Encinal Yacht Club Hosts Gracie & George Regatta
This year’s Gracie & George Regatta, hosted by Encinal Yacht Club (EYC), saw an impressive 17 boats on the start line in champagne racing conditions of 8–10 knots of breeze, a small ebb current and glorious sunshine.
The Gracie & George requires each boat to have a female skipper and male crew in a doublehanded race around the South Bay and back down the Alameda/Oakland Estuary. It’s broken into two fleets: spin and non-spin.
The racing started off the south side of Alameda, heading across the Bay toward Oracle Park and down the Bay toward the Chase Center before a tight reach back across the Bay, then down the Estuary to end right outside EYC.
With fierce competition, including a photo finish for the two Express 27s in the spinnaker class, the Santana 22 Anemone, skippered by Shelli Bohrer and crew Hank Lindemann, won the class. In the non-spinnaker class, the Harbor 20s took top honors in first and second place, with Gemma Hansen and crew John Hansen coming in ahead on Scout. Honorable mention went to another Santana 22, Bonito, with the youngest team at a combined age of just 24: sister and brother pair Isolde and Wilfred Bodiley.
After racing, the teams enjoyed champagne and canapés put on by EYC, followed by the awards. Anemone continued the great run for Santana 22s in this event to make it five years in a row for the class, and getting their name on the celebrated Gracie & George Trophy once again. A great day of racing! EYC is looking forward to hosting even more competitors in next year’s event.
Elkhorn Yacht Club Celebrates 80 Years!
Do you remember our Monday story about Elkhorn Yacht Club’s Nautical Flea Market, in which we mentioned they were celebrating 80 years? Later that day we received a story about the club’s birthday celebrations, written by the club’s commodore, Dan Garrett, for their newsletter Lee Rail.
On July 11, Elkhorn YC pulled out the stops to celebrate 80 years since a street-corner conversation founded our club.
The flags were flying and the club was decorated as the bar opened as usual at 2 p.m. that Saturday. We had a fun (and informative) Trivial Pursuit/treasure hunt to award free Elkhorn YC 80 merchandise.
Special guests Judy (Perry) Miller, daughter of our very first commodore, and her son Ken showed up early to share remembrances and look through early photo albums of EYC history.
Fleet captain Diana G. had the club’s sailing dinghies rigged and ready for fun. Commemorative glassware was available at the bar and a wonderful Mediterranean buffet was catered by Yafa Restaurant from Carmel.
After dinner, JD the DJ (https://montereydj.net/) played tunes from the 1940s to today, while the World Cup games streamed on the TVs (dancing and cheering)!
Even the clubhouse was getting into party mood with a new coat of paint thanks to Bill S. and his crew of volunteers.
I’m already looking forward to the 85th Anniversary/Birthday celebration!
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The Latitude 38 Cover Conundrum
We were talking with Colin Lindberg, the new owner of Owl Harbor Marina in the Delta, about his plans for the marina and asked him to make sure the magazine delivery was working properly. He told us all is good, and that he keeps them right out in front in the marina office, though he did mention that someone coming in for the August issue thought they had already picked it up. When they discussed it further, he discovered how similar the August cover is to the June cover. Darn, he’s right. Sometimes the details escape us.
How do we pick a cover photo? We generally like them to be timely so it’s from something that happened recently. However, every rule is meant to be broken, so a great shot from someone’s South Pacific cruise last year could easily jump into the mix. The June issue photo was taken by Felix Weidling, the StFYC race director, of Nicole Breault and Lucy Wilmot racing in the J/105 Women’s Skipper Invitational. Of course, our July issue intervened, but then Lauren Easeley Towill’s shot arrived: Tina Roberts sailing Ragtime toward the finish for their first in the Pacific Cup’s Pasha Hawaii Division ORR1. Another great shot we couldn’t help publishing.
We broke the two covers up with a return to a wooden classic on the Bay showing Ken Inouye at the helm of his 1970 gaff-rigged ketch Makani Kai. Since we get to pick only 12 covers a year, it’s always hard to decide, as there are so many scenes we want to showcase. Fortunately, there are a lot of pages between the covers where we get to show more photos of your sailing. If you do have a hi-res photo you think we should consider for a cover, send it to [email protected]. You never know what might strike our fancy. They don’t necessarily need to be vertical shots, but they do need to be high-resolution so we can crop them to fit.
We’re always inspired when we look back at 50 years of covers, many of which have been sent in by readers. The February cover was sent by Valerie Bucholtz from the Sydney Hobart race aboard the Express 37 Perplexity and the March cover was sent by Don Litton from cruising the Channel Islands aboard his Columbia 29 Pythagorus.
If you are inspired to send a shot, just make sure it doesn’t look like our June or August issue of the magazine. We like to think we won’t make the same mistake twice or even three times, but you never know.
Three Men, Two Mains and One Lost Bucket
Mexico did not want us to leave. Not because storms were coming. Not because the Pacific is dangerous. But presumably because somewhere a photocopy of a photocopy was still missing to confirm that another photocopy had indeed been photocopied.
By the time Crispijn, Jip and I finally cleared out of La Cruz, Mexico, we had survived three days of bureaucratic combat and enough paperwork to qualify as minor government employees. And honestly? Mexico was still wonderful. For the previous year-and-a-half it had given me surf, whales, sunshine and some of the best time of my life. But on April 22, after a proper crying session with my Mexican girlfriend, immigration, customs and the port captain finally waved us goodbye and we pointed The Seahorse west. Ahead lay 3,000 miles of Pacific Ocean.
