San Francisco Mid-winter Weta Series

March 2011

The San Francisco Weta fleet wrapped up their winter racing series at the Golden Gate Yacht Club with top award going to new Weta sailor Gordon Lyon of Sausalito, CA. This nine race winter series provided light wind sailing & strong currents. The Wetas were the only “dinghy” attending in this series which attracted some attention. Thanks to the GGYC for their invite and interest in developing multihull sailing on San Francisco Bay. GGYC club member Bob Nabor was especially forward thinking to rally support for inviting Wetas to this series.

Here’s a review of the series from Gordon Lyon. Oh, yeah, check out the pic of Gordon with this award next to the Americas Cup (The Ald Mug)!

In Praise of Midwinter sailing
As some of you know, the official Mid-Winter sailing season just wrapped up on San Francisco Bay. Being a bit of a newbie, I thought the calmer winds would give me a chance to nail down some racing basics without being preoccupied with simply not crashing the boat, so I signed up for both the Richmond Yacht Club mid-Winter series and the Golden Gate Yacht Club's 40th Annual Manuel Fagundes Seaweed Soup regatta. Thanks to the hard lobbying of Dave Berntsen and the gracious enthusiasm of both yacht clubs, the Wetas were actually scored as their own class in both series, so we had some great one-design racing. We also had a light wind race where the tides were so strong it took me 30 minutes to cross the start line - even though I was at the pin when the gun went off. We had Northerly breezes, Southerlies, Easterlies and Westies - sometimes all in the same day, often punctuated with pouring rain. Sometimes there were 6 of us on the line, sometimes there were only two. But it proved a great way to get to know some of the other Weta sailors in a more relaxed environment, and we got some great publicity for the fleet (We had pictures in Norcal Sailing and Latitude '38 several times). Hell, some of us even got our pictures taken with the Americas Cup, complete with white-gloved security guards (in recognition that multihull sailors are an untrustworthy lot). And I did learn something from every race. For instance:
- The Weta is just as fast as a J105 when there's absolutely no wind
- When you combine no wind with heavy rain, the mainsail is perfectly designed to funnel water down the back of your wetsuit
- It's not a good idea to use the screecher in a starting area full of Lasers.
- It's actually possible to run aground on City Front - most specifically on a sand spit just to the east of Golden Gate Yacht Club

But I also...
- Came to peace with trailering the boat - and got rid of all the road rattles
- Got used to start sequences, postponements, abandons and other weird signals
- Learned the hard way that the tide charts are an educated guess, subject to winds, snow melt, tsunamis... trust your eyes, check your bouys
- Learned how to get my boat in and out of the water at St. Francis by myself
- And learned that when your jib halyard separates in the middle of a squall, it's possible to beach the WETA on a very convenient sand spit just to the East of GGYC

Three cheers for the intrepid souls that came out to race these gray, damp and glorious months: Marc Simmel, Christophe Allie, Yann Bertaud, Stephan Sonnenschein, Dave & Mila Berntsen. Now we can all return our focus to to the main challenge of racing on SF Bay: not crashing the damn boat...

Click this link for more photos of the prizegiving