SSSS started hosting Portsmouth races twenty years ago, this spring. We will start our twenty-first year in May. This year we are starting, or at least trying to start, our second spin off one design fleet. It seems like a good time to review our early history.
In the spring of 1991 Curtis Dahlgren suggested at a board meeting that SSSS should have a dinghy fleet. Yours truly volunteered to organize it. The Thursday Night Races were off. We posted signs around the marinas. We got the newspaper to mention it. We got some mention in the free sailing magazines. Curtis had a small power boat we used to run the races. He and I launched it every week.
The first year most of the fleet was the kids, the Youth Sailing program, in Lasers. They were the bulk of the regulars. It was a competitive fleet. We needed an observer at the pin end of the starting line to get a race off. Otherwise it was one general recall after another as we could not see the pin. I particularly remember Mike Visser and Chris Snyder going at it. One night Jim Christopher came out. He was up from California on his way to a Laser Regatta and soundly spanked our fleet.
The kids were not the only ones to come out. We had people in many different types of boats. The strangest came from the crew of the Molly. They showed up every week with a different boat. They were all home built, out of high tech materials like Tyvek. None of their boats got through a race as something broke. They had a rudder pieced together in a radius pattern that looked good. It was not radiused to be in align with the forces on it however.
A couple years and the kids grew up and moved on. They were not followed by more kids. By then we enough other regulars that did not slow us down. We had a lot of different boats with none dominant. Most were double-handed centerboard boats, 14 to 18 feet. There were still had a couple of kids on Lasers, a Hobie 16 or two … truly a Portsmouth fleet.
Steve Worcester
Memories of Thursday racing, or other SSSS history? I would encourage you to write us on this anniversary year.