2008 Puget Sound Spring Regatta (PSSR)

Off to Seattle once again for PSSR, a great race to kick the season off with some tight racing and a decent fleet. We went into a nine boat fleet as scratch boat, something that happens a lot to us, and looked like some decent racing. We had our good friend Nate and the olsen 25, two moore 24s, a holder 20, a U20, and a martin 242 (along with some others). I was excited to see how the boat did with the newly sanded bottom and keel. Too bad the conditions had other ideas....


Joe decided to burn some of our down time with his renditions of popular George Michael hits.

The wind filled in for two races on saturday and since we had the H1 on deck, we all decided that no one wanted to get the L1, so we raced with the heavy sail. Due to our laziness, we placed 6th and 4th......not some of our finer work.

After Joe signaled to our competitors via sign language, that we were out of beer, I decided to engauge in a pre game ritual that had gone by the wayside on Saturday....easy cheese...

Ahhhh...much better - With easy cheese pumping through our veins and the L1 up, we managed to sail a very solid second day nailing all the shifts and pulling off a 3rd and 1st place finish, moving us from 6th on sat to 3rd overall for the weekend...I'll take it!

2008 Frostbite

After all the work that we put into the boat, it was time to see if things paid off. To do this, we sailed in the local WINSA series frostbite regatta in March. It was an exciting no holds death match against bob......yes only one other boat to race in the flying division, oh well. Here was the intense action looked like on board...!!!

We had fun mostly and consumed a lot of easy cheese. We ended up winning the series and clinched the victory when we shoveled the snow off the deck and went racing the last day when our competition was a no show.

Winter Repair

After our run in with the big red boat, we had some work to do. I decided to undertake the glass repair since I felt I was partly to blame and even though the other guy offered to pay for it, I figured it would be a fun winter project anyway. We also decided to do some work to the bottom and keel. I started out by making a mold of the exterior of the boat with some peel ply and plywood. I then glassed from the inside against this mold and build the layers back up to the original thickness. After that, some fairing compound and some gelcoat, and we are back in business. I would bet it is now the strongest part of the boat!

I also decided to see if we couldn't address the small but persistant crack that forms on our keel between the fiberglass stump and the lead section. I was convinced this was caused by low torque on the six keel bolts, and turns out I was right! They were barely snug, so I reefed them down and now feel much better about the keel. We even made a template and faired the keel from top to bottom and spent a good amount of time ensuring it was symmetrical.

Joey approves of the glass work and he finished the repairs off with his magic gel coat touch. I think the words "looks factory" came out of his mouth.......

2007 Grand Prix

So the Seattle Yacht Club puts on a three day event in the beginning of Nov called Grand Prix. It is an invitational regatta and you must qualify during the season to attend. We managed to pull a third place finish at Race Week, so we were going to grand prix. It is usually very cold, and it usually blows fairly hard at least one day. That was the case again this year. This would mark the first time that I drove at Grand Prix, but not my first rodeo. The previous boat that I sailed on, Isabeau, managed to win our class three years running, not too shabby. Anyway, we had a tough fleet as always, and had to sail against the fastest boats in our rating band.

Friday usually has one medium distance race to get the blood pumping for the weekend, we saw light winds for this race and had a so so start. It was fun to see the broad spectrum of boats that were in our fleet, a moore 24, a pocket rocket 22, an Olsen 25, a Ranger 26, Santa Cruz 27, and some others. Here is a shot taken right after our start Friday.....

The bad news, was that the wind had other plans and died right before we got to the finish, very frusterating to get so close and watch as the others come from behind, nothing new to us......

So Saturday saw some heavy air, and we were ready, sailing with five, with the help of our buddy Rich. We managed to have two over early starts, putting us in bad position of each upwind leg. The wind built as the day went on and we manged to end up at the weather mark with the big boat fleet bearing down on us. We were on the lay line doing fine, when we were tacked on by a larger boat (I think it was Veloce, but they did apoligize....) so we went into pinch mode, more and more big boats surrounded us, until it was obvious that were were not going to make the mark. At this point in time I tried to tack onto port, but had no room to duck or cross anyone, so we flopped back onto stbd, just to realize that Shoot the Moon, a peterson 40, was also in pinch mode coming up right behind us. I tried to yell, but they had stalled and lost helm, so I sat in horror as I watched a wave lift their bow up, and dropp it right onto our port transom. The impact drove our boat forward rapidly, and I bore off as quickly as I could to clear the scene. They didn't even realize they hit us and kept on racing. By the time shell shock was over, we were way too far to hail them to protest, and I pointed our horse to the stable with a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomache.

We evaluated the damage when we arrived back at the dock, and it was a pretty large impact, about the size of a grapfruit, complete with their red paint. I felt horrible, as it wasn't even my boat! We sat around and watched the rest of the days racing while eating burgers and shakes from the local diner. Once Shoot the Moon arrived back at the dock, Vic and I went to go have a conversation with the owner to sort this all out. They were totally cool about the whole thing and offered to pay for the damage. Winter project is all I could think...... Needless to say, even dispite missing a couple races, we were coming back for more on Sunday since the forecast was for more wind!

