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Report courtesy Cal 20 Fleet 5
Saturday started off with a fast first race and Sorcerer's Apprentice taking the start and lengthened their lead at each leg. Poco Loco sailed incredibly fast downwind and took second. The second race start gave the folks on race committee duty an entirely too close view of Cal 20s battling at the start. Brew Ha Ha, despite her recent addition to the "Collision at Sea" plaque at the bar, escaped any of the commotion and held off Sorcerer's Apprentice to win. Wynn Hammer from Santa Monica Windjammers YC sailed Seascape very well for third. The third race was almost a replay of the first with Sorcerer's Apprentice and Poco Loco first and second, while California YC's Bill Pistey, in Poquito, was close behind. Saturday night Cal 20 Fleet Social Chairman Dyan Beven organized a great feast for all participants and friends. "Burn your own Rib-eye steaks" headlined a great menu that surely increased every boat's weight by several pounds the next morning. Way to go, Dyan!
Sunday morning found an invigorated Brian swimming laps around his boat to burn off nervous energy. Actually he was diving, in vain, for his lost gudgeon that had mysteriously come off during the night. Brian and Kurt were able to procure another gudeon and quickly make the required fixes and were ready to defend their lead. Apparently, the high stakes of winning the Bud Gardiner Bowl creates as much intrigue as any America's Cup race. But not as much wind. Zero to one knot winds necessitated the use of the auxiliary engines to get down the channel. Any spectators on shore seeing a parade of sailboats being paddled furiously out to sea, must have been thinking "I think I'll get a powerboat instead". Naturally, after floating around in dead air, the wind started blasting one minute before the start, making the short course a virtual sprint. Poquito was in perfect alignment and the wind shifted so they sailed the lay line to the mark without tacking, and easily led Brew Ha Ha and Sorcerer's Apprentice to the finish. The last race could have been a victory cruise for Sorcerer's Apprentice, but Brian and Kurt, still mad from their early morning swim, punished the fleet with an awful beating. Dyan and Jim finally found the groove, and sailed Surf City into second place ahead of Poquito. After cleaning up the boats, the fleet retired to the bar and trophies were awarded for the winners, but pizza and beer made for a nice consolation prize for everybody else. Second place was your fearless Fleet Captain on Brew Ha Ha, just edging ahead of Poquito by the slightest of margins. It must have been that extra bit of speed I got from my new gudgeon! (JUST KIDDING, Kurt!) Congratulations again to Brian and Kurt! Thanks to all the participants, and volunteers. Next year's Bud Bowl will be even greater! For information on North Cal 20 sails, contact Chris Snow, our Cal 20 expert. To order your Cal 20 sails online, click here.
Report by Chris Snow Arriving in the parking lot Friday morning for the qualifying series I saw a number of Cal 20s that looked brand new. Since I knew that the last Cal 20 rolled off the production line sometime in the late 60’s it was obvious that a lot of effort and care has gone into getting some of these original fiberglass boats into top form. Mark’s was not one of these boats. However proving the you can’t judge a book by it’s cover I looked closely at his “Bandini Mountain” and what she gave up in looks above the waterline she made up for below the waterline. The bottom of the boat was perfectly fair and smooth. All the controls were simply rigged and functioned well. The first day was qualifying and since Marks wife could not sail with us and also since Mark had won the Championship the year before we used it as practice. For me sailing the boat is a real lesson in patience. Yes the boat is slow and unresponsive but they are all the same and reward attention to detail. I quickly learned that tacking too much is slow. Thinking ahead is rewarded and being able to hold a lane is critical. It’s really a thinking person’s boat. We made it through qualifying just fine and finished second to Chuck Clay who was firing on all cylinders. Saturday the actual regatta started and we started off with a 4th. A keeper to be sure and we were pleased. The next race, in a slightly building breeze Mark got us a killer start and we led wire to wire for a win. Our confidence level soared! The third race of the day and now the Alamitos seabreeeze is kicking in. We were feeling pretty good but got a pretty mediocre start and found ourselves in a line up of 5-6 boat coming in on the starboard tack layline and in bad air. For a second or two there was enough room to tack and take another hitch out to the right. Perhaps because we were feeling so confident we stuck it out and slowly slipped below the layline. We foolishly tried to tack (now we were inside the two boatlength circle) and promptly fouled the first starboard tack boat. After clearing the offset mark and doing a 720 we found ourselves second from last. Our good regatta was going up in smoke. We kept our cool and proceeded down the run catching a couple of boats. Upwind we maintained our position and on the final run to the finish we went for clear air only and managed to pass a bunch more boats to finish 13th. Since there was not throw out we were a little down. We