St. Petersburg Sailing Association
Hey Sailor,
Here’s your dot points of SPSA stuff to get you through January.
- New Year’s Day Pursuit Race: We had 16 boats swarming around the starting line for this years race. However only 13 boats reported finishing times, one new member was out fact finding and I have no idea about why the other two were there. Congratulations to Arista and Tack Tick for taking the liquids in the spinnaker fleet and Desiderata, Legacy and Cayennita III for earning their bottles in the cruising fleet. The racing was close as all boats finished within a 20 minute window. We also welcomed Legacy, a Catalina 310 and her skipper Dave Roberts and Meridian, a Beneteau Oceanis 331 and her skipper Jon Meliferas to the SPSA Racing Scene with their earned SPSA burgee.
- Winter/Spring Series kicks off 16 January at 11 AM. This is the first race day of the 2nd half of the SPSA Series. Tim Snyder of Sea Life will be the race committee. Please register for the event so we know who’s coming. This helps get the race records in order. Here’s the link. http://spsa.us/racing/regattas/ Click the Enter button. As a member, you race for free (other than the measly $49 annual membership fee we charge). If you intend to use a cruising chute please read the second sub dot point in the Board Meeting recap.
- 6 January Board Meeting Fallout.
- The WSIEH handicap system is taking a break. We will be racing under PHRF for the remainder of this year and maybe longer than that. The WSIEH system, which changes handicaps after every race, was too aggressive with handicap adjustments when only one or two race results are in hand. Although this system shows promise that old boats with old sails can be competitive, it needs more development work. It was a unanimous vote. We look forward to one day having a perfect handicap system that everybody loves.
- Cruising class boats may use cruising spinnakers, as described by WFPHRF Class Rules-Appendix E. You’ll pay a handicap hit and you must inform the Race Committee Chair of your intention by the Tuesday before the first race of any race or series.
- Watch for the updated SI’s to b posted very soon on the SPSA web site. Here the link http://spsa.us/racing/regattas/ on the Menu Bar, click on the Documents drop down menu and select List/Search.
- We discussed other stuff not worth reporting here.
- Surge captured the December honor and will ow be displaying the large and beautiful KoB flag for all of January. Charles Archer and his Surge crew ran the course twice on Dec 21st, a really windy day. Once with full sails and once with a reefed main. Fritz Kloepfel and his crew on Libèlula were also out on December 21st. All three runs on the the 21st scored in the top ten of all corrected times. Surges full main was the top performance.
- Libèlula appears determined to acquire KoB honors having already posted the time to beat for January.
- The most recent KoB data will be posted soon. Look for a January 2021 time stamp. Here’s the link http://spsa.us/spsa/wp/wp-content/uploads/KOB_results.pdf