The “Lucky Season” Is Here: Golden Ticket Winners Are Collecting Latitude 38 Hats
It’s the “lucky season” again. As Latitude readers pick up their magazines, some are happy to find a Golden Ticket between the pages, telling them they’ve won a new Latitude 38 hat. If all sailors are — like some we know — always losing hats, or getting them grubbed up with engine grease (we won’t mention names, but if you’re reading this, you know it’s you), then our latest winners, Paul Linsteadt and Robert Fairbank, will be quite happy with their prize.
Paul Linsteadt picked up his copy of the February issue on Saturday, February 10, at the Oakland Yacht Club. (The date is surely etched into his memory for the joy of winning the hat.)
Paul was a member of OYC for 12 years before he sold his boat and moved to the foothills. But he says, “I miss the Bay! I’m looking around for a boat.” In the meantime, Paul and his wife chartered a boat in the Abacos in late February, and, ” I could use a nice hat,” he tells us.
We presume Paul has been having a great time on the water, as we haven’t heard from him since!
Our next winner, Robert Fairbank, is a longtime Bay sailor, starting his journey in the mid-1970s as crew aboard the Farallon Clipper Mistress II. He then bought a Santana 22 in the mid-’80s, and a Yankee 30, Double Play, in the early ’90s. “I raced Double Play until I bought an Olson 911S Double Down [in] 2011,” Robert says. “I had great boat partners in all three boats.’
When Robert sold Double Down, “a custom Schumacher 30, really a 911S with a few mods designed by Carl Schumacher,” he had been racing on the Bay for 40 years. He was then without a boat for a while, until he and his wife Anna bought a 34-ft DeFever 34 [a trawler] — “I know, the dark side” — that he keeps at South Beach Harbor.
Regardless of craft, Robert says the best part of sailboat racing was making new friends. “My most memorable sailing adventures were a trip from French Polynesia to Hawaii and a transatlantic crossing from Morocco to Martinique. Both of those trips were on other people’s boats.” Robert and Anna are current members of the South Beach Yacht Club.
Robert found his Golden Ticket in the April issue that he picked up at South Beach Harbor.
Will you be the next winner? The May issue is nearing the docks … Get ready to pick up your copy from any one of our great distributors.