The YRA Calendar: Share Your Club’s Sailing Calendar So We Can Help Tell Your Story

Anyone who has sailed in enough regattas, or helped run enough regattas, knows that it truly does take a village. Between the race officers at host yacht clubs, volunteers for the race committee, the sailors, of course, and weeks (if not months) of planning, each event is far more than the two to four days of racing on the water.

This is nothing new to me, a lifelong sailor, but after being in my role as Latitude 38’s racing editor for a little under three months, my eyes have been opened to another side of planning regattas that I knew little about.

Latitude 38 and the San Francisco Yacht Racing Association (YRA) collaborate each year on a racing calendar, in which we highlight and advertise as many as we can of the different regattas and races held by various yacht clubs and class associations. Laura Munoz (head of YRA), Nicki Bennett (Latitude’s head of marketing and sales) and John Arndt (Latitude 38 publisher) have done this for years, but this year is my first time being involved in the production of our racing calendar, and it’s been incredibly eye-opening to see how much more than I had realized goes into organizing a regatta on the Bay.

Between the juggling of schedules and the need to get permits from the Coast Guard, and planning more than a year in advance, there is so much more that goes on behind the scenes than one realizes when just showing up for a weekend regatta. And that’s where my role comes in: How do we promote and cover regattas?

Sailing is such a dynamic and busy sport to cover. It’s not like being a local writer or editor covering the 49ers, Giants or Warriors, where all that really matters is one team’s game. Each weekend there are many different regattas in many different classes at many different yacht clubs around Northern California and the entire West Coast. Some events are easier for me to cover than others, as I race most actively in certain classes of boats and out of certain yacht clubs. But at Latitude, we want to make sure every yacht club, class association, and regatta gets the coverage they deserve in order to tell their unique stories.

That’s where I’ve found this year’s YRA calendar to be such a great resource; I can easily find all the dates and details for almost all of the regattas around NorCal in one place, and therefore get a far wider range of coverage than I would otherwise. I can’t do it by myself, however. If an event isn’t in the YRA calendar, unless I already know about it or somebody explicitly brings it to my attention, it is unfortunately likely to slip through the cracks. If you are a race officer at a yacht club or the fleet admiral of one of our many one-design fleets in Northern California (or along the West Coast in general), I strongly encourage you to reach out to Laura, Nicki or myself (if you haven’t already) to get into the YRA calendar. It can and will improve your participation in regattas, and will make it far easier for us to help tell the stories of your regattas.

If you are interested in publishing your 2026 sailing schedule in the YRA calendar, you can contact me via [email protected], Nicki at [email protected], or Laura at [email protected].