Sailboat racing is not always fair. A sense of humor helps when the wind doesn't cooperate to make a level playing field.
Such was the case for the 17th annual St. Petersburg Sailing Association Couples Race.
About halfway through the competition, the easterly breeze that has dominated for days slowly died. Then there was the dreaded zone of calm, with love bugs getting all over everything. Finally, the westerly breeze filled in.
This is a natural occurrence when the water temperature is under 80 and the air temperature approaches 90. But in sailboat racing, sometimes the last become first and the first last when a reversal of wind occurs.
It comes as no surprise that some sailors know the signs of an impending breeze. Ed Sherman has been on the waters in the St. Petersburg area for half a century. Sherman crewed for Diane Fowler and placed their SPYC Sonar correctly to use the new breeze. The result was a corrected time victory in the Spinnaker class by more than 6 minutes. Only an SR 27 and Martin 242 beat the slower Sonar on elapsed time.
Cakewalk II, the SR21 of Ken Wilus and Brooke Milvain, was second in Spinnaker after handicaps were applied to the mixed fleet. Finishing third was the SR 27 of John and Carol Poulson.
The Spinnaker and non-spinnaker boats started together. The line was crowded, as 11 vessels took off just after 4 p.m. Chris Arnold also has been sailing these waters for a while. He and crew, Donna, guided his J-24 Moondance to the non-spinnaker win. Hall and Wendy Palmer sailed their wishbone-rigged Wiley Cat 30 Lucky Ducky to the runner-up spot. Lagniappe, led by Darren and Amy O'Neal, was third. St. Petersburg Sailing Association was the brainchild of the late Patrick Talbott and his wife, Gwinnith, who resides on their native isle of Jersey off the English coast. They noted that in the early 1970s, St. Petersburg Yacht Club was hosting many important regattas but had few for members.
With little progress toward that goal, Patrick gathered a few sailors and formed SPSA. So, since 1972 there has been good racing off the Pier on Saturdays - usually once a month - for local keelboats more than 20 feet long.
The competition is not intense. The race committee has a take-turns arrangement, and the turning marks are government buoys. Membership is open to all. The next race is the Commodore's Cup on June 12. For information, go online to spsa.us.
FOND MEMORIES: Walton Byars and friends still sail his late brother Joe's Falcon, with its distinctive bow and low-aspect rig. They go up to Santa Rosa Sound in the Big Bend area of Florida but have fond memories of Tampa Bay. Byars visited what now is Fort De Soto Park.
"Well, I just anchored directly offshore from Rattlesnake Key and dinghied in to check out the exposed tidal flats," Byars wrote in a recent letter. "Spent a beautiful day exploring, and found some interesting fossils. I selected one of the smaller ones and constructed a genuine Rattlesnake Key fossil fob. Here is an animal that was running around the Rattlesnake-Egmont Key area when the coastline extended way out into the Gulf, and before man."
Tampa Bay's nautical history is relatively short. The first Europeans to make a living here were the slavers who had found their native islanders in the Caribbean dying from European diseases. The people searched for Indians to replace those workers. That explains why later visits by Ponce de Leon and other early visitors were greeted with such hostility.
William Bunce, with his Pinellas Point fish farm on Bird Key, and John Lvesque, with his house on Long Key as a base for turtle farming, were here until 1848 when the great hurricane drove them off. John's Pass, as it is known today, was a bit north of its present location. The pass cut through the settler's house and buried gold coins from the year's business.