I’m Andries Bik, 47, lifelong addict to surfing, snowboarding, skateboarding, wakeboarding and kickboxing — until my body politely suggested another hobby. So I moved onto a sailboat 13 years ago and never moved back ashore. My home is a 1997 Beneteau Oceanis. My philosophy is simple: If it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it. And if it is broke, and you cannot repair it with tie-wraps, duct tape or a hammer, it probably does not belong aboard.
My ocean-crossing team represented two entirely different schools of thought. Crispijn Hartzema, 40, 2 meters tall, big-wave surfer and professional climber, is the type of man who works on oil platforms where safety is sacred and every bolt has paperwork. I would cross an ocean with a surfboard as a backup liferaft. He arrived with three personal beacons, an EPIRB, Garmin InReach, VHF and enough emergency equipment to evacuate a small airport.
Then there is Jip Lommerse, 23, fitness machine, charter captain on a catamaran in Bonaire and human Labrador retriever with limitless energy.
The Seahorse has three cabins, all with their own heads, and to me those matter as much as the sails. People romanticize ocean crossings. Experienced sailors know civilization begins with sleep and some privacy, including toilet time after coffee without smelling up the rest of the team.
Are Tech and Productivity Apps Eliminating Free Time To Go Sailing?
Shouldn’t the Bay Area be the capital of “free time” for sailing? Since the early days of Fairchild Semiconductor’s pioneering development of integrated circuits, the Bay Area has been home to the digital revolution that has made all of our lives so much better. Right? Productivity soared when we all got our own personal computers, and expanded again when Apple put a computer in our pockets and added millions of apps to help us make our days more efficient. So how is it that so few people in the world’s epicenter of digital productivity tools have so little time to go sailing?
We think the Bay Area must have more productivity tools in everyone’s pocket per capita than any other region of the world, so we’d expect the Bay to be covered in sailboats seven days a week. It’s just not the case. The efficiency and marketing miracle of the internet has corresponded with a decline in sailing activity. Are computers the cause of the decline? The Guardian’s recent article offered an interesting perspective on how the early digital pioneers foresaw computers separating us from each other and nature. Any serious conversation on the subject can point to myriad contributing factors, but we can’t help thinking that screen time has distorted our relationship with far too many activities like sailing.
The computer has sped everything up, and most people arrive at their weekend wanting to slow down. Sailing is one of the great ways to do it. Rather than DoorDash your life, it’s nice to amble (“to walk slowly or leisurely; stroll”) down the docks to your boat, slip the dock line, hoist the sails, and head off for a leisurely (“done in a relaxed way, without hurrying”) sail. Distractions disappear, so conversations have more depth and continuity, and the ripples on the water and the flutter of the sails attract an attention that’s impossible to develop at higher speeds. Six knots is just right for a weekend.
Whether it’s Jack Johnson slowing down to make banana pancakes, Jimmy Buffett singing, “Mother, mother ocean, I have heard your call,” or Herman Melville writing in Moby Dick, “Whenever … my hypos get such an upper hand of me … then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can,” sailors find sailing to be an antidote to their life ashore and the digital hyperloop that distracts us from daily pleasure. The many cautionary tales of troubled child actors raised on screen should be a warning. Today we are all child actors and actresses.
While typing these words and showing photos taken with our universal pocket computer, we understand the challenge of disconnecting from the devices that have tethered us to the all-enveloping cloud. We’re fortunate to be reminded daily by stories coming from readers on the Bay, along the coast, and in Mexico and the South Pacific, that we can still choose to sail. Apps might make some of it appear easier, but we think the pleasure begins when you put it all away. The metaverse makes us feel as if we’re all lab rats in a digital maze with no exit, until you find your way to the Bay.
Right now there are boats returning from Hawaii after the Pacific Cup. The Farr 53 Atalanta left from Monterey to sail to Hawaii yesterday. Other boats are sailing from the Northwest on their way to the start of the Baja Ha-Ha. And any of us with access to a boat can head out on the Bay today.
We were proofing a story about the Ha-Ha for the September issue and this paragraph from the author, four-time Ha-Ha vet Mark LeFevers, captured a feeling he gets at sea: “What brings us, and others, back lies in the larger question of why we return to the sea in general. My answer is the rich sensations that sailing and the cruising life fulfill: a return to the joy of the simple rhythms of full-contact living; sunrises and sunsets; meal preparation; reaching into one’s bag of tricks to best meet the challenges of the day; celebrating shared appreciation of the experience.… In short, a microcosm of the collective traits and instincts that brought us here as a species.” (Isn’t it terrible not to be able to read the rest of the story instantly? It will be in the September issue, coming September 1.)
We think there are very few problems that can’t be solved, or at least forgotten for a while, by a day of sailing. The Bay Area remains the world epicenter of digital apps and productivity tools, theoretically designed to make life better. Yet we know Steve Jobs and many tech titans severely limited the time their kids were allowed to be on screen. Can you follow their kids on Instagram? While we certainly wouldn’t deny the many benefits of the digital age, we never forget that all those benefits aren’t worth much if you can’t find time to go sailing.
Latitude 38 Baja Ha-Ha Fall Crew Party — Get Your Tickets Now
