The Helmsman

We are now officially into Fall, and my orange Lantana, pink and purple Crepe Myrtles, pink and white Encore Azaleas, and my violet Rose of Sharon are going strong. So is the coronavirus, dad-gummit! One day, someday, we will return to normalcy. But not just now. We are holding races, and some of our members are cruising, but so far, we are just unable to get together socially. It pains me greatly to have to say that I have no forecast for when we can get back together and party. This does not mean that we won’t have parties and other social events – it just means that we don’t yet know when we’ll be able to have these events. Rather than officially canceling the Commodore’s Ball, which is still several months off, we’ll just say that if we can hold it safely, we will. If we cannot, it will be delayed
or rescheduled as appropriate. And as for PMU, we’ll just have to wait and see about a start date. It is just too early to tell right now.


I mentioned that we are still racing: We raced for the Tri-Service Cup, and OPCYC lost by a point. Imagine that. One lousy point. September’s racing hit both extremes of wind conditions. The Tri-Service Cup on 12 September was held in Willoughby Bay in 20 knots of wind, which was as much or more than anyone wanted. NNSA’s boats averaged over 5 ft. longer than OPCYC’s entries, and as you know, in a blow, waterline length counts. It was rough on the bigger boats and a real deal for the smaller boats. My heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who sailed with us on that day. The Commodore of NNSA intends to make the Tri-Service Cup trophy presentations on the beach at OPCYC just prior to our own awards
presentations for the ‘Round the Lights Race on the 7th of October. Tim has a plan
for an abbreviated outdoor socially distant post-race awards ceremony after the ‘Round the Lights Race.


As windy as the Tri-Service Cup was, the next race was almost cancelled because of no wind. We had just enough wind to drift with the current from OPCYC to Thimble Shoals Light, where the race was mercifully ended. Now if there had only been some way to bottle some of that wind on the 12th, and let it out on the 27th, that would have been nice! Read all about both races and the ‘Round the Lights Race in the Racing News.


We do have a couple of cruises scheduled for October, and as I understand it, the first one at least will be an anchor-out event, so we should be able to do that without any virus issues. See the Cruising Chronicles for details.