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Richmond Midwinters #4

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Trish Sudell Cleans Clocks at RYC Midwinters #1


After 6 races in light and shifty winds, Trish Sudell leads the Richmond YC's Small Boat Midwinters series. With bullets in the last 3 races, she leads the series by a comfortable—though not unassailable—margin of 9 pts.
Other highlights:
  • The fleet once again welcomed Mark Darley (finishing 5th) into the mix. We hope to see more of Mark!

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  • Bill Tieman successfully port-tacked the fleet with decent speed in the light airs of race 2, acquiring a comfortable lead that he managed to keep to the finish. This was Bill's first successful port-tack-the-fleet start ever. And probably the last…

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  • Dan Ouellet made a most remarkable leeward mark rounding in race 5. Asking for the room he was entitled to inside of Bill, and declaring his intention for a “seamanlike rounding,” Dan proceeded to take a truly extraordinary amount of room, much more than even a “tactical” rounding would require. Bill immediately (and vocally) defined it as a new type of rounding—the “moron-like rounding.” Dan went on to finish 2nd nonetheless; Bill, dazed and confused, was stuffed back into 7th.

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  • Several fleet members had a great, beer-fueled, and gentlemanly discussion about some rules issues that cropped up during the day. We all agreed that this was an incredibly useful thing to do. (The discussion, I mean, but the beer, too.) It's our intention to do this as much as possible in the future.

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  • We had great media coverage by norcalsailing.com, getting what must be by far the most photos of any of the fleets. Christine at norcalsailing graciously allowed us to use all the Byte pics for a slideshow on our site. Thanks Christine! (If you looking for gifts, check out their store.)
This was the first of 4 regattas in the Series; the next is on December 4.

CORK Getting A Big Makeover for ’09


There has been significant interest among fleet members to snap up some of the $1 Byte charters that PS2000 offers each year for CORK events. The negligible cost of the boat, plus the unbeatable accommodation rates at Queens University (a 5-minute walk from the harbor), makes this an attractive away-event option.

CORK organizers, however, have overhauled the structure of events, reducing them to 3 regattas and re-defining the focus of each. It appears—though it's not absolutely certain yet—that the CII will henceforward fit into what they will call the “CORK OCR” (Olympic Classes Regatta). In their own words:
The Olympic Classes Event will mainly focus on Olympic Classes, but will include development classes, such as Laser Radial men, 29er and CII. This High Performance event will be geared towards the more experienced sailors, providing racing in an international setting and in a race format commonly used at comparable events internationally. The goal is to qualify high level ISAF Grading for more classes. This event will allow for training and mentoring of officials striving to achieve or maintain International level certification, and will attract International level officials from other countries.
Check their website for further details: http://www.cork.org/newsitems/nov_13.html. This could be a lot of fun!

New Fleet Email Distribution List & Discussion Group


Our system for distributing notices and other messages fleet-wide has been re-vamped. Until now, we have been addressing emails directly to a handmade list of addresses that were copied-and-pasted whenever an announcement went out. This was unwieldy, but the previous email list had gotten heavily spammed and was a royal pain to subscribe to.

We now have an SF Byte Fleet group on Google Groups that is very easy to manage. Please note that we will be rolling over to this new system for 2009, so please make sure you've joined the group! If you did not receive an invitation already, send a note to sfbytes@gmail.com, and we'll get you on the list right away. Note that you do not need to open a Google account to join the list, despite whatever Google may tell you. (There are reasons why they do that, but just trust me, for our purposes you don't need to open yet another online account.) You may also visit the group to view discussions and request an invitation to join by going to http://groups.google.com/group/sfbytes.