Rail Meat gets ready for another excellent adventure…
Some of you have followed my sailing adventures (and misadventures) in the past, and some of you have even been sailing with me. Others have simply shaken your heads at the amount of time and money I pour into this obsession. Heck, some of you actually have been the recipient of some of that money.
As I kick off the 2011 racing season, I wanted to give you all a chance to follow along and get some entertainment out of this year’s edition of the Dragon Tales. At the very least, it will give you something to do while you sit on some boring conference call. This particular season is going to kick off with the Atlantic Cup this coming weekend and then include the Annapolis to Newport race on June 3rd, the NYYC Transatlantic Race on June 29th, and then once we get to the UK we will be doing the Fastnet race in mid-August.
The Atlantic Cup is a race spread out over two weekends, commencing with a 260 mile race that will start at the Statue of Liberty on May 7th. The first weekend’s event is an double-handed offshore race, heading out of NYC harbor down to Barnegat on the New Jersey shore and then up to to Newport, RI. That leg should take us some where between 24 and 36 hours to complete, then the boats will then wait in Newport until the following weekend when we will have fully crewed inshore races on both Saturday and Sunday. The race is limited to Class 40 designed boats like Dragon, and it looks like we will have 5 boats on the starting line. Beyond the tight racing and interesting format, we are also going to be racing for $15,000 of prize money and there is nothing like the sound of crisp Benjamins rubbing together to get the competitive juices flowing.
I am working on putting together a Facebook page, Twitter account and You Tube account to give folks a chance to follow along this summer, but we are not quite up and running with those yet. In the meantime, you can follow the Atlantic Cup in a few places.
- www.atlanticcup.org has background on the races, links to live tracking for the boats, video, and twitter feeds for news.
- While you are there, check out the Teams page) for background on the different boats. Please vote for Dragon as your favorite team. Vote twice if the spirit moves you. Get your kids to get all their class mates to vote for Dragon like some sort of demented cookie sale.
- Check out the thread. I am going to be posting live blog updates on our progress.
I hope you all have as much fun watching as we will have racing. At the very least you will be warm and dry while we are cold and wet.
Best,
Michael
