LHYC

www.LHYC.org March 2009

Mission Statement:

The objects of the Lloyd Harbor Yacht Club shall be to encourage and promote interest in, as well as to foster the art and enjoyment of, the sport of sailing by providing the opportunity and means for the development of individual skill and knowledge, encouraging excellence in seamanship and navigation, and by providing participative events wherein these qualities can be exercised under the aegis of the LHYC burgee.

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It’s getting to be that time again, hibernation period draws to an end, spring boat projects start to pile up and Lloyd Harbor YC events abound. As you can see by the vastness of black ink on these pages, we have had much to do, specifically the Rules seminar sponsored by the YRA, frostbiting Spring Series and St. Patrick’s Regatta, the Greater Huntington Boat and Yacht Council meetings, racing in St. Maarten for those lucky enough to be able to leave town and our own March Speakers’ Event, this year held in conjunction with the Willis Marine Center’s Open House. On a beautiful and unseasonably warm March 14, club members checked out the boats, ate barbecue and heard from Cruising Chairperson Dan Corcoran who laid out the plans for a nice Memorial Day weekend cruise and yours truly on performing race committee on our stalwart committee boat, the Melrose. Both Dan and I are looking for commitments from our members. Dan has set up through our website a “Cruising Thread” to get the information out to our fleet, solicit their input and seek commitment and interest for the Memorial Day Cruise and events planned later on in the season. Similarly, our races done get held unless we get competent people to step up, get trained and serve as the Principle Race Officer for our 30+ races. To facilitate educating the fleet, we have US Sailing’s Race Management Guide Book available to those who wish to learn everything there is to run a race; it’s not intimidating at all, as it is laid out in 80 pages of easily understood, illustrated material. Should you wish a copy please contact me and I will email you one. It also comes with the expectation that you will exercise your skills by volunteering to run a race. Our New Members Party is coming up on April 25 and traditionally, that is when our volunteers are called upon to act; your flag officers need your assistance, so please plan on attending and committing to provide a service, or two to your club. You will be glad that you did. Until then, let’s get busy and get out the word to all racing and cruising sailors that the calendar is set and all we need is you! See ya at the next event,

Rich Rubel Commodore LHYC

Dave Perry Gives Rules Update at CYC – At the stroke of midnight on New Years Eve, you might have missed it with all the revelry, our Racing Rules of Sailing had changed. Our new rules take us up to 2012 and brings more streamlining, a deletion or two, more clarification and greater consistency with regards to privileged boats and boats that gained rights at “the zone.” Oh, and by the way, the zone is now at three boat lengths, not two. Dave Perry, a Sr. Certified Judge, Sailing World Hall of Fame member and serious kibitzer, presented the recent changes at Centerport Yacht Club, to a nearly packed house.

Many lecturers drone on and lose their audience, but Perry’s March 3 presentation peppered the crowd with questions, kept you riveted to the rule at hand and had a way of making you look at the applicable rule only; common racing situations get diffused down to the most basic elements, making the applicable rule jump out at you. It is also entertaining when he unabashedly plugs his many books, which from my experience, are great aids to understanding the rules and learning tactics.

Some significant changes, beside the enlarged zone include the deletion of 17.2 sailing below your proper course, the deletion of no more zone around obstructions, a change in 18.4 regarding the proper course to a leeward gate and sails not being used for ballast, to name a few. If you have not read any of his books or seen Perry speak you should do both. The next YRA sponsored Rules discussion will be at Cedar Point YC on April 23. It’s a most worthwhile way to spend an evening and mull over an array of race situations.

Board Meeting Bullets: The March Board Meeting held at the Willis Marine Center addressed the following as part of our agenda:

· The Membership Committee and Board had the pleasure of interviewing Ryan Thompson, the T-10 Desperado’s (nee Smoke’em) new owner. Both Ryan’s and Rubin-de-Cervens names will now be forwarded to the general membership for their vote.

