CNU Sailing

Saturday started out with NW winds 12-15mph gradually subsiding to 4-7mph. Six A and Six B races were sailed in Georgetown’s new fleet of 18 Vanguard FJ’s.  No breakdowns.  No Protests. On Sunday one A race sailed in NE 7mph.  Wind quickly died and racing was postponed at 10:15AM.  After a competitors meeting racing was called at 1PM.  The wind never rose above 3mph the rest of the afternoon. Christopher Newport and Maryland qualified for the War Memorial Regatta.

IMAGE: Jerrica Nichols, Kate McClintock, Johanna Faroe, Ben France, and Lilly

This was an exceptional event for the team. Ben and Johanna had their best showing ever with a 2nd place in their division. Kate and Jerrica did very nearly as well with a 6th in their division and only one race that was double digits. Bets of all we qualified for the War Memorial Regatta with an impressive 52 point advantage over Maryland, the other team qualifying at this event. Had Maryland beaten us, we would still have qualified over St. John’s, 55 points back. But we didn’t want to just sneak into the season championship. We wanted to do it with style, and we did so. In fact, Maryland finished ahead of one of our pairs in just one race. Now that we have qualified, we simply need to polish our sailing and we will do so next week with part of the team going to Hobart/WmSmith in Geneva New York and part of the team sailing at Hampton University.

IMAGES: Tyler & Amy

Saturday morning brought a light breeze from the North East. Near 12 pm, the breeze shifted heavily to the south west due to the thermal. The wind speed in the afternoon was between 8 kts and 13 kts. It was sunny and the maximum temperature was 20 C. Sunday had steady breeze from the southwest between 8 kts and 13 kts. The temperature was slightly below 20 C and it was partly cloudy. Races: 9 races/division (2 divisions). The course was a modified windward leeward course, twice around. Six race/ divisions were held on Saturday and 3 races/division were held Sunday.

Class of boats were FJ’s. Protests were filed for boat breakdown due to excessive amount of water in certain tanks. Due to the limited time to drain boats between rotations, teams that protested were granted their average score for the races they sailed in the leaky boats.

IMAGES: Taylor & Lynn

While the ride is our longest and the boats have been in poor shape, this is only regular international event CNU does and team members start lobbying to go in early spring. The sailing in Canada is great and the opportunity to sail in another country has great appeal for the team. The great news is that by next year Queens will have a new fleet of 420s. The team we sent this year sailed extremely well and won the event with a solid margin over the second place team. There was a good bit of “squabbling between the next three teams, but CNU spent most of the time out in front where all they had to do was sail well. All in all it was a great weekend for the team.

Twelve races completed in each division split equally over two days in beautiful sunshine.  Saturday was held in a light Southerly becoming West, while Sunday was a solid Northerly of 12-14 knots becoming West-Northwest and dropping to five knots.  All races were W 4’s with leeward gates.

This was the first of two qualifiers for the War Memorial Regatta later in the year. At the end of racing on Saturday we were in a good position to qualify. But Sunday didn’t go well for us as a protest against Maryland at the close of racing on Saturday which DSQ’d Maryland and an unsportsmanlike reaction from the Maryland skipper led to an all-day “war” with the Maryland team. Later, both we and Maryland failed to qualify, however, it will be most unusual if either of us fail to qualify next week at Georgetown. Confrontations like this are few in collegiate sailing and extremely rare for us. However, sometimes it is necessary to remind sailors that anyone can foul out another team if the really want to. I expect that we will have the fences mended buy next weekend because over the last few years Maryland has been one of our favorite teams with both of us supporting each other’s events.

IMAGE: Jerrica Nichols, Johanna Faroe, Ben France, Kate McClintock, & Matt Lythgoe