Three Bridge Fiasco Rewards

You’d think that whatever controls the weather might have felt inclined to reward the 322 boats that showed up Saturday for the Singlehanded Sailing Society’s Three Bridge Fiasco with a reasonably nice day. Well, you’d be correct. Although it looked at first like it might be a long, gray day without much prospect for breeze, Saturday turned out to be sunny and, depending on where you were and when, breezy.

The big strategic call, as always, is which direction to go — counter-clockwise, clockwise or Red Rock first. As it turned out, the counter-clockwise option proved the most popular, with boats which got to the Central Bay quickly getting a massive assist from the flood that dominated the course for the first part of the day. Heading to Blackaller first didn’t work out so well for most of the boats that tried, as they ended up sitting in a massive hole near the mark, in a cut-off countercurrent. We heard of boats taking up to 2.5 hours to round Blackaller from the starting line.

Scott Easom’s Moore 24 Eight Ball came out atop a Top Ten that reads like a Who’s Who of Northern California sailors and boats, finishing at 2:41 p.m. George Lythcott’s Express 27 Taz!! was the top singlehanded entry, finishing just before 4 p.m. We’ll have a complete round-up with lots of photos in the March issue of Latitude 38. In the meantime, the provisional results have gone up at the Society’s website. Make sure you give them a looking-over as occasionally some things get mis-recorded during a race this chaotic; if you find any discrepancies you can report them here.