The weather was perfect and spinnakers were raised on sailboats Saturday for the annual Mayor’s Cup Regatta.
The race on Lake Champlain is one of the largest summer events in Plattsburgh, drawing boaters and tourists from Vermont, Montreal and the surrounding area. And it's also an important fundraiser.
The wind was light and the sky blue as nearly 50 boats assembled in Cumberland Bay. They were there for a key race in the Lake Champlain Championship Series: the Plattsburgh Mayor’s Cup. Shelburne, Vermont, boat owner Chris Golden is a member of the Lake Champlain Yacht Club.
“We’ve got a bunch of boats that participate in this as reciprocity for some Plattsburgh people coming down and participating in our regattas," Golden said. "And we’ve got a great forecast today so we’re super-excited!”
Golden was at the marina studying the race course laid out on a poster near the docks.
“It’s a fun course," he said. "There’s three different divisions and kind-of a triangular shaped course. So you get to have your different sails out and attack it from different angles rather than just going up back-and-forth, upwind, downwind, upwind, downwind. So, there’s a little more strategy involved with this. So it makes it a lot more interesting.”
His boat, MOOvin’ Up, raced in the spinnaker division. Golden says a competent crew, a well-maintained vessel and solid knowledge of how to propel a boat in different wind angles are all critical.
“What happens is, the wind’s coming out of the north and whenever you’re going to sail south, you’re going to want to put that big balloon of a sail up to let the wind come from behind and fill it up," Golden said. "And then when you’re going into the wind you need a more of a rigid sail and you’re trying to act like an airplane wing with your tight sails because you go as close to the wind as you can.
"Now, you can’t go straight into the wind in the sail boat. You’ve got to go about 45 degrees off the wind. And so you zig-zag to make your way upwind. And then you go around that windward mark, we call it, and then the second we turn the boat around that windward mark we want our spinnaker to be up in the air and full and we’re going off the wind and that thing’s like a big sack that just pulls you downwind. And we need all these crew to hoist that thing up and then pull it back down and run around and grab lines and use our body weight to keep the boat at a perfect angle and it’s a very cerebral sport.”
The Mayor’s Cup is coordinated by the Plattsburgh Sunrise Rotary. Joanne Dahlen is directing activities on shore.
“There’s a lot of competition on the lake. This is part of a whole series of races that take place all summer," Dahlen said. "This year, an increase in the number of Canadian boats over the last couple years, which is really great and exciting. Some new boats that haven’t raced before, which is really, really good. And then the other thing that we found interesting in the number and in the mix was almost equal number of boats within each of the three divisions: the multihull, the jib & main and the spinnaker.”
The Mayor’s Cup Regatta was co-founded in 1978 by then-Mayor John Ianelli and the Plattsburgh Sunrise Rotary. Eventually, Dahlen explains, the city handed over full management of the race to the Sunrise Rotary.
“The whole festival and regatta is hugely important to Sunrise Rotary because it’s our largest community event, which we like to call the ultimate consummate celebration of summer," Dahlen said. But it’s also our largest fundraiser, making money to support the various projects and other service organizations that have projects of their own where we’d like to support those as well. This model here of a community event with the fundraising component serves us very well.”
The boat Souvenir won in the spinnaker division, Schuss won in Jib & Main and Cico won the multihull division.
