Greetings Race Fans,

We have had perfect weather sailing on Biscayne Bay this week and today was the most spectacular. Sunny, mid seventies, 10-15 knots of wind out of the southeast, and no powerboat waves. We sailed far out in the bay near Stiltsville on a long Olympic Triangle course. The racing was all about the clouds, with clear skies yielding more wind and a right shift, and lighter wind under the clouds.

Greetings Race Fans!

When you are sailing in a fleet with nearly 100 boats, the start line has to be at least a mile long. It took nearly an hour to get the start off for Race Four in shifty 18-20 knots winds with short chop and when it finally happened, the boats on the right were in a big righty, and the boats on the left were in a big lefty and were able to tack and cross the fleet. We were on the pin end (left) of the line but were far enough down that just after the gun a pack of ten boats, led by John Dane and Austin Sperry, were able to cross us by 100 yards just seconds into the race.

Tuesday night, with the help of my website collaborators, Dale Hyerstay and Ernie Reuter, I made a presentation to the LCYC Board of Directors regarding the new website. Members were updated on the current status and future plans for the site, as well as how and why we moved to this new system. They had great questions and feedback and everyone was excited about all the new possibilities this database-driven site can offer our members and management.

Check out our news for sailing news from around the web. This uses RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology to pull news headlines from other sites that offer news feeds. Right now, we have feeds from just a few sites, but I will add more in the future. Currently, we get news feeds from Scuttlebutt, BYM Water Sports News and the International Sailing Federation.

Dear Race Fans,

Today was a tough day for Team Horton Nichol on Biscayne Bay. We never felt "right" in the boat and finished 22nd out of 91 teams.

While our spirits were high after yesterday's practice session, we knew something wasn't 100% right with our equipment. Perhaps it was some rust from the layoff after our strong performance at the Miami Olympic Classes Regatta in January. More likely, some of our gear was out of whack after the strain we put on the boat in the windy final medal race at the OCR. To complicate matters, we were seeing 40 degree shifts in the north-northeast breeze that was as light as 7 knots and as high as 14 as we tuned up this morning. Two-time Olympic gold medallist and seven-time Bacardi Cup winner Mark Reynolds with his crew Christan Finnsgard sailed an incredible race to take the early lead in the series. There's only one race a day at the Bacardi Cup over six days, so every race is crucial.