PCISA Gaucho Regatta - Silver

The 2025 Gaucho Regatta started with a sense of optimism in the air as multiple forecasts showed a break between storms, clearing breezes, and even potentially a nice thermal sea breeze for Saturday. But sometimes, it just doesn't go the way you think it might. One model predicted a 2 knot southerly for most of the day and so it was. The day began with a soft southwesterly that was unlikely to hold on until sailors hit the water. Even as sailors began heading to the race course they were stopped and sent to the sandspit rotation area as the breeze died out. Multiple short lived wind fills occurred over the next several hours even enticing the race committee to start two gold races that were both ultimately abandoned. Not helping the situation was an incredibly strong cross course current of 1-2 knots. Port tack looked more like snailing while starboard tack looked like they were on an escalator. After the two futile attempts and a complete die out, the sailors were again sent to shore. At least the sun was out.

Finally, just after 3pm a breeze from 185-195 filled. Not a great direction for predictability, however it was by far the best breeze of the day at roughly 4 knots. Fortunately, the unstable breeze direction held for the rest of the day and the RC opted to run races right up until 10 minutes before sunset. With just over 2 and a half hours of race time, there were 4 Gold A, 2 Gold B, 3 Silver A, and 2 Silver B races completed. Despite the challenging conditions, the UCSB Sailing Team did a fantastic job working as hard as they could to get races off and the races that were completed were very quality races. There were 3 protests filed and 4 breakdown requests for redress filed. All protests were dropped before a hearing and three teams were awarded average points for breakdowns (all in the silver fleet).

With a time change and an early start of 10:30am (which was 9:30am) the day before, the optimism of day 1 was all but gone and the focus became on getting a regatta in at all. But you never know what's going to happen and at 9:30am what appeared to be a fog driven southwesterly breeze filled in puffing up to 8 knots. So at 10:30am sharp, racing was under way and amazingly for the entire duration of the next 5 hours of allowed racing time, it never let off the gas eventually puffing up to 15+ knots between 1:00 and 3:30pm. Racing went very smoothly thanks to a down coast / down course current that allowed for few to no On Course Side (OCS) calls whatsoever. An additional 6 Gold B races, 4 Gold A races, 5 Silver B races, and 4 Silver A races were completed by the 3:30 shut off.

There were 5 protests filed and 11 breakdown requests on Sunday. Five breakdowns were rewarded (all in silver fleet). Nearly all of the other protests or redress hearings were not attended (most likely realizing it would not affect their final scores). At least one protest was declared invalid.

Thank you to the UCSB Sailing Team for providing all the volunteers, thank you to SBYC for usage of their marks and boats, and thank you to the SB Youth Sailing Foundation for their continued support of youth and high school sailing. Finally, thank you to whoever ordered up great breeze at 10:30 in the morning.

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.