The Columbus Day Regatta, That I'll Never Forget

The 2025 Columbus Day Regatta marked Contrail's 22nd race.  The weather was terrible on Friday for the delivery to Miami.  It was stormy and a long trip to the Coral Reef Yacht Club.

The race itself was the same as the delivery, rain storms in all quadrants.  We were almost the last to start in ARC class.  They used assigned start times according to your adjusted PHRF rating.  Contrails was severely adjusted as we had won this race several times before.

Our start was 10:37am (kind of), the wind died and we sat on the start line for several minutes.  The course was 10 miles south and return.  The course was simple, but the wind was light to zero.

After five hours of unbelievable crew work by Tom Jockers and Ken White, we could see the finish line.  About that time, the committee boat called and advised us that we had 20minutes to finish, as there was a 4pm cutoff time for all racers.  We went into overdrive as there was almost zero wind, the sails were hanging like wet laundry!

We tried reaching, wing and wing, crew weight changes, nothing worked.  The committee boat called, "you have 10 minutes to finish".  We were 200 yards out.  I was out of ideas.  I was starting to think this hugh effort to do this race was going to be all for naught.  At that moment, the crew said, "Jim, look at the bottom."

It was relatively shallow and clear, you could see the bottom of the bay, we were slowly moving!  We were in the outbound tidal flow which was moving to the finish line.  The committee boat was loudly cheering us on.

We finished with 23 seconds to spare!  First in Fleet!!!

Jim Wallace

S/V Contrails