Our J/70 team headed to Newport, RI for Sail Newport’s big annual multiclass regatta. This event also carried the moniker J/70 New England Championship. This is our fifth trip across the country to race J/70s since Andrew and Mallory Loe bought the boat Dime. My wife Jen Glass and I sail with the Loes, so it’s a couple of couples. As with the other events we’ve sailed in the last six months on the 70, it was a great weekend of extremely tight racing, duking it out with a lot of big names on little boats.
Friday was a brutally wet day with over an inch of rain falling while we raced. Coming off a tough red eye with no sleep, the day was a gray blur to me. What I remember was it was windy and the course was set in a tricky current off Rose Island. We were a bit rusty and didn’t feel like we were on our game.
Saturday and Sunday were mostly picture perfect race days on the outside course in pretty steady southwesterly mid-teen breeze with a very lumpy ocean chop (aside from a 45-minute postponement when a fog bank rolled in and dropped visibility down to 500′). For us this was a challenging condition as we hadn’t yet raced Dime in ocean conditions.
After taking a black flag the first race Saturday we came back with a win the second race. You have to love that feeling when you think you’re heading to the best side of the course and the boat feels locked in, then you get to the top and realize nobody is crossing. That’s the stuff that keeps me coming back to this sport.
Sunday was a little windier and a lot lumpier. We learned some good lessons about sailing upwind with the weight way back in the boat. We made some gains in our technique downwind but our finishes were pretty average.
I’d summarize these lessons learned: Don’t let the waves dictate your speed, you have to sail so the boat maintains as steady a speed as possible and isn’t constantly decelerating and re-accelerating. Good luck with that sailing a 20’ keelboat through a confused 3-foot wind swell/wind chop.
We’re excited for the next event at New Bedford YC, the Corinthian Nationals. We hope to earn a spot at the worlds at this event, but we will have to capitalize on our lessons learned this weekend if we are going to make that happen. Buzzards Bay should be giving us pretty similar challenges to the conditions of the last couple days.
Ed. Notes: Ben Glass generously offered to write up the regatta so that sailish.com readers can get a taste of the East Coast J/70 scene. If any of you PNW sailors out there are either racing or cruising “out there” in the watery world, and want to share with our readers, email me and let’s plan it. As far as this piece goes, I’m on the hunt for some more photos of the event. If and when I can get a hold of them, I’ll update this post.