Seattle Yacht Club's Annual Grand Prix Regatta is an invite only affair with the best boats in the region qualifying for the event. It is always run in the fall with the hopes of good winds and challenging conditions. This year was no exception and I was lucky enough to participate in class 4 with Three BeneteauFirst 36.7s on the line with a bunch of other really good boats, like a Soverel 33, a Dash 34, a Peterson 40, a J33 and Charles Hill's beautiful Wauquiez Centurion 40.
The Dash 34 won the event handily but the 36.7s had a good showing placing 2nd, 4th, and 8th. In these pictures by Jan's Marine Photography, you can see Carl Freund's Veloce, winning the start of race 1 with their beautiful port tack approach, and then Dave Steffen's Vitesse a moment later on Starboard. Notes the reefs in both of our mainsails. It was blowing a solid 22-25 knots at the start. On the run we saw 32 knots on the wind gauge, and promptly took our kite down.
The rest of the weekend was light and fluky, where we had to wait until Sunday to get 4 good races off in a funky easterly breeze that was blowing straight out of the locks. For me it was great fun to see three of these Beneteau race boats out on the water, having fun and rounding marks together. It would be great to get a few more out together and have one-design racing. PHRF is really fun also, but in this regatta we owed all of the boats time on handicap and you really had to sail very solidly to beat a 40 footer like "Shoot the Moon" and the rocket ship "Karma", that Dash 34 that was first to finish in every race.
The last photo is a Wauquiez Centurion 40 with teak decks and a gorgeous interior.
Links to photos are here:
