Family Teams on Top at NOOD Chicago

Chicago, IL (June 17, 2016) – Favorable conditions yielded flatter water and a more consistent breeze as hundreds of local and national sailors aboard more than 150 sailboats launched onto Lake Michigan for the Helly Hansen National Offshore One Design (NOOD) Regatta’s second day of racing. Friday’s competitive sailing provided an outlet for families to come together this Father’s Day weekend.

Chicago local Bill Smith and crew aboard Wooton continue to lead the J/111 class after the second day of its North American Championship. However, close behind is Karl Brummel, Steve Henderson and Mike Mayer’s Kashmir, and Rob Ruhlman’s Spaceman Spiff, which is third overall.

Ruhlman — who’s sailing with his daughter, Meaghan, and son, Ryan, out of Cleveland, Ohio — said, “We worked on things after yesterday, and what we were doing differently was driving the boat with fewer big adjustments to the main trim.”

While the battle among the J/111 class played out, the other fleets joined in on the sailing fun, including the iconic Tartan 10 fleet.

Loaded with family members, Don Wilson’s Convergence won all three races in its class. Among Wilson’s crew was his 14-year-old daughter, his 7-year-old son, his cousin, his sister and his brother-in-law.

“It’s a fantastic class to be a part of,” said crew member Tod Reynolds. “They’re all great people, and Don’s daughter is the one who really enjoys it. She wanted to sail and that’s why we’re racing it this weekend.”

Like Wilson, Beneteau 36.7 skipper Mark Norris of Split Decision — which leads its class after today’s races — is also enjoying the regatta with his children, including his son Nick and his fiancé. Norris attributes his team’s top finishes to consistently good starts and great boat speed.

There’s more racing in store for Saturday, including the North Sails Rally Race — a one-day, pursuit-style race open to sailors of all levels with boats in all classes. NOOD Regatta sponsor North Sails will also present the award for Local Boat of the Day.

The overall winner of the Chicago NOOD regatta, along with the winners in each individual class and the winner of the J/111 North American Championship, will be announced at the culmination of the event on Sunday, June 19.

The overall winner, chosen based on the strongest finish in the most competitive class, will receive an invitation to compete against winners from the other four series stops in the Helly Hansen NOOD Regatta Championship, hosted by Sunsail, in the British Virgin Islands Oct. 22-28.

Source: NOOD Chicago

Event details – Scoreboard – Photos

Report from J/111 class:
Sailboat racing is indeed a game of inches. Ask Wooton’s skipper Bill Smith, who continues to lead the J/111 North American Championship at the Helly Hansen NOOD Regatta in Chicago, but now by only 2 points over Karl Brummel, Steve Henderson & Mike Mayer’s Kashmir.

It was inches that made the difference in two of Wooton’s races today, and as Smith analyzed what went wrong after racing, he placed the blame squarely upon himself, not that of his hard-working crew. “It was my inexperience in critical moments,” he says, describing one downwind finish in which they were overlapped with Kashmir. “There was a moment when we were on starboard and I could have heated it up, pushed them out a bit, taken control and then jibed to cross the favored end of the line. Everyone on the boat knew we needed to do it, but I didn’t. They literally beat us by 3 inches.”

Conditions were tamer than Thursday’s races for the J/111 fleet, which is now two days into its 15-boat Championship. The flatter water and more consistent breeze, says Smith, made it easier for them but also for other teams who posted good results, including Rob Ruhlman’s Spaceman Spiff, which finished third in the day’s first race and then went on to win the next two.

“We did a better job of getting off the line than we had been doing,” says Ruhlman, whose family team from Cleveland, Ohio climbed into third overall, only 5 points out of first. “In the second and third races, we just got away with good starts and sailed our own race.” Downwind, he adds, their technique is to sail deeper than others. “We tend to do it a bit more efficiently,” he says. “It’s our forte.”

It was anything but an easy day, however, as Split Decision battled all day with FOG, which engaged them in several tacking and jibing duels. “We started to get into it with them a few times, but we didn’t want to wear out our trimmer, so we broke away as soon as we could,” says Norris. “Even downwind at times we’d be a half-length apart with them, and they’d start a jibing duel. But we just jibed away and tried to do our own thing. We do well in tight situations, but when we can be on our own, we’re much, much faster.”

Ruhlman’s daughter Meaghan, 31, is trimming mainsail, which is critical to the J/111’s upwind performance, and today, says Ruhlman, the two of them were in much better sync. “We worked on things after yesterday, and what we’re doing differently was driving the boat with fewer big adjustments to the main trim. Yesterday, in the really puffy conditions, we’d get out of sync. Today I was concentrating more on trying to maintain target speeds.”

With Ruhlman’s son Ryan trimming the spinnaker, they worked hard on sailing lower than anyone else on the run, “just one half-step down” he says, and unlike the first day in which they picked up a weather mark penalty, they sought opportunities to avoid high-risk situations. The results were dramatic, and they go into Saturday’s light-air forecast with momentum on their side.