came back charging the next race and managed a 6th but felt like our speed was not the best it could be. Going in to Day 2 we were tied for second with Walter Johnson and Mark Gaudio and two points out of first. It was a whole new regatta. Mark and I were both worried about our upwind speed and both felt like the boat was “bound up” a bit. We tried sailing with less, almost no backstay and with the sails twisted open some more. This seemed to give the boat more forward speed with no loss in height. Mark would work up in the flat spots and because the leeches of the sails were more open he could put the bow down a little in the bumpy spots and keep the boat moving. Mark came out on fire in the starting department and we had really good speed. We won the first two races on Sunday and the regatta turned our way. Chuck, had a tough first race and Mark Gaudio finished a few boat behind us in each race giving us a decent cushion going in the last race. We had a OK start and concentrated on holding our position with clear lanes on the first beat. With good speed we ground back to finish fourth in the last race and won the regatta by a nice margin on 22 points. The kicker came at the trophy ceremony where Mark and Jennifer won the trophy they had been avoiding ever since they got into the Cal 20 about ten years ago. The “Hank” award is given by longtime class stalwart Hank Schofield for the worst looking boat in the fleet. At the end of the ceremony Mark proudly accepted the trophy as well as the class Championship to cap off a great weekend! He actually was talking about getting the deck painted as we were pulling the boat out on Sunday! We used the standard North Cal 20 sail which are the AP Main and MW-1 Jib. For more information on North Cal 20 sails and how to set up and tune your boat please contact Chris Snow at North Sails One Design. Click here to see more photos and complete results.
Article by Chris Snow Every year in Mid February the Southern California Yachting Association hosts what is billed as the biggest one design regatta in North America, the SCYA Midwinters. Held this year on February 14-15 virtually every SCYA member yacht club from Arizona to Santa Barbara hosts an event. From juniors to model boat racers everyone gets into the act. It is truly a festival of sailing! This year sailors using North One Design sails took home plenty of Midwinter trophies. Notable achievements:
The fact that North Sails have performed so well over such a wide variety of boats and fleets makes it clear that North is the true leader in sail design and construction. Whether it is starting from scratch with class like the Martin 242 or developing a long time design like our Soling sails. North is always pushing forward to make our sails faster and easier to use for our clients.
Article by Kerry Poe Well, I will have to say that I was quite flattered when I was asked to write something for the North One Design web site about how I prepared to finish second at the Class Championships. I thought that the saying was “you only remember the names of the winners and never who finished 2nd”. So here is my chance to go down in the written history of Cal News! I have to warn you that this article might be better known as “How not to prepare for a championship”. I am new to the Cal fleet here in Portland. I have been racing a Santana 20 the last couple of years, but it was getting difficult for me to race in my five boat fleet while I watched 18 Cals battling it out on the course. So I convinced my friend Ray McCormick, who just sold his Melges 24, that he needed to step up to a real boat and we should buy a Cal 20. Ray thought that some slow, tactical and cheap sailing sounded good also. At the end of the sailing season last year we purchased the ugliest boat we could find from Michael George and gave it the appropriate name “Cal Pie”. I hope I am not offending anybody with my comments about the Cal. I do truly believe that some of the beauty of the Cal is how inexpensive it is and tactical of a boat it can be. The first problem with trying to prepare for the Championship here in Portland is that we all use spinnakers on the river, otherwise we all would be flushed out the mouth of the Columbia as we try to fly our small jibs against the current. We were going to practice with our whisker pole, but we turned it into a noodle when we tried to use it as a spinnaker pole one windy night. So we saved the whisker pole practice until the elimination series in Vancouver. After all, we figured how hard can it be to fly a jib downwind when we are use to a much larger spinnaker. Well, we figured wrong. It is much easier jibing a 6’ pole compared to the 8’ pole through the fore triangle. One week before the regatta we pulled our boat out of the river, scraped and sanded the black slimy growth off of the bottom of Cal Pie. We did not put any bottom paint on Cal Pie since we figured that all of the fast California boats would have nice glossy bottoms. We noticed that our torpedo was not very fair neither was the keel flange. Our desire to avoid hard labor brought us to a discussion of the theory of how a dimpled golf ball will fly farther than a smooth golf ball, but decided that this was probably not the time to be lazy and experiment. So we got the bondo and long board out and added another color to the bottom of Cal Pie. We did spend some time on the rig tune, or should I call it rig