It felt like summer at Buggs Island, VA on Memorial Day weekend, with 5 Wetas, 9 adults, 2 kids and Gizmo the Sailor Pup. With a large beachfront area on a fresh water lake that is bordered by over 850 miles of shoreline, it was the perfect venue for a Mid-Atlantic Swarm. Sailors could kick back in their lounge chairs under a shady tree or opt for a swim before heading back out to sail.
Theres a first time for everything. Gulfport Yacht Club in Florida hosted their inaugural Weta regatta, March 1-3. Ten Wetas, 7 singlehanded and 3 doublehanded showed up for a weekend of fun. Friday afternoon, Weta after Weta pulled in and began rigging while Alan Taylor was jamming the tunes. As evening approached, Club members mingled with the fleet on the clubhouse patio while enjoying some snacks and a few beverages to wash everything down.
The Venue is an alpine lake, situated in the Sierra Nevada mountains East of Fresno, CA, and west of Mono Hot Springs. It's part of a diverse network of reservoirs and hydro-electric stations installed in the early 1900s by Edison, supplying electricity, and controlling spring flooding, to the California Central Valley. The lake is slender, less than 1 mile from side to side, but nearly 7 miles long, running east to west.
This annual event is hosted by the Hobie Fleet and Santa Cruz Yacht Club who have generously welcomed the Wetas to join them for several years. This year three Wetas from the Bay area (Christophe, John, and Marc) were joined by three Wetas from Southern California (Bruce, Robert, and Tim). We shared the race courses with 6 Hobie 20s and 8 Hobie 16s.
