As a three-time winner of the Butler Cup, all I wanted for my birthday this year was one more. Unfortunately, that wasn’t meant to be. It seems like each year the Long Beach Yacht Club symmetrical pole Catalina 37s get more physically demanding, we just get older… or maybe a bit of both. On Saturday morning last weekend, on a sunny but cool day in California, after a few last minute rearrangements of the crew list, I quickly realized I was one of the more ‘senior members’ of the team and sailing for the first time with over half of the group.
A typical grade 4 match race is geared towards developing club teams, like ours, primarily comprised of good amateur sailors looking to push their boat handling and communication skills to the next level. So you can imagine how seeing the final roster for the 2019 Butler Cup with two teams signed up that are currently ranked top 15 (one was former #1 worldwide) came as a bit of a surprise and turned what was supposed to be a warm up regatta into essentially a grade 2 match race event. Two of the other teams had multiple paid professional sailors aboard, some of whom were this year’s Congressional Cup entrants to boot. Eyes and mouths wide open, we docked off on schedule, alongside the other SDYC team skippered by Summer Greene, and headed out to the course.
Our 2019 Butler Cup team included the following sailors: Max Hutchinson, Parker Mitchell, Matt Hecht, Kara Voss, Jack Franco, Ty Reed (Saturday only), Brian Janney (Sunday only) and Chris Nesbitt.
Having only sailed in one grade 2 match race event before, I was cautiously optimistic on Saturday morning and our primarily SDYC member team got off to a good start winning race 1 in convincing fashion. However, a few races later, our main trimmer and most experienced crew lost his footing and went down in the cockpit hard, leaving a nice gash on his head. The decision was made to stop racing so he could be removed via umpire boat and receive medical attention. This left us with only 6 crew and our tactician and member of our 4-person match race travel team for this season, flyweight Kara Voss, taking over the pit responsibilities (at an event that allowed 8 per boat with no weight limit) for the rest of the day in a building breeze. For the remainder of Saturday, while we had our moments, as a team we couldn’t consistently put all the necessary pieces together to win many more races, finishing the day up with a disappointing 3 and 5 record. It is worth noting that in one of the Saturday losses we had incidental contact with an umpire boat on the approach to a leeward mark rounding so significant it punctured the inflatable side tube of the RIB, completely deflating it. Unfortunately, umpires don’t take kindly to that kind of intimidation-- we were not granted redress. Undeterred, we still found time to grab a late birthday dinner on Saturday night and contemplate how we could learn from the experience to improve our results the following day.
Sunday brought similar conditions and we were fortunate to add a new crew that had more match racing experience than the rest of us combined, Brian Janney of North Sails. That talent and experience boost put us on more level footing. We finished with a 4-2 record for the day and 5-2 for the second round robin, including wins over two of the top 3 teams on the leaderboard from Saturday.
This coming weekend is the Ficker Cup, where the top 2 teams will advance to the Grade 1 (professional world match caliber) Congressional Cup. Many of the same teams that raced last weekend in the Butler Cup will be in attendance, plus a few more “rocked-up” groups, so we expect the competition to be stiff as the afternoon breeze picks up in Long Beach. Our final group of only 6 sailors, as allotted by the venue, are up for the challenge. Given the stakes, we suspect even more paint swapping on the high seas this weekend so keep an eye out for our post-race report. Our club match racing team would like to thank the Competition Fund and the San Diego Yacht Club for their continued support of our match racing this season as we gain the necessary experience to continue to compete and represent at the top west coast match race events.