Tuesday, June 23, 2009

On the Road; Brigantine NJ

The Mid Atlantic Classic Moth Championships were this past Saturday; hosted, as always, by George Albaugh at the Brigantine YC. Brigantine is the next beach town north from Atlantic City, the East Coast gambling mecca. Sailing takes place on the back bay, hemmed in by marsh but still within clear sight of the Atlantic City skyline of casinos and wind turbines. Thirteen Classic Moths showed up despite an abysmal weather forecast.

Fellow road warrior John Z. and I went up in double deck trailer mode. Saturday's forecast, like the rest of the East Coast, was for rain and more rain. Luckily Sat. dawned cloudy with no rain but shortly after launching, around 10 am, a dark line appeared in the West and rapidly ensconced our racing in moderate to heavy showers. The plan was for five short races, back to back, to avoid the predicted thunderstorms of the afternoon. Well, we avoided the thunderstorms, and thankfully, the rain let up once the racing ended only to start up with a lighter drizzle when we packed the Moths up.

It was a light air day. The start line was short and the weather mark was tucked up under the weather shore to make for some very tricky conditions. The Classic Moths are like the 6 meter keelboat class, we divide our trophies up depending on the age and the speed of the various hull designs.

Mike Parsons, who owned the favored left end of the start line the last two races, won the higher performance Gen 2 division. Joe Courter, sailing his Maser (modified Laser) registered some high finishes to take Gen 1 (slower, higher wetted surface designs) and Greg Duncan took out the Vintage Division (restored hulls from designs dating from the 1940's and older).

Your humble scribe finished third in Gen 2; getting to the weather mark OK but getting stuck in the water in the calm zone compared to the high flying Mistral designs.

Some pictures from Ingrid Albaugh. Click on picture for a larger, higher res view.


Start with Harrahs casino and wind turbines in the background.



Erik Albaugh coming to grips with the narrow waterline Mistral design.



Exiting the dead zone around the weather mark. Raining pretty hard.




Approaching the reach mark.


2 comments:

Tillerman said...

Aaah, there's some names from my past.

Tweezerman said...

We have a party on Friday at Joe Couter's place across the bay in Absecon. The Atlantic City skyline is spectacular. One side of Harrahs casino is a gigantic light board, rolling out different pictures every minute or so.