Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Race Committee for Thistles; October 9,10

I was Vice Chair for the Thistle Oyster Bowl at SSA on October 8,9. I was expecting to take a camera along and take a pic or two for Doryman, but we had little to no wind. We did squeeze a race off late Saturday in about 5 knots to make it a regatta, but Sunday only teased us with some light breezes in the Severn River; flat calm remained in the Bay. The regatta was called by noon.

The Thistle Class is doing as well as any dinghy class on the Eastern seaboard. Talking with class stalwart Don Moore he can list all the clubs where the class was once strong in the 1960's and 1970's and popular regattas were held, but now.... nothing. But that is how it is with all dinghy classes (with maybe the possible exception of the Lasers). It amazes me the small clubs and lakes the Thistles are still sailed. There are the Pennsylvania lake clubs outside of Philadelphia that I've never heard of. There is also a communal fleet of Thistles that are wet sailed all summer in New Castle Delaware. I have said it before; there is no better sailing dinghy to drift about a lake than a Thistle.

I was puzzling why even fiberglass Thistles have wood gunwhales and wood trim and found out it was a class rule,enforced so the class wouldn't look too plastic. Good rule! I also noted that two of the skippers had been sailing coaches in a previous life. In talking with one of the ex-coaches, I found it interesting, that after coaching kids in plastic 420's and Lasers, they were attracted to a classic dinghy like the Thistle.

I came across a YouTube of an intercollegiate regatta sailed down the road on the Potomac River on the same weekend. You get a good feeling on how the wind teased but ultimately became a no-show.

7 comments:

Baydog said...

Reminds me of the all-but-disappeared Penguin class. Very disappointing.
Thistles are such great sailboats.

doryman said...

Would have loved to see some photos. Even in a drifter, the Thistle is handsome.
Here on the left coast, the Thistle clubs seem to be made up of people who grew up with Thistles and are now of a certain age. I met one fellow at a local regatta, on a ten acre lake, who was eighty and still sailing a woody he'd had most of his life. Not someone to mess with either, apparently.

michael

tillerman said...

There was an active fleet of Thistles at Lake Hopatcong YC in NJ when I was working there a few years ago. Judging by the Thistle class website, LHYC is still running several Thistle regattas a year and attracting decent sized fleets to them.

Doc Häagen-Dazs said...

These pictured look nothing like the Thistles I remember. Not the original. I decided against a Thistle when I bought my I-14. That was then, I guess.....

Doc Häagen-Dazs said...

I just had Trophy Wife look at these shots and she concurs. If the original Thistles looked like these fakes, our choice for an International 14 would have been much easier than it was.

tillerman said...

Um Doc. Sit down. Take a deep breath. Read the post again. Especially the last paragraph. OK now?

Tweezer just posted that video to show us what the wind was like. He didn't say it was of his Thistle regatta.

doryman said...

Misguided perhaps, but he has a point. Though the Thistle maintains a strict one-design, the new boats are a distant cousin to the varnished, molded wood of yore. Modern Thistle sailors still seek out those old boats, not just for their beauty.