Berkeley Yacht Club’s Rollo Wheeler Memorial Regatta got a slight upgrade this year to become: the Rollo Wheeler Regatta to Benefit Special Olympics. That’s right—it’s a charity deal, now. The change was inspired by Staff Commodore Kevin Murray’s past work with Special Olympics. As was the case with so many things, Covid squashed it and we took a look round and noticed it had been gone awhile so we decided to incorporate the Special Olympics event right into our biggest regatta, because why not?
With the help of Sheena Kawakami, the Development Manager at Special Olympics of Northern California, we were able to connect and invite some of the families of the athletes to our event to meet and greet our members and racers and they could not have been better representatives of their organization. I cannot say enough about what a great job they did and a very special thank you to Maggie and Eric for coming to our event and sharing what Special Olympics means to them.
The sailboat racing was pretty good, too. The wind and weather smiled upon the 23 boats that competed on Saturday. The wind started out at a steady 10-12 knots out of the WSW at the start, and built to about 12-18 by the middle of the second race with the wind direction holding steady all day. The courses took the racers from OCF out towards the city front and back around twice for a 9nm course with an upwind finish. Race 2 was a shorter version at 6.4nm. This made for plenty of spinnaker raising and dousing as well as tactical considerations with current and wind.
Sunday’s race was a pursuit race so math was involved. Since there was no wind at the scheduled start time a postponement meant each racer had to recalculate their start times on the fly. Everyone passed the test and the sailing was clean. The wind picked up nicely to 10-12 out of the WSW and hung steady all day.
Finally, the City of Berkeley and Wheeler Perpetual Trophies awarded to the boats with the fastest overall corrected Saturday times in each of the two divisions respectively were won Jens Jensen on SNOWY OWL for the Wheeler Trophy and David Gruver on SKETCH for the City of Berkeley Trophy. They will be immortalized in brass and dusted occasionally for time eternal.
Saturday’s oyster feast and lasagna dinner was fabulous with over 700 oysters sold. The lasagna dinner was delicious as well. If you missed it then you missed a good one. Huge thanks to all of the folks that helped make this event happen including Betty Gray, Mari Bird, Roger Mason, Maria Wallace, Graeme Lowe, the committee and too many more to mention.
We hope this is the start of a great new thing.
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