2012 AYC Tulip Regatta – Breakdown, musings, and other blithering what-not

It seems Anacortes Yacht Club regattas are a lot like an AC/DC concert in that people will tell you every year that this regatta was the best one yet… And I’m hard pressed to argue with them. Tulip Regatta 2012 kicked off Saturday morning to fickle pressure, glassy water but patience was awarded when a steady breeze filled in from the west and got off 3 races for the day. Sunday came with twice the pressure than the day before and after a little delay while a tanker was set the race committee fired off another 3 races for keelboats and pitchforks… If you were trapped out on a Hobie F18 you got an extra race each day for being so damn fast…

F18’s are exceptionally fast for boats without a convenient place to mount a beer cooler. Team Storm took home 1^st place with an array of solid sailing and distractingly colorful canvas, followed by the crew who just started shaving in Barely 18 with 2^nd place, and Laser Tag in 3^rd.

In the big boat PHRF fleet Teddy Bear mauled her competition taking 1^st place with four bullets in 6 races, followed by the fancy Bellingham Beneteau 36.7 Vitesse in 2^nd, and the freshly painted Baltic 39 Pangaea in 3^rd.

Smaller and sportier PHRF boats in fleet 3 saw the mighty Viper 640 KAA just barely edge the boys and girl aboard the Wavelength 24 Surfin Bird for 1^st and 2^nd respectively. Back in the mix with a fresh new bottom the J30 Celebration partied her way into 3^rd place.

In the “Alcoholics Among-us” fleet, what might be called “upset of century” this side of the Swinomish cut saw SC27 Giant Slayer, with a few new Ullman sails in her inventory, put the hurt on local favorites Wild Rumpus with 5 bullets in 6 races. Rumpus settled for 2^nd place and the boat thats name just changed but still takes the same amount of syllables to get through it (6 by my count), Ziggy and the Outlaws sailed to the podium in 3^rd place.

With the largest PHRF fleet of the regatta, fleet 5 saw hot and heavy competition at the top with a mere one (1) point separating 1^st through 3^rd places. With 12.5 points the always well sailed and well rum’d Catalina 27 Syn-di-cat took 1^st place honors over fellow Catalina 27 Handyman with 13 points for their 2^nd place efforts. And taking 3^rd place with 13.5 points back to Bellingham was the mighty San Juan 28 Hoerndag.

Lastly in the San Juan 24 fleet, another dominating performance from the boat that seems to sail with an imaginary 6 more feet of waterline than her sister ships, 1^st place went to the Magic Juan winning all 6 races. 2^nd place was hard fought for and the mighty Merlin did just enough to take silver from Renaissance in 3^rd place.

Lots of fun to be had on and off the course.

• Only one recorded blowout of the regatta – Tom Dixon’s favorite camo shorts. Welcome back to the bow Tom, the back of the boat is always screwing you.

• I’m guessing that Wild Rumpus consistently empties the shelves of ACE Hardware’s duct tape stock for their outfits.

• I think Shannon Buys should be restricted from purchasing a new main for Magic Juan until he wears out his old one.

• Pangaea is sporting a restoration paint job that relives the days back when she saved two of every living creature from the great flood. It turned out really nice!

• Nice to see Team “The Kraken” keep their rig up for a whole regatta!

• In news of “things that have never happened in Anacortes before”, while they weren’t exactly “kicked-out”, an Emoyeni crew member was definitely denied re-entry into the brown lantern Saturday night (or maybe Sunday morning). Alcohol was a factor.

• Lucky Duck, with guest power boating crew, sent up a duck-dodge style kite hoist designed for laughs but not for speed. They actually managed to get the sideways kite drawing for a second or two. Boat speed readings might have been converted to mph on Saturday.

• Did anybody mention that this year was the “Best Tulip Regatta Ever?”

• Winner, winner, Salmon Dinner! Walt Meagher (whose mustache curls naturally like that) and a small army of volunteers served up 80lbs of the tasty stuff this year!

• John Gunn, feeling significantly under the weather, raced the whole weekend aboard Little Annie single handed. He may have also tied one hand behind his back to give the fleet a fightin chance!

• Eric Beemer has really big friends to help sail a small boat so well…

• I think everyone can agree that the boat with the best name of the regatta goes to the newly christened “Thunder Muscle” of the SC27 fleet. Of course it’s a yellow one.

• I’d like to have clever things to say about the Hobie Tigers but they were too quick for me to observe anything besides impressive seamanship and “holy shit those things accelerate!” 

• Battleshots was a great and/or terrible idea. Stephanie should be commended and/or punished.