I was in a Regatta!

Wow, what a wonderfully long and exhausting weekend!  I actually participated in my very first official regatta. Let me just say it was super fun! 

  I was basically just along for the ride on this race and was not actively sailing myself, although I did pull a line once or twice maybe.  I am usually not one for racing but this is a very special race that occurs every year around this time.  My husband has participated every year for some time and I've attended all the fun events but never the race itself until now.  It is called the Outback Cup Regatta and is held at another sailing club on our lake, Columbia Sailing Club.  It is sponsored by Outback Steakhouse, yum, and proceeds go to the MDA, Muscular Dystrophy Association.  It begins on Friday night with registration and cocktails and ends on Sunday with the finals of the J24 fleet.  This year we had the most participants from our club attending in quite some time.  If I am correct I believe we had a total of six boats from our club and several members teaming up on each others boats like we did.  We attended the Friday night registration party but I didn't bring the camera for that, only for the race.

This is Columbia Sailing Club the morning of the race.  They have a new clubhouse built two years ago.  Isn't it gorgeous!

The skippers meeting was held at 11:00am.  We had to leave our club at 9:30am in order to motor over across the lake to attend the meeting.  This means I spent Friday afternoon and Saturday AM preparing foods to pack and take with us for the race since we would be out all day.

Here are a few more boats arriving for the race.

This was one of our club members, John. All participants need to attend the meeting and have to tie up to the docks which means rafting up to each other to cross over to the docks.

More of our club members, Debbie and Simon.

They are shown here tying on their "class" ribbon before the race.  All of our members were participating in the Cruising fleet race. There is another division of racer boats which are mostly J-24's.  They are more hard core and race separately from the cruisers.   All the boats in the cruising fleet race are divided up into several different classes based on several things and given a colored ribbon according to what class you are in.

This is my husband making his way back from the meeting towards the boat we were on.

I did not attend the meeting and opted instead to sit on the boat and wait.

We were on our friends boat a Catalina 30, called the Dragonfly.

This is one of the owners, Bud coming aboard.

And the other owner, Ray,  talking to his wife and daughter who were on the way by land.

Time for all the boats to head out to the mark, our starting point and wait for our start.

Here we are all jockeying towards the mark to start.  This is where it get's a little dicey as everyone get's very close together.  I put away the camera  at this point so I could stay focused so I don't have any super close up shots of our competitors.  

Bud and his wife Audrey counting down the seconds before we begin.

And here, we're off!  These photo's were taken of us by another member from her boat.

Another  club member of ours, Frank and his crew.

Other sailors.

This boat was pretty cool.  It had brown sails which is very unusual, kind of reminds me of a boat you would have on your mantle, huh?

It was a beautiful and long day and the winds were very light making it slow going.  Then right after we rounded the island and were on the way back to the finish lines don't you know the wind all but died.  This is where everyone gets very hot and tired but we held in there and finished up fourth in our class.  

After the race we dropped sail and motored back to our clubhouse to shower and change and get ready for dinner back at the other sailing club.  

Ray and his beautiful daughter, Elizabeth are very excited to be going back to our clubhouse to get ready for our steak dinner provided by Outback.   Dinner was at 6:00pm which meant we all had to hustle getting ready and then drive our cars over to the other club.  

Sorry, I forgot to bring my camera back to the dinner.  The food was delicious but I was so exhausted that we ate and made it a short evening and got home around 9:00pm.  What a day!

Looks like we missed all the later fun.  I borrowed this photo of our captain and his wife enjoying the night from another member.  I don't know how they were still going, but I sure wasn't.  LOL!

I spent Sunday relaxing and revisiting all the memorial tributes of 9/11.  Lot of tears and sad memories but I am so thankful to know that we live in a country that is still so filled with love and compassion and the spirit of freedom.  Freedom that allows us to live as this!

Thanks for taking a look with me today.

I hope you enjoyed your visit!