By Ron Oard, Glory #158

Fleet 9 came away with the top honors among the four boats competing in the Ocean Great Lakes Challenge last weekend at Larchmont Yacht Club. The light winds (7-8 kts Saturday and 5-6 kts on Sunday) made for a challenging event, with a four-hour thunderstorm thrown into the mix on early Saturday afternoon.

Ron Oard skippered the Fleet 9 boat and described the event as a series of highlights:

  • Heather Shaver and her brother Tor Johnson (Helen 181) were great additions to the Team Glory (158) crew of myself, John Earhard, and Mike Koplovsky.  As John Burnham coined it: “Glory with a dash of Helen.” Heather and Tor had raced at Larchmont before, as had John, and having that conversation about what the wind was doing and likely to do during the prestart and during the race was key. I could concentrate on driving and leave the tactics of where to go on the course (my admitted weakness) to them.
  • Mike telling me to keep starting aggressively after we were over early on the first race.  A big part of our strong performance was winning all the other starts, and that way we could dictate what we wanted to do for the rest of the race.  It was also Mike’s first time out racing this season, and it was great to have him back.
  • Finishing second in the first race after restarting.  Why: see the first bullet point above and the bullet below, plus John’s spinnaker trimming.  We had tons of downwind speed in that race and rode over 207 on the final leg before the t-storm halted things.
  • Heather’s comment that we were better off with older sails (we used a 2020 jib with one season on it, a main from 2017, and a spin from 2010ish) in the light air.  We had a newer spinnaker that never came out of the bag.  I would never have guessed it.  Not only did we have speed on the course, but on the last two starts we tacked within 30 and 25 seconds of the gun and still got our speed up enough to have great starts (the Shields rule of thumb I have always followed is it takes about a minute to get back up to speed after tacking).
  • Tor’s Friday dinner.  Pan fried chicken. OMG, so good!
  • The sandwiches!  And Heather’s great call to have two lunches on Saturday and Sunday to enjoy them all the more.  We were like hobbits with our “second breakfast.”
  • Sharing beers with the crew of 207 after the practice race on Friday was called off after 20 minutes due to lack of wind.  Yes, it was Bud Light as we held back the Space Dust; but that gesture bought us some goodwill for the rest of the event. Following closely was the Sunday discovery of the oatmeal raisin cookies my wife Kelly had packed—and sharing them on the veranda with the RC while we waited for wind.
  • Getting that private puff of air and crushing everyone on the downwind leg of the final race.  I didn’t realize how far ahead we were (I was too focused on how to finish to cover all the bases when the RC shortened course and it wasn’t clear where the finish line was) until we were reaching home and started taking pictures.  Much better than not racing at all on Sunday and winning by default (we were a point ahead of two boats tied for second going into the second day).

Lowlights (that I can laugh about now):

  • Almost hitting a moored boat on our way out Saturday while everyone was distracted trying to dry off personal gear.  Ugh, that would have sucked…
  • My inability to land the boat on a mooring after two tries with the t-storm looming.  I compensated by having Mike do the rest of the landings for the weekend, and he also avoided the boats on moorings.  Maybe I had too much beer by then…
  • Ummm…getting locked inside my bedroom the first night.  Fortunately, it was only 10-15 minutes until Heather finally let me out of jail when my texts to John and Mike went unanswered (they blamed the Dark ‘n’ Stormies).

To be honest, we had such a fun weekend both on and off the water that winning was just icing on the cake. This is the third time I have participated in OGLC (also 2018 Newport and 2019 Monterey), and the fact that everyone has to race in a borrowed boat (bring your own sails) makes it easy to travel to and provides the opportunity to bring back (OK, steal) ideas from boats that can be very different from what you are used to, to race for two days.