St. Francis Yacht Club Wednesday Night Racing Returns
On Wednesday, May 20, St. Francis Yacht Club’s (StFYC) Wednesday Evening Series kicked off. The elephant in the room is that the series started three weeks later than initially planned, due to the previously unnavigable nature of the West Marina harbor entrance. Now that (most of) the sand has been cleared, racing is back on.
This racing editor has been competing in the Knarr fleet for a decade now, with his dad Hans Baldauf, and Chris Perkins and his sons aboard boat #141 Three Boys and a Girl (StFYC). We didn’t race in the May 20 race, but did get #141 out on the water on May 27. With the first two regattas of the season having been canceled due to the dredging, and only two more on the calendar before the 2026 International Knarr Championship (IKC) in Oslo, Norway, we wanted to get time on the water, and to have a good time on Wednesday night.
Ten Knarrs made it to the starting line off the StFYC race deck. With a flood current and boats expected to be playing the left upwind, it was a two-lap, starboard-rounding race. We were only a team of three last Wednesday (Knarrs typically race with four in the Bay): Chris driving, Hans trimming the jib, and me on bow blocking the waves for the older generation.
We made the decision to start down the line, and got a clean start, but it was going to be a tough first tack and likely a sea-room call off the line. Thankfully (and somewhat luckily), our lives were made a lot easier by a boat that had been OCS, slowing down the boats just to windward of us and giving us an easy tack up course. On the first leg, we protected the left side in a race to the top mark with Randy Hecht’s Niuhi (SFYC). We rounded in first, about three lengths ahead of Niuhi, with Mark Dahm’s Benino (StFYC) close behind them.
We held our lead on the first downwind, but on the second upwind it became a close battle with Benino for first. While we and Niuhi were sailing with three people on board, Benino had four and had a tick of extra speed that we didn’t have upwind. Benino passed us about three-quarters of the way up course after several close crosses. We were still within reach of the win, however, as they overstood the starboard layline. Niuhi rounded right behind us. With a big gap behind them but not even a boat length separating first from third, it was going to be a battle downwind.
With Niuhi and Benino initially both fighting high, we soaked down and were able to clear our air and remain overlapped with Niuhi to the left of us. With it being a starboard rounding, it was looking as if we might slip to third place with the two boats inside us, but since they hadn’t broken the overlap, Chris was able to employ some match-racing tactics, sailing the other two boats into the far bottom corner of the course before jibing and taking the whisker pole down, and then executing a jibe rounding at the leeward mark. Exciting stuff!
After that rounding, we covered Benino and Niuhi all the way to the finish. It was a delayed, but fun and rewarding return to Wednesday night racing.
Latitude 38’s June issue will be on the docks tomorrow. Go check it out!