wobble. We pretty much ignored the shroud swing numbers that we hear people talk about. We set the lowers so we have about 2 degrees of rake upwind and 2 degrees of forward rake downwind. We then loosened the uppers so we would have about a half a mast width of sag. I would sight the sag while sailing upwind by taking the tensioned jib halyard and holding it on the center of the whisker pole ring on the mast. I would then sight up the halyard and at the spreaders the halyard would be close to the windward edge of the mast. This was our base setting. If we started finding ourselves overpowered we would loosen our uppers a little to flatten the main. We use North Sails which are flatter than some other brands. In order to get the right shape in the sail you need to sag the mast by having tighter uppers compared to the lowers. The advantage of getting the proper depth in the sail by this means is that you can have the tip of the mast more vertical compared to looser uppers. The Cal is a pretty fat boat and needs to be sailed flat. Keeping the rig more on centerline keeps the rig more powered up. Friday was the qualifying day and we mostly concentrated on learning how to fly a jib downwind and how to get around the race track in Vancouver. We also tried to figure out how to keep the rig stable since it was bouncing around so much on the downwind legs. With a spinnaker we used a fraculator to pull the mast forward, but since we had to leave our jib up we couldn’t use the fraculator. It wasn’t until Sunday when we noticed Green Eggs and Ham behind us with the third crew holding the mast forward that it dawned on us how to deal with this problem. We were not concentrating on winning races but instead on learning. We thought we would try be smarter than everybody else and not go all the way to the port lay line, consequently we decided we were not smarter than anybody else and quickly squashed that idea. Since Amy, Ray and I never sailed all together, except one beer can race that Amy drove and I stumbled around the foredeck like a lost skipper in a sea of tangled lines, we worked on our crew positions. I think the most important part was working on our communication on the boat. Ray and Amy did a great job looking around and finding the current lines, puffs, laylines and marks (or lack thereof). Their help allowed me to concentrate on steering and untangling my mainsheet throughout the race. Saturday was the first day of the races that counted so we put to use everything we learned. We had great starts near the favored end of the line, which turned out to be the most important part of our success on Saturday. We concentrated on making sure we had the ability to get our Cal moving close to full speed off of the line and at least going faster than the boats next to us. You needed to be in the front row in order to go left. Sunday was a little bit different story for us. We were not as aggressive getting to the favored end of the line, which probably cost us the regatta. Every time we were coming off the line I would look over my shoulder and see Lickety Split getting as good of a start as us, but right at the favored committee boat. So much for all those books that say, “don’t start at the favored end, instead go for the higher percentage start twenty percent down the line”. I wonder if I can return my Dave Perry book? I like to thank my wife Amy who edited this article. She edited out one important detail of our success on Saturday that I should not go into. However, there was one significant event that happened Friday night that did not happen on Saturday night. I learned that if I want to do well at a regatta I must take my wife with me from now on. And if I do go to a traveling regatta without my wife and do well, I have been informed she will have reason to believe that divorce papers are in order.
36 boats showed of for the 2001 Cal-20 National Chapmionship,
last weekend.
For more information on Cal 20 sails, contact the North Cal 20 experts. |
Congratulations to Brian Lindquist and Kurt Mayol on winning this past weekend's Bud Gardiner Bowl. Sorcerer's Apprentice showed great consistency by winning three of the five races, and also had a second and third to finish comfortably ahead of the pack. Brian and Kurt shared the driving and trim duties, and did a great job of sailing fast in wildly varying conditions. This win vaults Sorcerer's Apprentice to the top of the North Sails KHYC Cal 20 High Point Series.
After a few beers, Cal 20 Fleet Captain Chuck, remembered to update Brad Knox who was down in Hot-lanta missing the race in favor of attending a friend's wedding. Unfortunately Brad forgot to turn off his cell phone, and it was extra embarrassing because Brad was the best man in the ceremony. Perhaps the bride is a big sailing fan, and won't mind reliving the moment whenever she watches her wedding video. Maybe not. That's what she gets for not consulting with our race schedule before planning her wedding.
About a two months ago my friend Mark Golison called me to ask if I would be interested in crewing for him in the 2004 Cal 20 Class Championship. The Cal 20 is not know for it’s speed or comfort but it does have a great group of people and the regatta was to be sailed out of Alamitos Bay Yacht Club, one of the best places to sail in Southern California. Mark is a great guy to sail with so I said yes.
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