Latitude 38 Crew Party, Pt. 2, Ahead of the Manuel Fagundes Seaweed Soup Regatta

Just ahead of this past, gorgeous Big Daddy weekend, on which we also adjusted our clocks for more evening sailing time, we held our Thursday Crew Party at the Golden Gate Yacht Club. It was attended by lots of boat owners and crew looking to spend more of the spring and summer evenings and weekends sailing the Bay and California coast. We shared some photos on Friday and have some more to share here.

The small world of sailing … we ran into J/105 racer Aiden Ramblas, who works with our race editor, Fritz Baldauf, at Clubspot. We were also in the Alpineer Ski Club at Sugar Bowl with the Ramblas family, so Aiden and our kids used to ski together. We never knew we’d have a future sailing connection, but it was made at the crew party.

Ian, pictured above, was also new to Bay Area sailing and looking for ways to get on the water. He connected with Marcus (and many others), whose boat BB10 is in Marin, so he should have some good summer sailing ahead.

While sailors were inside the club networking for crew connections, local high school sailors were taking advantage of the warm summer, pre-daylight-saving evening to get in their sailing practice. The San Francisco Cityfront has an often well-deserved reputation as a very challenging stretch of water, but these high school sailors practice out there all the time. While doing so they learn to look outside, check the wind, check the current, respect Mother Nature, and sail when the conditions are right. Conditions were right on the night of the Crew Party, and are right a surprising amount of time over the course of the year for a huge number of sailors. Saturday’s Golden Gate Yacht Club Manuel Fagundes Seaweed Soup Regatta (Results here) also proved that the Cityfront is a magical place to sail.

We met GGYC member Craig Biauchi at the club. His red tag stated he was looking for crew for social sailing and cruising on his new-to-him Islander Freeport 41. Chris was also on a mission to reenergize the GGYC youth sailing program, which has been inactive for a period of time. You can learn more about GGYC youth sailing here. They’d surely welcome some volunteers.

Ross White was at the Crew Party planning ahead for the 32nd annual Baja Ha-Ha. He was looking for crew to sail south aboard his Catalina 42. We were worried, as he was talking with our new advertising rep, Maddy Garcia, who just started about three weeks ago. It’s always hard to stay on board at Latitude 38 with the constant temptation to sail away. Just reading the stories in Latitude can be a constant tease. Luckily, sailing in the Bay Area is also a reliable reward. You can learn more about Maddy on our Good Jibes podcast here.

If you missed the party you, didn’t miss the opportunity to sail or even meet many of these people. Contact information for skippers and crew is available on the Latitude 38 Crew List. You’ll find opportunities to crew for racing, cruising, daysailing, and somehow just getting on the Bay and California coast, cruising to Mexico, or crossing an ocean. We won’t tell your boss if you’ve signed up to sail away.

Here are a few more photos of the Bay Area’s sailing community that gathered at the Golden Gate Yacht Club.