Hippie Island Drag Racing

The best sailing winds tend to arrive in the Pacific Northwest when temperatures are their least appealing. That was the setting this weekend for those racing around Vashon Island, a little piece of rural paradise just west of Seattle. Read on…

Ahh Winter Vashon – lovingly sitting at the forefront of sailors minds as they think longingly all year long about this balmy jaunt around the last stronghold of hippiedom in the Pacific Northwest, Vashon Island. At just over 30 nautical miles, it’s an easy six hour sail with those consistent south sound winds the area is known for and with our eight hours of light this time of year finishing in daylight is even a possibility! Right? Well it was this year!

Sailors began arriving into the super fund cleanup site previously known as Tacoma Yacht Club soon after sunlight began filtering through the cloud layers, increasing everyone’s sight noticeably, well everyone except the delivery crews that arrived late Friday night under the veil of darkness that needed to be kicked out of their bunks and told to clean themselves up and try to smell a little better, but that’s another story.

For those of you that haven’t been down to TYC recently its now a huge clean-up/construction site complete with every kit of large piece of equipment. Gravel and construction mud are the new parking lot surfaces along with some new rock outcroppings both in the entrance of the marina and outside near the starting area that grabbed ahold of at least two different boats (watch out for that).

Winds were forecast in the normal south sound 6 to 11 range but as the cruising classes started down the course at just after 9am it quickly became apparent that the foreguessers were wrong once again. But for the first time since man learned to cure cod with lye they had under guessed the wind speeds!

The waiting boats watched as the cruising class boats began rounding up in the puffs while reaching across the south end of Vashon towards Colvos Passage with a few chutes opening up in the middle to help depower the rounding up boats.

Full report and exploding spinnaker photos…click here.