Yacht Race Has Little Wind, Plenty of Confusion

The sailors who coped best with the wind and outwitted the race committee moved to the front of the fleets on Friday, the first day of the Long Beach Yacht Club’s Ullman Sails-Washington Insurance Race Week.

The first race was delayed an hour waiting for wind, which was 6-8 knots for the first races, then shifted 45 degrees eastward as it built to 12 knots after the the starts of the second races. The unusual shift created a nightmare for the race committees and parades of reaches over the windward-leeward courses instead of upwind-downwind legs, for the sailors.

When the shift started, the committees altered the courses to compensate. But, on the A course for the larger handicap fleets, that only caused confusion because the faster boats--most notably Peter Tong’s ultralight Blondie--had already lapped some slower boats, and most boats didn’t notice the new bearing to the weather mark indicated by code flags on the committee boat.

At the end of the day, the committee was considering scrapping the Fifties fleet race altogether.

Dave Ullman, sailing Don Hughes’ Reichell-Pugh 42 Quintessence, placed first and second in his first two races, opening a bid to win the IOR-A class of the event--formerly Long Beach Race Week--for the fourth year in a row.

Robbie Haines won both IOR-B races with Irv Loube’s Farr 40 Bravura, and Steve Steiner and Alan Adams led the Fifties in their custom Steiner 58 with a first and a third.

Haines, a 1984 Olympic gold medalist in the Soling class, was a full boat length over the starting line in the second race but was screened from the committee boat by Mike Wooten’s Allegiance, which returned to restart as Haines kept on sailing.

Steve and father Barney Flam weren’t so lucky aboard their J/35 Flambouyant on the B course, where the one-designs competed. The Flams, who won the event in 1988, sailed second to David Dale-Johnson’s Paleface in both races but were disqualified in the second for a premature start.