CRASH Regatta Wrap – 40 Entries and a Cruising Class

Here’s another of the highly organized and enthusiastic Vancouver Island Racing Series races. A good mix of boats and clearly a balance of racing and shoreside activities. Of particular interest is the Martin 242/Hotfoot 27/Moore 24/Hotfoot 24 class and the 6-boat cruising class. 

The Sidney North Saanich Yacht Club’s 2018 Challenging Racing And Social Happenings regatta (CRASH for short) was held on September 14-16 in a perfect mix of wind conditions from 2-22 kts, with boats from Schooner Cove to Esquimalt and from Vancouver to Point Roberts and Orcas Island testing their skills against the international competition.

Photos by Nat Klein. Click any to enlarge

We had a record entry of over 40 boats racing from 13 sailing clubs and associations including a large and spectacular multi-hull fleet, a highly competitive Round the Buoys fleet of Martins, Moores and Hotfoots, two well balanced PHRF divs, and this year we also introduced a true Cruising Class that ended up being highly competitive.  Cruisers were given a 5 minute start window and individual start times within this window were entered into SailWave, thus “de-stressing” the start box for those beautiful big multi-purpose boats.  The results can be found here: http://crashregatta.com/results/

International Race Officer John Abel lead our well-trained race management team and over 70 Sidney North Saanich Yacht Club volunteers came out in support, supplemented by our friends at RVYC.

All Social Happenings (craSH, remember) were held in the Port Sidney Marina hospitality tent.  Entertainment included almost real-time drone racing videos of the day’s racing, live music and dancing, a high-quality meal Saturday plus free first night dinner and all breakfasts.  Our second emergency top-up of sponsor’s beer just lasted til the end of the well attended prize-giving on Sunday. Perfect?

Planning for 2019 has started, put CRASH in your calendars!

–Heather Richardson

Kurt Hoehne

Kurt grew up racing and cruising in the Midwest, and has raced Lasers since the late 1970s. Currently he is a broker at Swiftsure Yachts. He has been Assistant Editor at Sailing Magazine and a short stint as Editor of Northwest Yachting. Through Meadow Point Publishing he handles various marketing duties for smaller local companies. He currently is partners on a C&C 36 which he cruises throughout the Northwest. He’s married to the amazing Abby and is father to Ian and Gabe.