Cal Race Week Regatta June 1st and 2nd

This weekend, June 1st and 2nd, the California Yacht Club will be hosting Cal Race Week, a long-running, late-spring sailing regatta that always attracts the finest boats and best female and male sailors in Southern California.  This year there are 74 boats entered and approximately 60 are trailered boats, which is probably a record number for this regatta and reflects the growing popularity of smaller one-design sailboats.  

Regatta Chairs, Mary Stuyvesant and Monica Antola, anticipate that several one-design class sailboats will participate this year, including the J/109, J/105, J/80, Martin 242, J/24, and Open 5.70. For the first time, the J/70 and Viper 640 classes will also be participating. A new award, the Junior Crew Trophy, will be awarded to the highest scoring boat with a youth sailor onboard. This is also the first time that there will be a Random Leg Class, where the boats do not go around buoys, but, instead, zig-zag around various landmarks in Santa Monica Bay on challenging courses that average 20 nautical miles. 

Familiar "big boats" that will be racing include "Pendragon" and "Margaritaville" (CYC), "It's OK" (Balboa Yacht Club), and "Crockett's Rocket" (Santa Barbara Yacht Club). Conducting such a regatta is a major task, performed by volunteers, and CYC has excelled at race management, winning US Sailing’s "St. Petersburg Trophy" for excellence in race management three times in recent years.  

There will be multiple courses with separate start/finish lines to minimize the classes interfering with each other's racing. Individual yacht clubs can compete for the Thomas K. Armstrong California Challenge Trophy. This trophy will be awarded to the club whose team has the lowest cumulative combined score, with the teams comprised of three club member boats, each competing in different classes. 

Spectators can enjoy the races from the Venice and Santa Monica piers as well as from the beach. They can also observe the sailboats leaving from and returning to Marina del Rey harbor by walking or biking to the north and south jetties. 

Event website: http://www.calyachtclub.com/
Sam Haythorn Photography: http://samhaythorn.smugmug.com/Sailing