BYC Beginnings

Looking back now, I have gone a long way since my first summer sailing! I've gone from working my way across the Manatee River in a pram to racing around the country in high-performance catamarans. And to think it all started in one of those floating "bathtubs". It all began during a summer camp at the Manatee River Pram Fleet. At age 8 Lisa Fath introduced me to singlehanding and ever since then, even though I do the majority of my training in Sarasota, I have been sailing as much as I can up at my home yacht club, the Bradenton Yacht Club. I've learned a lot by sailing here, from keelboat skills (Thursday night/Sunday afternoon racing series) to river tactics. I have been very fortunate to have sailed with Dr. John Marcin as well. His extensive sailing experience, including racing as an Olympic Finn alternate, has taught me a lot of what I know now and helped me achieve the BYC Sailor Of The Year award (which was a surprise to me!) and it all started at the BYC!

Old School











This is what it was like a year ago when I started getting into multihulls more. We used these boats and a Capricorn to train for the US Youth Multihull Championship last year up until early June. After sailing these cats for the first time a little more than a year ago I immediately got hooked on their power and speed! I'm glad I got the opportunity to sail these boats as they opened the door for me into the multihull world.

Different Settings


We've still been training a lot on and off the water. Recently we had been messing around with some different rake settings on the boat but decided that our previous setting was working best. We tried bringing our mast rake forward for a few light practices but it made the boat feel too off balance and stalled. We've also been messing around with rudder rake and had gotten it to a nice spot right before the Spring Fever/Southern Area F18 Championship. We're gearing up for some of our next events and I'm especially excited for the Sarasota Sailfest Regatta!

CleverPig

This site has been very useful to me in the past. When my team and I were planning to compete for the US Youth Multihull Championship, we used this site to help ourselves start a campaign and get some funding. If the application process is correctly done and all past follow-up requirements are completed, sailors are eligeble for grant money. Check it out!

My Clever Pig
CleverPig.org

Spring Fever


Aka the Southern Area Formula 18 Championship. What a way to spend my birthday weekend! Conditions were extremely shifty and at times very unpredictable, but I learned a lot on Lake Harwell, GA. Being our second F18 regatta together, this was a good event for Erick and I to sail as we had good competition from other teams. We won the first race of the event but had some deeper finishes the next two races which hurt us the rest of the regatta. I got a treat of no wind and a bright and shining sun on my birthday and day two of the regatta, Saturday. That day was spent daydreaming of future sailing plans and of brainstorming some interesting rigging designs with our teammates while on the water waiting for the wind to fill in (which it never did). We pulled ourselves together on the last day of the regatta and got top 3 finishes for the rest of the event and ended up in 3rd place overall, a few points behind our own coach Jim Zellmer who teamed up with Jason D'Agostino for the weekend. Now that I'm back home and finally 16 I'm looking forward to returning to training on and off the water in preparation for our next event, the local Sarasota Sailfest. And I'll be getting my license Thurdsay!


Long Hours

This past Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were all spent on the water. Thursday our Laser team decided to change up from the norm and sail our sailing program's J22. The seven of us switched out between the J and the coach boat and we all practiced the different positions on board. We mainly worked on tacks, gibes, spinnaker hoists and douses. Between all the positions on the boat, I enjoyed fore-deck the most. When I sail J24's up at the Bradenton Yacht Club I generally am the skipper, so I got to experience a change in position and roles on the boat. Overall it was a good Thursday night practice and as always we got to enjoy the sunset on our way in. Some of the youth sailors in our program are working towards gathering and training some teams on the J22 to go compete at the Sears Cup Qualifiers.

Erick adjusting the camera

On Friday I switched out of keelboat mode and back into the high speed multihull mode. Erick Weinstein, my F18 crew, and I went out for an afternoon practice session. Being out there by ourselves (with a VHF radio and appropriate safety equipment of course) we worked on some crew work issues that we were having, including body weight positioning downwind and smoother transitions through tacks, gibes, and between varying breeze strengths.

