“Mrrrzzz.” Shaking off a sublime summertime Saturday stupor, I pulled out the phone. Would I be interested and available to join a team for the J/70 National Championship in Santa Barbara in just under two weeks? Um… heck yeah!
With a short ramp-up, there wasn’t a lot I could do to prepare. I talked to some knowledgeable folks, watched a few videos, and gratefully accepted an invite to jump on a friend’s J/70 at Leschi in the Lake Washington fleet for a Wednesday night to try to get my mind in the boat. Luckily, several years of background in the J/70 and a few more in the Melges 24 gave me a baseline knowledge, in spite of the couple-year pause I’d mostly taken from racing following the addition of our second kiddo. Ready or not, I was soon on my way to the Southern California coast.
The fleet of 38 boats at Nationals was a good mix of mostly West Coast boats, including some with quite a few Santa Barbara locals, a good group from around California, a couple from the East Coast, and a strong contingent of 12 boats from the Pacific Northwest…