Practice Makes Perfect

Fishing Bay Yacht Club held our Annual Junior Regatta on Saturday. We took this opportunity to do a trial run at a small scale version of the Opti Nationals for our sailors and volunteers.

For the sailors it was an opportunity to do some racing on the nationals sailing area. Most of our Opti training is done in FBYC Area A-C, but not D where the USODA Layline Nationals will be held. Beyond that, it was like any other regatta for the sailors.

For the volunteers, it was a chance to practice setting up the optimist trapezoid course. We also got to test out some of our radio and communications equipment and processes.

What we hadn’t planned on practicing was our emergency evacuation plan. Lo and behold a small and severe thunderstorm appeared on radar and was forecasted to make a direct hit. We have two evacuation plans for the Optimist Nationals which we’ll go over in detail closer to the regatta but they basically consist of

1. Towing all of the optis the ~1 mile back to the launch site at Deltaville Boatyard and
2. If we need to get off the water so quickly that towing would take too much time – sailing 1/2-3/4 of a mile to the Stove Point beaches of various club members.

Since our junior regatta was being held out of FBYC and Deltaville Boatyard is still in marina mode and not set up to handle optis, we had to go with #2. In the end everyone got off the water safely, some of the sailors got a break from the heat and got to watch some of the USA vs. Ghana soccer game while the storm passed, and all of the sailors got to go back out on the water for more racing once the storm passed.

It was a successful day of practice for everyone involved and we’re that much more ready to bring on the USODA Layline Nationals!