A light northeasterly breeze on the second day of the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta in Chicago was good enough for the race committee to send the regatta’s eager distance race teams in ORC and PHRF on their respective 20 and 14-milers. And while the handicap fleets laid their wakes across Lake Michigan the regatta’s full complement of one-design fleets got off to a delayed start. New additions today included the Sonars of the Youth Invitational Keelboat team from area yacht clubs as well as the ILCA 6 and ILCA 7 classes vying for their District 20 championships.
While the biggest boats of the ORC 1 fleet were across the finish line by the time Geoffrey Davis’ crew finished and dropped sails, the scorer’s calculations had the experienced J/111 team corrected to the top of the results sheet, followed by Peter and Nina Wright’s Neo 43 Roma. The two boats are distinctly different in their designs—the Neo voluminous and beamy and the J/111 narrow and light—and with more windward-leeward oriented racing over the 20 miles than reaching, it was a Shamrock sort of day.
Davis and sailmaker Wally Cross are transitioning the one-design to an offshore-racing leaning program for this summer’s 150th edition of the Chicago YC’s Race to Mackinac. For the better part of two days at the Chicago YC, Cross and several crewmembers have been working on the boat, and it is clearly ready for primetime, winning its 15-boat ORC division 1 fleet’s opening race.
George Jackoweic’s Tartan 10 Out of the Blue was ORC 2’s top boat, followed in the standings by Robbie Devlin’s slick Italia 11.98 Drumleck and David Baker’s Beneteau First 10R Handsome Pete.
The ORC fleets were followed by three waves of PHRF divisions, and after nearly four hours of racing, Steve Daube’s C&C115 Paradigm Shift emerged as the corrected time winner of its nine-boat PHRF 1 division. Daube, however, wasn’t on board for the victory; he was at work and let his crew take over for the weekend. The team scored a race win for the big guy back at the office, and when we caught up with them celebrating after the race, they were thrilled.
“We had some new crew so the strategy was to go slow and steady and not screw up any sets and get clear air,” says Paradigm Shift’s fill-in skipper Will Dixon. “A lot of boats were favoring the pin so we started in the middle of the line, nice and easy.”
Immediately after the start, the team hoisted its biggest spinnaker and was off and running. All went smoothly, Dixon says. “Because of the new crew we took our time with sail changes and spent a lot of time determining which sail was going to be the best for the next leg.”
When Dixon finished, he figured they were either fourth or fifth on corrected time, but pleasantly surprised to learn they’d won. “We stayed offshore a bit thinking it was stronger,” he says, “so the first half of the race were just trying to match with the fleet and we ended up correcting out over Dire Wolf [a highly-customized 1D35] by 53 seconds or so. That’s incredible after 20 miles and four hours of racing.”
John Notch’s Baltic 35 Exeter was the top boat in PHRF 2, correcting over William Bartz’s Hunter 355, Ranger.
In the Beneteau 36.7s, Jarrett Altmin’s Soulshine added a 1-5-2 to its scoreline to pad its overall lead to 15 points. Scot and Yvonne Rhulander’s Mojo added to its winning streak and remains the regatta’s sole undefeated team. Lindsay Duda’s Sin Duda also put two more wins to its scoreline to bring its lead to 5 points over its perennial rivals on Andy Graff’s Exile.
Evan Jahn’s team on the J/109 Tumbler now has the fleet’s full attention as seven of them vie for the class’s Great Lakes Championship. Tumbler’s win in the second race of the day was the result of a precision start at the pin end of the line that allowed them to immediately tack, cross the fleet and sail their way to a wire-to-wire win. Five points now separates Tumbler and second-placed Lounge Lizard II.
After two days and seven races, Clark Pellett’s J/105 Sealark is at ease at the front of the 14-boat fleet. Pellett’s “longtime shipmate” David Brown is filling in on the helm for the weekend, however as Pellett is tied up with work. Brown, a seasoned sailor with decades of racing experience, is a first-timer to Chicago’s J/105 buoy-racing fleet, but given the results of the first day (three race wins) you’d never know it.
“I’ve only done the Chicago to Mackinac Race with Clark, not any buoy racing,” Brown says. Despite some trepidation, however, Brown quickly found his rhythm. “The crew work is impeccable,” he says. “And a fast boat makes anybody look good.”
Despite a strong start to the series, Sealark’s second day of racing was a mixture of triumph and learning. “We won the first race with a good, nice, clean start,” Brown says. The second race proved trickier, and an OCS made them work harder for their fourth-place finish. “I didn’t anticipate how quickly [the boat would] accelerate,” he says.
They got jammed in the third race, and the best they could claw back to was seventh—an impressive feat in this competitive one-design fleet. With a self-deprecating chuckle, he summed up his day: “I told the guys, I’m human and thank you for digging us out.”
Despite the finishes, at the end of the day, Sealark stretched its lead to 10 points, and Brown’s strategy for tomorrow’s racing is simple: “We’ll protect the lead,” he says, and “cover the boats we need to beat.”
On the one-design circle further north near Chicago’s Belmont Harbor, Craig Roehl and Edward Mui crew on the Tartan 10 Meat fleet continue to have their way with three top-five finishes, but the team of the day is Stephen Pratt and Lisa Thomas’ The Penguin, which won two races and beat Meat in all three. Cate Muller-Terhune’s Casting Couch won three more races to grow its lead over the talent-laden J/70 fleet to 20 points.
In the ILCA fleets, Emilio Bocanegra Lopez won all five races in the ILCA 6 division and Clayton DeBruyn did the same in the ILCA 7s.
The racing team from Macatawa Bay YC, winners of last weekend’s Youth Keelboat Invitational at the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series in Detroit, leads the Sonar racing with a 4-point lead over Chicago’s Corinthian YC squad.
