December Light and Close Quarters With Coyote Point Yacht Club
The fourth Sunday of our series began beneath a pewter sky, the kind that asks for patience. Morning brought no wind — only stillness — and even by early afternoon the air refused to stir. We delayed the start once, then again, and finally, at 1:25 p.m., the faintest movement arrived: a meager handful of knots, just enough to coax seven boats into motion.
Will O’ The Wind took the rabbit start, a small spark in a sluggish afternoon. Lorelei, Paradigm, Sirius, Sweet Grapes, Surprise! and Ventus followed, pushing gently into a course built of looping arcs: from the marina to C, Z, 8, back to C, back to Z, again to 8 (this time to port), one last swing to Z (port), and home.
Sweet Grapes leapt forward on starboard, bright and eager, but the moment she tacked to port her advantage slipped away. Ventus seized the opening and rounded C first, followed by Sweet Grapes and Paradigm, with Surprise! keeping steady watch in fourth. The same order held at Z, though Paradigm narrowed the gap like a shadow drawing closer.
On the downwind run to 8, spinnakers bloomed — Paradigm and Lorelei’s catching what little breeze there was. Paradigm and Surprise! slipped past Sweet Grapes, while Ventus clung to the lead. But the fleet was restless and the wind fickle. Sweet Grapes, with her 150 jib and whisker pole set just so, found new life. She slid inside at 8, reclaiming her place in a rounding so tight it felt like a whispered duel.
Back toward C, Sweet Grapes now led the procession, followed by Paradigm and Surprise!, with Ventus pressing from behind. That order held to Z, though somewhere along the way Ventus edged past Surprise!.
The next run to 8 saw every boat reach for its downwind tricks — spinnakers unfurling, poles swinging, sails trembling for any breath of motion. Paradigm, powered by her chute, once again overtook Sweet Grapes. Sirius, defeated by the fading wind, retired from the race. For a moment the talk was of shortening the course, but the ebb had arrived — slow, steady, and on our side. It would carry us to Z more quickly, and so we pressed on.
Then came the moment that shifted everything: Paradigm rounded 8 the wrong way, forgetting it was a port rounding. The race committee’s call rang out across the water. The correction cost her the lead, and Sweet Grapes stepped into the vacancy with quiet certainty.
The ebb tightened the fleet toward Z, funneling the leaders into a single, tense approach. Paradigm, finding a cleaner line, stole back the mark and rounded first, followed by Sweet Grapes and Surprise!. From there the three sailed together — a small convoy bound for the finish, the late-day sun easing through the thinning clouds.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, Surprise! began to edge ahead. Sweet Grapes overtook Paradigm. And so the order at the line was set:
Surprise!, Sweet Grapes, Paradigm.
But time is the final arbiter. Once the numbers were settled, the podium shifted:
1st — Surprise!
2nd — Will O’ The Wind
3rd — Paradigm
4th — Sweet Grapes
A quiet start, a wind that never quite committed, and yet a race full of reversals and small triumphs — just the sort of afternoon that lives long in the telling.
Good Jibes #222: Commodore Tompkins on 600,000 Miles of Sailing, With Host John Arndt, Pt. 2
Join us this week for Part Two of our chat with one of the great legends of the sailing world, Commodore Tompkins. The 93-year-old Californian has sailed over 600,000 miles and has accumulated a lifetime of sailing stories spanning his earliest memories to today.
In this Part Two — recorded in person aboard his custom Wylie 39, Flashgirl — Commodore shares his stories with this week’s host, John Arndt. You’ll hear his most memorable stories from racing and cruising around the world, the time he was featured in Sports Illustrated, the spicy origin of his boat’s name, how he studies the weather on a daily basis, and the impressive 11-year-old kid who made an impact on his sailing life.
Here’s a sample of what you’ll hear in this episode:
- The origins of Great Hope
- How Ron Holland arrived in San Francisco at age 18
- Building Improbable in New Zealand with Ron Holland
- Sailing 12,000 miles to reunite with Nicky
- Racing aboard Improbable
Read more about Commodore in Latitude 38 here: “Commodore Tompkins on the Move Again”
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots — follow and leave a 5-star review if you’re feeling the Good Jibes!
