COVID Shut Down Provides Growth Opportunity For Newport Harbor Team Racing
By Alex Curtiss III
For over a decade during the month of April, the Newport Beach turning basin turns into a team race sanctuary. For a week, locals will hear starting horns, umpire whistles and plenty of screaming. To the Newport Beach Peninsula, it is spring break on the water. But in April of 2020, there wasn’t a sound being made. In fact, as I stood at the corner of Bay Island and looked out, there wasn’t one boat on the water being used. We had to change that.
The following Friday, I sent an email to our local team race group to see who might be interested in doing some on the water team race practice. Thinking I would not get much response, I did not have any expectations due to the “rona-noya”. All of a sudden about 40 emails came in all of them saying: “See you Friday at 3pm.” We were off.
Luckily, Newport Harbor Yacht Club saw this time off as an opportunity to spend more time on the water. My good friend, Jake LaDow, and I put our heads together to come up with several “practice” team race events in various formats to fill on the water time. We hosted four regattas in five months, and 15 practices in 17 weeks. At the height of it all we had 42 Harbor 20’s on the water. The Harbor 20 itself made for a great “socially distant” boat to sail. Your butt is not allowed to leave the cushions, so hiking is not allowed. Crew and skipper sit about 6’ apart from one another, and there is always a great breeze in the turning basin so people felt very comfortable going sailing.
We also experimented with several different formats. First, we hosted the June Gloom Team Race, which was a 2v2 format. Then we hosted our club championship in a 3v3 configuration. We hosted a 2K team race regatta in August, which is a format that we think very highly of and would like to see other clubs give a chance. Then we hosted a Turkey Brawl, which was a 3v3 team race with one skipper (of the three on a team) over the age of 60. It was also a random pairing, so teams were composed of sailors who might not always sail together. The last COVID rules regatta we hosted was the West Side Team Race that was in April 2021. We invited some other clubs to come and play and marked the first time in over a year that we were allowed to have other clubs to come sail. That format was 3v3 with one skipper over the age of 60. It was a super competitive event that was won by NHYC members.
Newport Harbor was very fortunate to increase the amount of team race participation throughout the past year. We are very fortunate to have so many good team racers at our club which was aptly noted by Jon Pinkney. During the Turkey Brawl, he counted 22 ICSA All-Americans (including himself), 4 College Sailors of the Year, 7 College Sailor of The Year finalists, 4 Team Race World Champions, and 3 America’s Cup Sailors. Obviously, many of these people are in different stages of their lives where sailing is not their priority anymore, but for this past year when the world stood still (or at least in lockdown) sailing, and particularly team racing, was an excellent local outlet for each and every one of them.
It looks as though the world is headed back to some semblance of normal. We look forward to the opportunity to see our team race friends in other places. We, Newport Harbor Yacht Club, look forward to seeing competitors back in our team race sanctuary next April for the 2022 Edition of the Baldwin Cup.
About the Author: Alex Curtiss is a team race enthusiast who works for North Sails. He does a lot of one design sailing for work but team races in his spare sailing time.
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