Nine Thousand Feet Above Sea Level

It used to be known as “Skiyachting,” and it was by far the best day of the season for skiers who moonlighted as sailors, or vice versa.

“The inevitable has finally happened,” reads an article in a 1966 edition of the enthusiast magazine One-Design Yachtsman. “A group of Denver sailors and skiers got together and spoke for many of us when they laid plans for the first combined sailing and skiing regatta ever held in the U.S.”

It was the ultimate Colorado regatta: On Memorial Day weekend in ’66, a group of several dozen “skailors” met at Arapahoe Basin for men’s and women’s giant slalom one day, followed by class races and events for catamarans and monohull craft the next day. There were crews of never-evers paired with former U.S. Ski Team members, and Warren Miller was there to get footage of the snow-to-sail carnage. He even competed in a few races from the deck of his Pacific Catamaran boat.

Skiyachting was also a little dumb and maybe more than a little dangerous. In 1968 — the same year that the Dillon Yacht Club came to the shores of a then-new Dillon Reservoir — veteran sailor Paul Kresge says a bad storm hit during the Skiyachting race, still held over Memorial Day Weekend despite a thick covering of ice in early May.

A microburst capsized more than half of the 100 boats in attendance, and that was no one’s idea of a good time when the water was a few days removed from slushy ice.

“The state was populated with those boats — Butterflies and Yuenglings and Sunfish and Catamarans,” said Kresge, who never raced in the Skiyachting regatta but has heard plenty of stories through the years, some wild, some even wilder. “That was before the Laser was built. You didn’t have anyone out there in keelboats.”

By 1971, the short-lived Skiyachting races had ditched the giant slalom and moved to the dog days of summer, where it morphed into the Dillon Open Regatta. It was a traditional sailboat race, just as it is today, and it still featured the unpredictability of sailing a high-alpine lake with constantly changing winds, fingered inlets and those tricky microbursts.

“What makes sailboat racing so intriguing and cerebral is you have hydrodynamics, plus thermodynamics and mental dynamics,” said Kresge, a New York native who’s lived in Colorado since the ’70s and is race director for this year’s Dillon Open.

“It’s one of the very few sports where the field itself is morphing into something different,” Kresge continued. “With football and soccer, the players know what the field of play is like every time. Sometimes it’s micromanaged. Here, it’s incredibly difficult, or it can be.”

Now in its 45th season, the 2016 Dillon Open from Aug. 5-7 is no easier than it ever was. It’s still the highest deep-water regatta in the U.S. and continues to draw about 100 boats from across the nation. That’s down from a peak of more than 120 boats before the 2008 recession, but, aside from ebbs and flows in the registration numbers, little has changed since Skiyachting became the Dillon Open. It’s also the club’s largest fundraiser of the season for the Dillon Junior Sailing program.

Event details – Entry list

Source: Summit Daily