Discover San Francisco Marina Small Craft Harbor
Keeping an Eye on US Virgin Islands Shipping Traffic
Here’s a good reason to set an anchor alarm. James Lane captured this shot of a sailboat getting an 0600 wake-up call as it had inadvertently dragged its anchor into the shipping channel in St. Thomas, USVI. As you note in the photo, the sailboat still has its anchor down off the bow.
James reports there were no injuries and everyone was safe. In fact, he reports there were just a couple of “kids” aboard who somehow managed to get the sails hoisted and sail out of the way before any property damage. Whew!
This is our second sailboat-and-ship encounter within a week. The other was last Friday in the Estuary.
James and his partner, Dena Hankins, left the Pacific Northwest 25 years ago to start a life of cruising. They are about to depart the USVI for Panama aboard their current boat, the Baba 30 Cetacea. James has a story about the characteristics of a good cruising dinghy in the current December issue of Latitude 38.
Lighted Boat Parades Adorn the Bay
The lighted boats have been cruising the Bay from Petaluma to South Beach and beyond. Rich Brazil sent us a note about Petaluma’s annual Lighted Boat Parade, hosted by the Petaluma Yacht Club and local sponsors last Saturday. They were expecting everything and everyone from the 65-ft Sea Scout ship to twinkly stand up paddleboards. Did you join the parade?
Up in Port Townsend, WA, The Resourceful Sailor, aka Joshua Wheeler, came across this resourceful use of an old sail.
Here are a few photos from the Encinal & Oakland YCs’ Lighted Yacht Parade held on December 6.
Did you sail in any lighted boat parades this year? Perhaps in Sausalito, or San Francisco, or Alameda? Or maybe you just decided to decorate your boat and not go anywhere? We’d love to see some photos.
Come on, folks, let’s get that Christmas spirit moving. Send your pics for all to enjoy. You can email them to [email protected], or you can upload them to the Sailagram page: latitude38.com/sailagram.
And please remember to include your name and YC.
Max Ebb — Forecasting Time
It’s getting hard to find crew who know what to do with a spinnaker pole. All the hot young race crew are sailing on the hot new boats with asymms tacked to the end of a bowsprit. My crew has suggested a retrofit, but my boat was designed during the dark years of the IOR, and it’s just a little too heavy to bring the apparent wind forward on a run. So I have to square the chute back with a pole.
On the other hand, bearing off to a run is one of the secret pleasures of sailing an older boat. The wind goes aft, the air seems to warm up, the deck stays dry, and the crew is rewarded for the bash to windward on the previous leg. Not so with a fast sprit boat, where the apparent wind is hardly ever aft of the beam.
“Like, you’re just showing your age, Max,” Lee Helm scolded me while I was browsing some recent photos on the yacht club bulletin board of Transpac racers crossing the Diamond Head finish line. I hadn’t realized that I was actually thinking out loud, and Lee had been eavesdropping from close astern.
“Hey, you still get to fly the asymm from a pole and sail deep on the way to Hawaii,” she assured me. “When the wind is up and the swells are surfable, there’s a point on the ocean polars where a deep run is best VMG. It complicates the jibes a little compared to a symmetrical jibe, but, like, that’s what good crew are for.”
Sprit envy may have been part of it, but there were other things making me think “new boat.” If I was ever going to race my own boat to Hawaii, I needed a boat that would get me there before the parties were over. One of our members, a foredeck specialist and veteran of more Transpacs and Pacific Cups than he can count, had kindly stapled all the pages of the Notice of Race together and hung them from a nail next to the bulletin board for easy perusal. He noticed me reading it and came over from the bar to join the conversation.
“I got more time logged steering a broach coach with the pole tripped than some of these kids have on the water,” he boasted.
“What is this ‘FTCF’ scoring?” I asked, looking up from the Notice of Race. I naively thought there might be a simple answer.
“A Well MISSPENT Youth” by Ben Needly
