A West Coast Perspective on the 2026 ILCA Masters Nationals
Brant Beach Yacht Club, New Jersey, August 28 to 30. About 35 ILCA 7s. Friday brought rain and no wind, so eight races got packed into two days.
I finished third overall and third Grand Master. Peter Hurley won, Patrick Wachholz took second, and David Hiebert fourth. Peter Vessella, a fellow Bay Area sailor, finished sixth. No soft spots: Every one of them has cracked the top 10 at a Masters Worlds.
The course favored left, nearly always. Two of every three shifts came from that side, and in race five, closer to nine of 10. That is not a race course. That is a hallway, and you want to be first down it.
Race five was where I paid for caution. The pin was heavily favored and crowded. The committee had backed the pin boat off on four boat lengths of rode, 55 feet of line in eight feet of water and no deadman weight, so it lay at about 10 degrees to the surface, a tripwire across the favored end. Figuring the left half would be carnage, I started midline, safe but wrong. Hurley went left and stayed. I rounded the first mark around 13th, and in seven knots nobody hands places back. Ninth. Ugh.
Race three cost me another way. I was grinding out left with one boat to windward. When I finally looked around, the fleet had tacked onto port a minute earlier. My compass had shown no header, so I assumed nobody had a reason to go. They did: The gradient breeze was shifting left, and the puffs came with it. Twelfth, clawed back to eighth, and I had to count it. A look over the shoulder was worth four places.
Small numbers, big difference. My outhaul was two centimeters too tight, and I could not hold a lane against Roman Plutenko. I eased it two centimeters, got the pointing back, and squeaked across starboard tackers at the windward mark.
The current ran ahead of the tables. Peak flow doubled over the week, 0.6 knots to 1.2, and slack slid 30 to 45 minutes later each day. On Sunday the ebb arrived two-and-a-half hours early. Read the water, not the printout.
Halfway through Sunday it looked bad. Two timid midline starts had dropped me from third to about sixth. So, screw it, win the pin. The breeze built to 15 to 18 knots. Downwind was full effort at 150 beats per minute, the game now overtaking waves, not surfing chop. Two seconds, and third overall.