Major West Coast College Sailing Regatta on the S.F. Cityfront
On March 21 and 22, 20 college sailing teams from up and down the West Coast converged on the San Francisco Cityfront to sail the Pacific Coast Collegiate Sailing Conference (PCCSC) South Designate. The regatta was officially hosted by St. Francis Yacht Club (StFYC) and the UC Berkeley team.
The regatta was sailed in FJs, with each school fielding an A- and a B-division team. The national powerhouse that is the Stanford Cardinal were ultimately victorious, totaling 53 points between the two divisions in 20 combined races.
Sailing in A Division for the Cardinal was the sophomore duo of Thomas Whidden and Caroline Geiger, who totaled 20 points from their 10 races. They never finished outside of the top three, and recorded three bullets. Stanford’s B-Division team, the freshman duo of Samara Walshe and Avery Baldwin, were nearly even more dominant, winning six races and finishing second in three more. Their point total was ultimately inflated by an OCS in race nine B. That was Stanford’s only non-top-three finish in the regatta. The OCS ultimately didn’t matter in the grand scheme of the regatta, as Stanford still finished a comfortable 17 points ahead of second.
Coming in second was the team from the University of Hawaii, with 70 points from the 20 races. The Rainbows were anchored by their A-Division team of senior skipper Erik Anderson and junior crews Amanda Turner and Arden Rathkopf, who totaled 27 points from their 10 races, winning four of them (one more than their Cardinal counterparts). The Hawaii A-Division team might have edged the Cardinal, at least for their division, were it not for an eighth-place finish in race one.
Rounding out the podium in the regatta was the team from UC Santa Barbara. The Gauchos have often played the role of second-best college sailing team on the West Coast, behind Stanford, over the past few years. They totaled 74 points from their 20 races, and likely would have been second in the event were it not for an OCS in race six B. The Gauchos’ only non-top-four finishes were the aforementioned OCS and a fifth in race 10 B.
The PCCSC is guaranteed two automatic bids to the ICSA College Sailing Fleet Racing Nationals (in both the open and women’s divisions) later in the spring, given to the top two finishers at the Conference Championship regatta in late April. Thirty-six teams qualify from across the country for college nationals, with 14 slots being awarded automatically to the top two teams in each of the seven conferences. The PCCSC recently hasn’t received many at-large bids, as those have mostly gone to the powerhouse conferences in New England and the Mid-Atlantic.