Southland Sailing : Etchells-22 Sailors Have Busy Schedule

Southland sailors of Etchells-22 yachts will be busy during the first part of next month, with the world championships set for mid-August.

First up will be the Pacific Coast championship regatta for all comers next Friday through Sunday at Newport Harbor Yacht Club.

Balboa Yacht Club will be the scene of a warmup regatta Aug. 10-11, then Newport Harbor Yacht Club will play host to the world competition Aug. 14-25. The world regatta will include 60 crews that have qualified for the title event through regattas in their own areas.

Jeff Littell, general chairman for the world competition, said that sailors from Australia, Hong Kong, Europe and the United States were entered.

Fourteen Southland skippers have qualified: Jack Jakosky, Tim Hogan, Rick Hawthorne, Scott Ramser, Scott Mason, Dan Thompson, Jim Buckingham, Ted Munroe, Fleet White and Nina Nielsen, all from NHYC; Bruce Chandler, Gene Williams and Gaston Ortiz, from Balboa Yacht Club, and Ken Frost, Alamitos Bay Yacht Club.

This will be the second time the world championship for the popular international one-design class has been held in Newport Beach. Dave Curtis of Marblehead, Mass., won there in 1978.

The Etchells-22, a highly competitive boat, is 30 feet long. It was designed by Skip Etchells, an international Star sailor from New York, and gets the rest of it’s name from a 22-foot waterline.

Etchells designed the boat in a 1965 Yachting magazine-sponsored design competition based on the International Yacht Racing Union specifications for a new three-man Olympic keel boat. The boat was highly successful, but it was rejected as an Olympic boat because it was too expensive.