World in an article entitled “An Outer Banks Experience (p. 54-58). The article includes a photo of Ben on p. 58!
2015 Fall Series #8
Today was a gorgeous day for the last day of the season. We had a nice southerly ranging from 8-12. The breeze was relatively steady. We were able to get off 4 races each around 40 min log.
2015 Fall Series 8 – Albacores
2015 Fall Series 8 – Buccaneers
2015 Fall Series #7
Sunday was a tough day sailing. The sail out to the course was nice with the exception of the super low tide. Just prior to the first race starting, the wind shut off and gave a drifting race where we sailed the various wind lines that would come through the course. After the first race, we drifted for a bit and it looked like the wind was going to fill in. The wind only held for the first leg of the race. Then it was a battle of finding the micro puffs that could not be seen on the water and fighting the incoming tide. It was probably the most tidal current going up the river I have seen. Thanks to Jeff for managing to get off 2 races.
2015 Fall Series 7 – Albacores
2015 PRSA Fall Series #6
What a fantastic day for some fall sailing! It was a bit blustery when we headed out, but weird westerly that dominated the first race faded and the breeze then settled in for another couple of races in a 8-10 kt southerly. In addition to the usual Lightnings, Buccaneers, and Albacores it was great to see 6 Lasers come out to race as well as 4 I-20 scows! We even had a number of people dressed to celebrate Halloween! Congrats to Will Summers for winning our impromptu costume contest.
PRO Jim Antonivich and his crew did a good job in getting us some nice long races on the south course near the power plant (something new!) and we were back on shore in time to enjoy a nice BBQ after the racing as the sunlight faded. Since I was double-handing with John I didn’t have a ton of time to look around. The first race was a bit funky, with all sorts of shifts and swirls as the W/SW breeze that was there in the morning tried to figure out what it was going to do. The RC sent us on an O3 (!) and we managed to lead two of those three laps, only to be passed by Nabeel on the last full upwind leg. Once we got ourselves sorted out, though, we were able to hold with the rest of the pack, even downwind (John did a great job flying the spinnaker and working us through some perfect jibes as I drove). The 2nd and 3rd races – both O2 courses – saw some ups and downs in pressure but not too many shifts. The line was a bit boat favored in both of those races, and I managed to put us over early in each one of them so we were playing catch up quite a bit. The left (east) side of the course seemed to have more pressure as it was away from the shadow of the Alexandria shoreline, and that generally paid even as the current and tidal outflow became more of a factor later in the day. In the Lightning class Nabeel won two races, Frank won the last one, and on 14592 we were consistently in 2nd all day long. I’d welcome any additional thoughts and observations from other boats!
2015 Fall Series 6 – Albacores
2015 Fall Series #5
Today was an interesting day on the water. The first race was light air out of the west and the breeze ended up doing a 180 in the last bit of the race providing an additional windward rounding for us. After drifting for a bit, the wind finally filled in with 5-10 from the north. We were able to get 2/3 more races off for the classes. These were quite nice. And the wind picked up even more to about 15 on the sail home providing some fun planing conditions!
A brief thought on the sailing today was that the races were about 30 minutes long and in my opinion that makes having a good start worth about 30% of the race (which leads to being able to do what you want on the first upwind leg). The starts today all had a pin favor that I believe proved to provide a good head start in all my races.
Kudos goes out to Frank and his team on RC for getting off races with the tricky conditions at the beginning of the day!
Farley
2015 Fall Series 5 – Albacores
2015 Fall Series 5 – Buccaneers