· Our membership ranks were discussed; we have received notice of the resignation of Mark Ambrosious and Martin Rebholtz, and the Treasurer (at the time of the mtg) is still waiting to receive checks from a few other members. Failure to pay dues will result in the deletion from the roster and possible termination of their membership. It was also announced that we have received confirmation of another year of sponsorship from Mike at Compass Rose Marine. Thank you Mike and to all of our premier sponsors, Total Dollar Insurance, Coney’s Marine and the Willis Marine Center.

· Summer and Sunset Series Race start times were discussed; some wanted to start early, have longer races and beat out the dying breeze, while others have problems leaving work early from NYC on early trains. The Fleet Captain will survey his committee and make a decision.

· Plans are going ahead for our New Members’ Cocktail Party on April 25, at the Sterflinger’s; we are working to interview members and get good sailing applicants for club membership and participation.

Miscellaneous Illuminations: News from YRA Pres. Bob Kendrick: The YRA racing program was sent to printer, expect it to be out around April 1; Sailors are reminded to renew their PHRF certificates to beat the last minute rush; PHRF meetings are on the second Thursday at Larchmont YC at 8 PM with a very full schedule of boats to rate, including the new Santa Cruz 37 and a R/P 55; Special thanks to PC Leigh Sterflinger who is now the YRA Treasurer and to PC Charlie Powers who is on the Racing Program Committee and also Scorer for the various YRA season trophies; lastly the season opener is at American YC on April 25 and you can review the rest of the schedule at www.yralis.org.~~__/) Is it better to be lucky or good? Art Kelley of the Frers 33 Brilliant was the lucky winner of WindCheck's latest on-line contest. Sponsored by North U., Art will attend US Sailing’s Racing Rules Seminar Presented by North U. for free this March. Maybe we can get Art to share his knowledge with the fleet. ~~__/) Seen on a Northport Village minivan bumper sticker: “It Takes a Viking to Raze a Village.” Ha! ~~__/) From the book on the BT Global Challenge (1996) titled “Uphill all the way,” there was the following quote from noted adventurer Bill Tilman: “Crew should be cheerful, equable, longsuffering, patient in adversity, tolerant of the whims and uncouth manners of others, neat and clean, adaptable, unselfish, loyal – in fact possessed of most of the qualities in which the majority of men are notably deficient.” ~~__/)

Heineken Regatta Happenings - submitted by Jordan Mindich

George Ryan, Damien Emory (J105 Eclipse), Shannon and I hitched a ride on a modified 35' KIWI...the thing has wings sorta like a flying squirrel. The owner is a sail maker down in St. Lucia and this was a "project boat" It is notorious for poor upwind performance, the owner replaced the keel with double the weight and added a meter to the boom; the nicest part of the boat was the paint job. During practice a shoddy tackline came undone from the shackle and after that takedown drill the new, thinner tack line got jammed in the block resulting in another drill. However, for the few minutes that we had the chute up, it was FAST - 17.9 in 18 knots! So on day 1, Friday, we have an OK start in big breeze, 20-30 kns. and 6-8' waves for a hard beat up the southwest coast. Shortly after turning the point toward Marigot we notice the flicker was inverted at the mast head...about five seconds later it all came down. All ten on board were safe, though we were near a lee shore. And did I mention that the boat has NO ENGINE; fortunately there was a large rescue rib nearby that kept us out of the rollers until a larger coast guard boat grabbed us and towed us to Marigot. In big seas again, with lots of water coming over the boat, the sharp carnage of the rig and the threat of losing the lifelines during towing had us grabbing whatever we could to hold on. Anyway, we were towed safely to the new marina where the boat now sits and the owner hopes to have a new carbon rig for the Rolex.

We later hitched a ride on a 35' bareboat for the rest of the regatta and struggled to keep it on its feet in the waves and wind. Even with Damien driving, the thing rounded up downwind. And as fate would have it, their return trip to the marina was much worse; here is the Sailing Anarchy blurb: Yesterday a bareboat returning to Oyster Pond hit the reef and sunk. Everyone was rescued from the boat, but the boat was done, a 35ish Moorings.

