Rose Bowl - Silver

At the 29th Annual Rose Bowl Regatta on Saturday more than a hundred of the best college sailors in the country spent more time parked on flat water than racing on day one, but they didn't complain much.

Many had come to a sublime and sunny Southern California from the miserable weather conditions the rest of the country has been suffering.

Nevin Snow of Georgetown University in Washington D.C. noted, 'Probably 70 per cent of us who are racing are from here, so if we're already here we all might as well be racing in the Rose Bowl Regatta. This is my sixth time.'

He's from San Diego. One year he won the High School Gold division with Cathedral Catholic, whose junior varsity team currently shares first place in the same division with Corona del Mar's JV, while Snow's Hoyas, currently ranked No. one nationally, lead the Collegiate division with six points to Roger Williams U.'s 10.

All racing is off Belmont Veterans Memorial Pier east of downtown in the Long Beach outer harbor. The event is hosted by the USC Sailing Team and organized by the US Sailing Center of Long Beach, which for the first time has everyone launching off the beach.

The colleges and High School Gold sailors, sailing an adjacent course and alternating crews after two races, managed to run three before what little wind there was checked out around 4 o'clock.

Earlier, all three fleets, scheduled to start at 11 a.m. were kept on the beach until noon when a wisp or two teased their hopes but then left them parked until 2 o'clock. Then they had about two hours of restless sailing, squeezing all they could out of two to four knots of southwest zephyrs in their two-person 13-foot CFJ dinghies.

They'll try again today, scheduled hopefully to start at 11, but they must finish before 3 o'clock to allow time for awards and packing boats and gear to go home.

The title honors the traditional college football classic in nearby Pasadena, where Stanford University, ranked fifth nationally, lost to Michigan State on New Year's Day. The Cardinal sailing team---also ranked fifth nationally---sits in that position after Day 1.

Light winds prevail for 29th annual Rose Bowl Regatta

Long Beach, CA (January 5, 2014) Georgetown University and Point Loma High School will tell you that the 29th annual Rose Bowl Regatta was an event when it paid to pick your partner.

With 26 college teams from across the country and 63 high schools from California all sailing little 13-foot, 3-inch CFJ dinghies and winds varying from 2 knots Saturday to 7 or 8 knots on Sunday, nobody needed extra ballast.

As Point Loma assistant coach Nick Kaschak, said, “Some of our events are guy-guy and some are guy-girl. This one was definitely guy-girl.”

Kaschak was calling the Point Loma shots in the absence of Coach Steve Hunt, who had a conflicting commitment to race Etchells in Florida on the weekend, but the San Diego team??"with 110-pound Rebecca McElvain crewing for Scott Sinks on the lead boat, hardly missed a beat in seizing its eighth consecutive High School Gold fleet championship.

Meanwhile, on the same short trapezoid course set off the beach in front of spectators on the Belmont Veterans Memorial Pier, Georgetown’s A-boat skipper, Nevin Snow, went with 125-pound Liz Mullarney, alternating the boat with B-boat skipper A.J. Reiter and crew Eliana Michaels.

The results: finishing of logs of 2-1-3-7 and 3-6-2-3, respectively, in the 26-boat fleet.

And here’s another wrinkle: While Snow estimated that 70 per cent of the college sailors were West Coast homeys, Mullarney, a New York City resident, said, “This was my first trip to California.”

But she added, “The sailing was less high-strung than back East, probably because of the better weather here.”

The High School Silver fleet for less experienced sailors was won handily by Cathedral Catholic’s JV2 team from San Diego, with Ryan Ratliffe and crew Matt Parker on the A-boat and Jesse McKnight and crew Lizzy Matheson on the B-boat.

The yearly event is hosted by the USC Sailing Team and organized by the US Sailing Center of Long Beach, which for the first time had everyone launching off the beach.

The following chart shows the relative rank of the teams as of the race indicated. Note that the races are ordered by number, then division, which may not represent the order in which the races were actually sailed.

The first place team as of a given race will always be at the top of the chart. The spacing from one team to the next shows relative gains/losses made from one race to the next. You may hover over the data points to display the total score as of that race.