The San Diego Yacht Club Team Race Team returned to the Soiland Cup for the second consecutive year after a tight second place finish the year before. The event, hosted by Southern Yacht, began Friday morning with a light Northerly breeze. It was our teams goal to get back into Flying Scot mode as fast as we could and continue to improve as the event went on. We had finished the first day with all wins and we had been feeling strong after a few tight races.
The second day was much of the same forecast with an even lighter wind which puts a heavy emphasis on getting all three boats off the starting line. We started our day off against the New York Yacht Club who had been having a strong event. The race was very close with about eight lead changes and all six bows shooting the line at the finish and luckily our team had pulled out a very tight victory to start the day. The last race in the round robin was against the raining Soiland Cup Champions, The College of Charleston Yacht Club, where we had started out with a 1,2,6 around mark one. Charleston had broken up our combo on the downwind leg and we had resorted to chasing for the rest of the race. We finished the round robin Seven and One.
The second round robin proved to be much more difficult where we had taken a loss to both SYC and Charleston. We had finished the second round robin in second place tied with Charleston with records of 10-4.
The last day we had been broken up into the Gold and Silver rounds where the wind had been getting lighter and lighter as the day progressed. The silver round had finished and we got into our boats and were set to sail against SYC who was the three seed. Once the breeze had clocked back around to the north we began racing in about 5-8 knots of wind. We knocked out SYC in a first to a two race win series. This meant we had punched our ticket back into the finals for the second year in a row.
If you are into drama, you guessed it, we were back in a repeat battle against the Charleston in the finals. After last year’s loss in race five it was a mixed bag of feelings since we had yet to win a race against Charleston in this year’s event. We started the first race out with a 1,2,6 around mark one and once again had that broken up with us finishing in a 3,5,6. We didn’t have much time to regroup after the first race but we shook it off and won out the next three races with all 1,2’s securing the 2017 Soiland Cup for SDYC for the first time ever!
It was an amazing year for the San Diego Yacht Club Team Racing Team with a 3rd Place at the Baldwin Cup, 1st Place at the Morgan Cup, and a 1st place at the Soiland Cup. We would like to thank the Yacht Club for its everlasting support of this extremely successful and growing program at San Diego Yacht Club. We look to forward to having another great year in 2018!