Race Week Up Close



On Thursday, January 19, we climbed aboard the 105 ft. schooner America 2.0 to observe the sailboat races off shore.  And what a wonderful day it was.  Here's what we saw:  This is one of the "tenders" for one of the three 72 foot racers--impressive huh?



Vesper--nice and colorful.



We definitely had a front row seat for the race!



You can see that the racers came pretty close to our observation boat.  I think this one was tacking back and forth finding the right approach to the starting line.

The wind came up mid race and things started to get really excitng.  You can see the red spinnaker getting dowsed.  I don't think there's an actual crash in this picture, but I'm pretty sure there were some spirited discussions being had about race rules and right-of-way.

Heading for the starting line.  Notice how grey all the sails are.  I think that is because they are all carbon fiber sails--super light, super strong, super expensive, and a bit noisy too.

That's the committee boat just beyond this jumble of sails.

We are at the downwind marks of the oval course.  It is just were these spinnakers have to be taken down super quickly and the marks are rounded for another upwind leg.

I'm sure this is world-class spinnaker dowsing.  72 ft. Numbers is in front and 64 ft. Shockwave is just behind it.  These are both USA boats in a class called the mini maxies. Very impressive!

Another start.

More exciting moments.

Another start.  These might be the Farr 400's--a one design boat that competes all over the world.  Our narrator explained that the boat was built to fit into one of those shipping containers.  It makes it much easier for the owners to get their boat to races in different parts of the world--who knew to even worry about such!

Another start.

Here are the big guys--mini maxies--this is Numbers on the left and Shockwave on the right.  There were three of these and they were very impressive!  The third one was a British boat named Ran.  There is a picture of Ran coming up--they were the big time winners of this three-boat division.

This is RAN the British mini-maxie who has first place locked up--they were awesome.

Key West Quantum.

There also was a very competitive J Boat from Beaufort in this race.  The boat is owned and sailed by Robin Team.  The boat's name is TeamWork.  The Teams have a house on Front Street, Beaufort--it's Paul Jones's old home right down from the now defunct Bft. Post Office and between the Fraizers and Claud Wheatley's.  You may have seen TeamWork docked there in front of their house.