CHAMPIONSHIP OF
CHAMPIONS
SEATTLE SAILORS AND MOORE 24 NATIONAL CHAMPIONS, BEN AND JENNIFER BRADEN HEAD DOWN TO CALIFORNIA TO TANGLE IN TIGHT QUARTERS WITH SOME OF THE NATION'S BEST. To qualify for the US Sailing Championship of Champions, a sailor must win a national championship regatta in a US Sailing recognized one design fleet, and you must apply to be invited to the regatta. By winning the 2018 Moore 24 National Championship regatta in Hood River, Oregon, we became eligible for application. As luck would have it, our Moore 24 Nationals regatta was held about one week after the cutoff date for application to the 2018 regatta, making it one of the first Nationals eligible for the 2019 Championship of Champions regatta — that year held in Connecticut on Ideal 18s. We applied but didn’t make the cut until about two weeks before the regatta. Too short of a timeline for us to make it happen, unfortunately. Seattle sailors, Dalton Bergan and Ben Glass, won that event. Roll in 2020 with all its challenges and lack of National regattas around the country, and wouldn’t you know it we were eligible again, and thankfully the regatta was to be held on the West Coast for the first time in many years. The 2020 Championship of Champions regatta was to be held in Schock Harbor 20s sailing out of Balboa Yacht Club in lovely Newport Beach, California. The Harbor 20 is a twoperson gentlemen’s boat consisting of a main and jib only with the jib on a boom to help downwind sailing. It’s a somewhat lightly-built, good looking inshore daysailer that has evolved into the local Newport Beach Harbor one-design fleet. No tiller extensions are allowed and you must race with cockpit cushions 48º NORTH
in place. Harbor 20 one-design rules allow for absolutely no hiking and you can’t leave the cockpit during a race to adjust the jib halyard or tack/clew settings. Having won our Moore 24 Nationals by racing three days in Hood River with 20- to 30-plus knots of wind and big waves, needless to say, we were out of our element in Newport Beach. My wife, Jennifer, and I arrived in sunny southern California Thursday morning before the regatta, found our way to the beautiful Balboa Yacht Club, checked in and pulled our first boat — Bow 18. It was a rough boat with older sails and about 25 gallons of water in the bilge. I say “first boat”, because this was a round robin regatta, meaning we traded boats after every three races. They had a 40-foot dock anchored out near the approach to the weather mark and every third race we finished at the weather mark and got in the queue for rotation. We pulled up to the dock, masked up, threw our gear on the dock and then sprayed the boat down with disinfectant cleaners, wiped it off and jumped on the next boat. Honestly, this was the best run program at this regatta — the volunteers really did a great job of making sure we had clean, safe and quick transfers of boats. The organizers made every attempt to keep the boats similar, but jib boom end heights ranged from 6 to 12 inches off deck, some boats had motors, sails were different ages, and each boat had to be sailed differently. Some I could figure out and, frankly, some I could not and we just felt slow through the water.
44
DECEMBER 2020