Saturday was a great day for training! We had the benefit of the company of professional sailor John Casey with Dalton Tebo and also the Langefelds along with two other all-youth boats out there. The conditions were a steady 10-15 knots with some gusts of slightly more. The water was flat with some occasional moderate chop the more downwind the bay we sailed. In the morning Erick and I replaced our main halyard which we had broken the day before at the end of our practice and then assisted the others in unpacking their boats off trailers. We split our practice into two parts: a morning session from around 10:00 to 1:00 and an afternoon session from around 2:00 to 5:00. We mainly focused our drills around boat-on-boat speed. We all lined up in a row downwind, raised our chutes, and worked on passing the boat in front of us. Erick and I focused on transitioning between the puffs and lulls with body weight movements and on rolling other boats. We felt in tune and powered up on the downwinds but still weren't able to keep up with JC! I guess it's just that new Cirrus R...

On the upwinds two major things stood out to me. First, even if you got rolled at the beginning of the drill you could still hold your ground and possible pass other boats if you worked your way out of their bad air and got into different and more favorable shifts (we kept tacking to a minimum on the upwinds and worked on straight line boatspeed while in close proximity to others). The first time we went upwind JC quickly rolled over us, sailing lower but faster. During the rest of the drill we sailed higher but slower in an effort to get closer to the shore to get some different lifts and it ended up paying off for us. On the second upwind we were the most leeward boat at the start, below the Langefelds. We held our ground through the entire drill, eating header after header as we got farther away from the shore, while the Langefelds gained some ground on us to winward with JC even farther to winward of us. Erick and I tried a different style from the beginning of the day; rather than sailing high and slower, we worked on lower and faster.

We made some slight adjustments to our a couple of our settings on the different upwind and downwind legs owe sailed. On the first downwind leg, we had our boards lower than normal and noticed we powered up more easily but did not sail as low as we would have liked. On the second downwind we raised them up a little more and saw ourselves sitting in a faster and lower groove. Also, on the first upwind we had our boards up a little bit because of the strong breeze but not too high to accommodate for the lighter breeze ahead of us when we got closer to shore. On the second upwind we had our boards up slightly higher, which I feel wasn't very beneficial to us. We had to work harder to keep the boat powered up, even though we had more breeze as we got away from the shore, and we couldn't sail as high as we could the previous upwind leg.

Overall all three of these days were great learning experiences and a ton of fun, especially Saturday. With great conditions and 5 boats on the water (JC in the Cirrus R, 3 Infusions, and a Wildcat), that weekend practice was one of our most efficient ones yet. And a special thanks to David Hillmyer for setting a course for us while we were out there!!

Spring Break



Everyone has their own type of spring break vacations. In previous years I've gone on trips for sailing regattas, visiting family, and just to get away from the norm back home. This year my dad and I traveled by boat to the Dry Tortugas.
On Friday the 9th we finished packing our bags and headed over to the Snead Island Boatworks where our family keeps our 46 foot Outbound sailboat. After having a late dinner at the neighboring Bradenton Yacht Club, we prepared for our trip which was to begin the next day. Saturday morning we left the dock early before sunrise and began heading south. Little did I know that we would be heading this direction for at least the next 24 hours. 


 Sunday morning after seeing nothing but open water for a whole day we finally saw some structure ahead of us. We decided to anchor at Garden Key, which was the main land mass in the Dry Tortugas. The next two days consisted of exploring the reef which surrounded the harbor in which we had anchored and learning about the fort that was built on the Garden Key. It was originally built as a military post to help control trade to many major gulf ports. After it was no longer needed by the military, it was converted into a jail. We also discovered that the most well known person to have ever been held there was Samuel Mudd, doctor of the infamous John Wilkes Booth.


 Our sail back home to Bradenton was relaxing especially during the night when you could see hundreds of stars which normally would not be visible on land. Near the end of the trip we trolled some lures in familiar offshore waters in the Bradenton area and caught some mackerel and one decent sized gag grouper. Overall I had a great time on this trip and I highly suggest visiting the Dry Torgugas. I know I will be again!