- Jack Bennett (#005) sails his RC Laser in the 2011 Squaw Island Race on Canandaigua Lake.
The next special race for the Canandaigua RC Laser Fleet will be the “Eight-Legged Race” which will be held at 4 p.m. on Saturday, July 2 at the Canandaigua Yacht Club. Each boat will need a skipper and 3 additional people to help sail as “crew.”
What is the Eight-Legged Race?
1 Skipper + 3 Crew = 8 Legs
This will be a series of races using multiple marks where each crew member, as well as the skipper, will sail one leg of the race and then pass the transmitter to the next crew members as each rounds a mark of the course. Full details will be posted shortly but go ahead and mark your calendars and then locate and start training your crew!
In other news, several of the women who come out to watch the Sunday afternoon sailing asked if they could have their own race so we’ve started a weekly Women’s Series. Tracy Blevins and Missy Porter are tied for first place after two weeks of racing, followed closely by Terry Schmidt.
The women will race at least once each Sunday during a break in the regular series which will usually happen around 5 p.m. The series will continue weekly throughout the year until Sailor’s Night where we’ll calculate overall low point scores for awards.
We usually have an extra boat or two available if there are any other women who would like to stop by and try their hands on the controls of an RC Laser.
In regular Sunday RC Laser sailing, Bill Blevins has taken the lead in both the overall season high point “Batting Average” scoring as well as in the Spring “First Place” Series.
As many of you know, we’ve implemented a staggered start sequence to spread out the fleet at the starting line where new sailors who have not won more than 3 races get to start 1 minute before the fleet. After winning 3 races, those skippers start 30 seconds ahead of the pack and after winning 3 more races, skippers start at the gun.
Bill Blevins and Gary Schmidt have worked their way to the scratch fleet and very clean air for their starts while David Turnbull, Bill Schmidt and Jonathan Gorbold will now be starting 30 seconds early after winning 3 races. Jack Bennett is only a win away from joining them in the middle start. Everyone else is getting better starts with less stress, bumping and banging into each other on the once-crowded start line.
And finally… stay tuned for more details about our fleet going up to race with the Rochester Area Model Yachting Association in a very unique day of sailing that they are proposing where our RC Lasers will be responsible for completing one leg of a relay race where we’ll be placed on teams with other types of model sailboats!