Sunday saw a great northerly and a long kite run down past Elliot bay. We had a long slug back upwind and manged to even learn that the lee side of the Ferries have a HUGE wind shadow, that is a funny story....once we climbed out of the water, the wind returned and off we went again, looking around to see if anyone had saw that....we found out later that some people did and had a good laugh. We pulled off a second place finish (missed first by three seconds after racing for 3 hours!!!) and felt like we had redeemed ourselves. I arrived home and was met at the door by my wife, holding a pregnacy test.....we were going to have another little one!! ! That was enough excitment for me for one weekend, and a great ending to a great season for Shenanigans. We finished middle of the pack, but it felt to me like we had won!

2007 Saragota Sprint (aka Baby Island)

So Baby Island is a race in August that WINSA puts on that is a nice relaxing pace compared to Race Week a month earlier. The big thing this year for us was the engineering genious that Joey displayed when adding our new SailComp to the boat. Not to be out done by fancy brackets, or recommended mounting ideas in the manual, Joey pulled one right out of the 3M play book.....scotch tape. I have never met anyone who has scotch tape on a boat, in fact, I couldn't produce you a roll of scotch tape from my desk as I type. Not this guy, he pulls out a full roll, and in under one minute, had the sailcomp mounted in a very seaworthy manner right next to our chartplotter. Classic.......







As you can see, we have our game faces on, and a good thing too, since the well known racing yacht, "Yeah Dogg" made an apperance to go head to head with Shenanigans. I know what you are probably thinking, "Is that Chad in the back of that boat?" The answer is yes! Either he was too drunk to realize he was holding onto the tiller and not the spinnaker pole, or he is doing a great job acting like a winner yacht racing skipper.


Yeah Dogg managed to pull out front and hang onto a nice lead in the 15 knots southerly that had develped after a light air start. It took us half way uphill to catch up to these guys. This is the moment we climbed above them and passed them after an hour tacking dual.




Chad and the gang ended up correcting out over us, and claimed a first place trophy, good for him! Very cool to see Chadly driving a boat.

2007 Whidbey Island Race Week

Race week is always an amazing event, and this year was no different. It was our first year with Shenanigans, but marked my 13th year at race week, the previous two I drove my hotfoot 20, so I was getting more comfortable at the helm at this venue. We had a pretty tough fleet and we found ourselves as scratch boat, so if anyone was in front of us, they were beating us.

We sailed with the usual suspects, Vic, Joey, K-Dawg, Rich, and I even brought my younger sister, squirt, along on Friday (I think she learned some new words). We got off to a rocky start on monday, which included a minor collision at the leeward mark the first day, but didn't phase us. We came back swinging and managed to pull off some pretty decent finishes, including a first!

Our biggest problem was keeping up with an extremely well sailed Hotfoot 27, Egress. These guys were fast and could sail well. They hardly every made mistakes and it was fun to sail against them, as it makes you better. The one I didn't see coming was the threat the Olsen 25s put on us. Nate with Three Ring Circus led the charge and managed to string together a consistant regatta and come out ahead after a tough race on Friday beating us by two points by a great finish on Friday.

The weather was great, consistantly blowing 8-10 from the west with blue skies. The only day we had with light air was Thursday. The typical up the right side down the left proved to be the way to go as usual, although we did take some risks trying out some other routes when we were down and managed to sneak back a few places when no one was watching us.

The boat sailed well and we managed to hold our own going downhill, something I was worried about. We were able to burn down and sail as low as the mastheads, but had to periodically heat it up to gain some boat speed back. All in all, I was very pleased with how the boat performed and how we sailed her.

The real funny story came on Friday, we were in second place by two points to Three Ring, and Friday was forecasted to be light. We watched as the RC attempted to start races in a dying southerly, and bobbed around for a while. After the three blasts came, I started to cheer and get very excited about finishing second in race week, something that almost certainly tempted fate. Turns out the RC was just cancelling the races in progress, and saw a westerly filling in Penn Cove, so off we went to restart in a filling westerly. Well, needless to say I was nervous, as I had to fight off the Olsen to claim my second place trophy! As luck would have it, we were putting together great starts all week, top notch, but on Friday, I managed to let the hotfoot get underneath me and they took us to the moon at the start. The gun went off, the knotmeter was reading 0.0 and we were head to wind, I was bummed! We watched the other boats take off and I knew that we had a long battle ahead of us. The worst thing was, that the RC decided to dust off the gybe mark and placed it in front of Coupville, so it was really two reaching legs, leaving us no room to pass other boats. We manged to come back slightly, but not well enough. We placed 6th, and Nate placed 1st, betting us out of second place by three points. Kudos to those guys for sailing a great regatta.

Here is a great shot of how our starts were going all week, with the exception of Friday.

This year was a blast and we are so excited we did so well!

