When I go daysailing, I usually take out friends and neighbors who are not sailors. To keep summer sailing from turning into a few hours of drifting in the hot summer sun, I pick a course that we can set our cruising spinnaker on to make sailing more fun for my guests and for me. You see, I’ve been called an evangelical sailor and the sport is much easier to “sell” if the boat is lively. Even in six knots of wind and flat water, our boat will do 5-6 knots with the cruising spinnaker while sailing on a beam reach. At those speeds the boat is heeling some, the water is rushing by and you feel a nice breeze across your face. Times like this are magic. If the breeze comes up more and the boat heels uncomfortably for the uninitiated, just bear off some and ease the sheet until the boat is more comfortable.

Forty youth teams competed in the U.S. Junior Women’s Championship, hosted by Mantoloking Yacht Club and Bay Head Yacht Club in Mantoloking, NJ and sailed in Club 420s on Barnegat Bay.

Sarah Williams (Bay Head, NJ/Bay Head YC) and crew Ali Blumenthal (Bellport, NY/Bellport YC) took a commanding lead on the second day of the three-day event and never looked back. Winning by a six-point margin, Williams and Blumenthal will have their names engraved on the prestigious Ida Lewis Trophy.

Sailors and guests joined in a final celebration of a fast and safe Marion-Bermuda Cruising Yacht Race on Saturday, June 25 as His Excellency the Governor of Bermuda, Sir Richard Gozney, and Royal Hamilton Amateur Dinghy Club Commodore Robert Mason presented three-deep trophies for each of the four classes as well as 19 fleet, special and regional prizes. The trophies that these sailors took home were well deserved for excellent performance in a race that had a robust start, some dead calm midstream, and finished with wind again.

Rambler Sets the Record, but PUMA Gets the Win

The Transatlantic Race 2011 (TR 2011) is in the history books. Twenty-six boats completed the 2,975 nautical mile course from Newport, RI to Lizard Point, South Cornwall, UK. Rambler 100, skippered by George David (Hartford, CT) crossed the finish line on Sunday, July 10, establishing an elapsed time record of 6 days, 22 hours, 8 minutes and 2 seconds. This new record is subject to ratification by the World Sailing Speed Record Council.

The second boat across the finish line, PUMA Ocean Racing powered by BERG Propulsion’s Volvo Open 70 Mar Mostro, finished with an elapsed time of 7 days, 11 hours and 40 minutes. Based on corrected time under the IRC rule, Mar Mostro claimed victory in the IRC 1 class and the overall win. “We entered the race with zero expectations, just like the other IRC handicap racing we’ve done this year,” said skipper Ken Read (Newport, RI). “We wanted to learn the boat and the crew. We are pleasantly shocked. We didn’t break anything, the sails held up, the team is certainly coming together, and there’s not a single negative to this race. It was a great experience.”

More than 150 sailors participated in the 2011 Flying Scot North American Championships, sailed out of Cedar Point Yacht Club in Westport, CT July 9 - 15. The regatta, which included the Women’s and Juniors North American Championships, was co-hosted by Cedar Point YC (home of Flying Scot Fleet 177) and Sprite Island Yacht Club in Norwalk, CT (home of Fleet 142).

The Setauket Yacht Club in Port Jefferson, NY held its 24th Annual Harbor Cup Regatta on Saturday, June 18. Eighteen boats, divided into three divisions on the basis of handicap and having a spinnaker or not, raced in the waters outside the harbor. The boats represented the Setauket Yacht Club, the Mount Sinai Sailing Association and the Stony Brook School. The oneday regatta started the first division at 1:00 pm over a windward, leeward and reaching course of 8.8 miles. The wind started and remained light but steady and all but two boats finished their respective races.

This year’s edition of the Marblehead to Halifax Ocean Race was one for the record books...literally.

Consistent winds and rhumbline sailing propelled Bella Pita, the Tripp 75-footer owned by Jim Grundy (Oxford,MD), to beat the elapsed time record for theMarblehead to Halifax Ocean Race, set by Starlight Express in 1989, by over two and a half hours. Bella Pita set the new race record with an incredible time of 30 hours, 46 minutes and 52 seconds, averaging nearly 12 knots. Two other boats also beat the elapsed time record, includingWill Apold’s Swan 78 Valkyrie (Halifax, NS) and Gus Carlson’s Reichel/Pugh 66 Aurora (New York, NY). I had the pleasure of sailing with Gus and team aboard the Thomson Reuters-sponsored Aurora.

It all started with a Facebook post from Evan Saunders, the volunteer coordinator at Extreme Sailing Series Boston, stating that they were looking for volunteers to assist with running the event over the Fourth of July weekend. The Extreme Sailing Series is a worldwide professional sailing circuit that in 2011 will consist of nine five-day events. The event in Boston, MA was “Act 4” of this year’s series.