2004 Lido 14 Sr. Class Championship Regatta

Day 1 (Monday Aug. 9) Report

The traditional summer winds on Fernridge Reservoir, according to locals, starts out as a thermal wind that is often from the South but eventually is overtaken later in the afternoon by the prevailing Westerly breeze.  For this reason, according to EYC member Ron Fish, the club typically doesn't host regattas on summer days because there isn't much good wind in the afternoon.  Of course this wasn't the case when competitors from Washington, Oregon, Utah, and California converged on Eugene.  Instead they found a brisk Northerly breeze blowing all day and night!  "It's never like this." seemed to be the phrase of the day.  Sailors arriving early and practicing on Saturday claimed puffs into the low 20 knot range.  The winds were consistently above 10 knots on shore and probably averaged more towards 15 out in the middle of the lake.

Two practice races held on Sunday in these conditions and with no mishap and despite all the claims by locals that these winds weren't normal and were sure to blow out, no one quite believed it.  Sure enough, come Monday morning there was no wind!

There was enough (5knots?) to get the first set of round robin qualifier races off but the wind went kaput and the fleet sailed back to the club under postponement to wait for the typical Westerly to fill.  A few hours later (2ish?) the winds came in and two heavy weather races were held.  Lots of hard hiking and pretty fast downwind legs but fortunately very little tragedy and destruction to report.

After ranking the competitors from their Qualification Series results (below), the top half are assigned to the Gold Flight to compete for the title of Class Champion while the balance of the competitors sail for champion of the Silver Flight.  In addition, each team will carry a score into the Championship Series representing their rank within their flight (Gold or Silver.)  The estimated carry over scores are shown below with the Gold Flight teams highlighted in yellow.

Qt is the number of points from finishes of three qualifier races, rank is the overall rank of each team from the qualifiers, and Carry is the score (estimated) that the teams will carry over into the Championship Series.