2007 Northsound Event #2

For 2007 WINSA tried to set up a North Sound Series with Milltown sailing, and they wanted to use Round Whidbey, this Milltown event #2 and Foulweather Bluff as the races. We did two out of the three, and performed well in them. We decided to participate and delivered the boat to Everrett on friday afternoon, and had great weather, a nice 15 knot NW, perfect for a kite ride down. Kevin was waiting for us when we arrived and then brought us to the Ferry and in doing so almost managed to kill us all, but that is another story.....on to the race!


We had a fair amount of boats to sail against, three J30 and an etchells 22 to name a few. It was a great sunny day and we had great winds, downshifting to a 3 about 30 minutes into the race. After that, the pressure came down and it turned into a long haul. A few boats manged to get stuck in the mud as we attempted to round the baby island bouy in a negative tide....brilliant. After that it was a long slow kite ride home, during which I think we all decided we should have brought more sun screen. The worst part was when we ran out of Dr. Pepper........

I think we managed to hold onto a second place finish, coming in just behind Bob, the J30.

2007 Windermere

Well I don't think we have any pictures for this race since it was an action packed event. I think we saw mid twenties all day and even saw 30 a few time (app). Anyway, we sailed well for never having had the boat is these conditions, with a reef in the main the the #3 up, and we didn't even hoist on the last downwind leg.

I had obligations to attend to on Sunday, so we missed racing on sunday, but it was a blast to get the boat out in these conditions. We set the current speed record at this event with a #1 up and a reefed main going down wind, 10.2kts.

2007 Round Whidbey

Well, since we were so lucky in 2006 in this race, we decided to enter again and see if we could make it a repeat. We managed to pull off a great start in about 5knots of breeze, hitting the boat right at the gun with no one on top of us. We shot out of the pack and sat in the lead for a short time. As the breeze started to come up, we found ourselves crossing tacks with Skookumchuck and Lissa for a while before they pulled ahead. That is when the wind shut down just south of Keystone. We floated around for awhile and took the time to catch up on eating and capturing great photo ops...........

Once the wind came back up, we started to move again, only to join the rest of the leaders bobbing at Possesion Point, the south end of Whidbey. This is where we found Grins, the Olsen 30, Veloce, the Bene 36.7 and the rest of the pack, Heart of gold, Bob, and Garuda to name a few. As night time fell, it became time to attempt the heavily argured Mulketio ferry crossing of death. I have always been conservitive when dealing with large ships that go very fast in the middle of night, but some of the other crew (Doug and Joe) are a little more brazin when it comes to this type of thing. So against the desires of a few, I came down to give the ferry some room as it entered the pier on the whidbey side. This was the response that I recieved......

Shortly after this, the wind shut down and we drifted for a few hours. The night pretty much sucked, and at that point we just wanted the misery to be over. As dawn came, we realized that we had stayed in the fight the whole night and were nipping on the heels of one of the best sailed boats in Oak Harbor, Veloce. We managed to get lucky again and pulled off another repeat of last year.

2007 Frostbite Series

Our first regatta series was the feb classic frostbite series put on in Oak Harbor by WINSA. We faced off against a few Olsen 30s and a U20. Mostly this is an opportunity to shake the bugs out and prepare for the upcoming season. The weather this year wasn't too bad and we managed to recruite another sailing member, Ben from down south.

While the racing isn't exactly top notch, it gives us an excuse to go out pretend we know what we are doing.

Obviously we take our racing very seriously. I believe the catch phase "Shut up and trim. Winners don't have fun" was coined during this series.

We did a lot of work on the bottom this winter, new bottom paint and we made the keel fixed, so we faired in the opening around the keel with expoxy. This turned out to be a horrible idea, more about that later. I think the power of bob prevailed this year and we took a second place.

2006 Round Whidbey

So our first race on Shenanigans was Round Whidbey in 06'. This race is a non-stop rounding of Whidbey Island, which is the second longest island in the lower 48 I believe. The route is 72 miles, starting just west of Decpetion Pass and ending in the entrance to Oak Harbor. The race was initially run by the Oak Harbor Yacht club, but after their sail fleet broke apart, Whidbey Island Naval Sailing Association (WINSA) was formed and they have been running this event ever since.

The race starts at 9 am sat morning and has a time limit of 27 hours. It can be a fun fast ride, or a gruling grind. Typically, there are multiple re-starts along the way due to wind and current and makes the race very difficult to plan for. Mostly, we just rely on getting lucky and that seems to work well for us.

Shenanigans was sailed with the gear that she came with this year, nothing too fancy, but everything worked great. We brought along our long time friend Doug, who is no stranger to the sailing scence in Oak Harbor since Vic was carrying around our unborn daugther and wasn't feeling that adventurous.

We managed to hold everyone off the entire race and capitilized on great wind and great current, finishing the race at 11 pm sat night. It was a great ride and we never had to gybe! We won first in class and first over all, a great start. The remaining boats did not finish until the next morning.