My friends were on that boat -- they are all very good sailors out of Annapolis who chartered the boat. For those of you bashing the charter boat sailors as people who don't know what they are doing, just keep in mind that not everyone out there on a charter boat was a complete idiot and that the conditions just might have played a part in some of the carnage. The good news is that all crew made it safely back to shore and nobody was hurt beyond some bruising. Everything they had with them went down with the boat, including plane tickets, car keys, phones, you name it. I haven't gotten a lot of details but the short story is that a twelve-foot breaking wave in the channel at Oyster Pond caught them, the boat turtled and came back up with a broken mast. It ended up on the reef and then went down. It had to be a pretty scary experience.

The good news (besides that the Long Island sailors were not aboard that day) was that it happened on the last day, they had a great time until that last day and the folks from Annapolis were all safe. For more gory details you can find info in the Heineken blog on Sailing Anarchy.

The Power of the Mind – Excerpted from Sail, Race, and Win: How to Develop a Winning Attitude By Eric Twiname, revised by Cathy Foster, Sheridan House Inc.

The wonderful thing about your mind is that provided you go about things in the right way it will do a vast amount for you without you even having to think about it. It does this all the time with mundane activities like walking and driving the car. This is taken for granted. If your subconscious mind went on strike you would be in dire trouble. Every movement of every muscle would have to be consciously thought out and supervised. You would take a long time to

get anywhere.

Your subconscious mind is 90 percent of the whole, with only 10 percent representing the conscious part. Just as walking is done almost entirely by the subconscious, so is sailing, much more so than you think. Your conscious mind is simply incapable of attending to every little movement of your body or tuning into each of the senses that is providing you with information that is being drawn on. Even tactical decisions are based largely on the subconscious. A situation develops ahead and you need to make a response, and that response whether to tack or luff or whatever, results from dipping into your store of experience which lies in the subconscious and getting a quick answer. To think through the alternative moves at the time would usually be disastrous. There is so much to attend to during a race that quite often you have to put your sailing of the boat on to automatic pilot while you look for the weather mark, see what the other boats are doing, or scan the water upwind for gusts. When you do this you shift your conscious attention entirely off sailing the boat, which is done subconsciously by your automatic pilot skills. Only if something goes wrong, like a wave taken badly or a sudden heel, does a mental alarm bell call your full attention back to the job of sailing the boat. Even when you are sailing with your attention and thoughts all centered on getting the boat to go through the water as fast as it will, much of your bodily movements and responses are bypassing the conscious mind completely. We are automatons of our own making, and part of making your mind work more effectively on the water is raising those automatic pilot skills- that part which the subconscious mind does for you- to as near perfection as possible.

When your automatic skills are highly developed you automatically sail your boat near-perfectly the whole time. The conscious mind is then free to attend to the tactical side of the race, looking out for wind shifts and generally being the master of the preceedings and not merely a slavish servant to the jib luff. Much of the time will certainly be spent with full attention on the jib or the waves ahead of the bow- or wherever a particular sailor looks in the prevailing

conditions to enable them to get the most speed out of their boat. But little will be lost when they must look away and, all else being equal, it is their studying of the wind and the race as it develops that will enable them to make the winning tactical decisions. Beginners have no automatic pilot sailing skills; they have to do everything consciously, and even heading up and bearing away have to be thought out. Improvement is a process in which the subconscious learns

set responses that allow skills such as helming to become a natural, easy and very automatic process. Once your responses do become automatic in this way you face a problem: if these responses are only 70 percent perfect and you want to improve your racing, you must make

the effort to take these automatic skills out, examine them, and then raise them to a higher level of perfection. That is how you improve.

Greater Huntington Boat and Yacht Council News Submitted by the GHBYC Secretary and our representative, June Kendrick:

There is a Sea Scout ship in the Town of Huntington - associated with the Northport Boy Scouts - Ship #490 open to all children ages 14-18. They have a power boat and a sailboat; for more information contact Jan Rose at 631-351-8350 or tigeress89@aol.com.
If states don't have a salt water licensing system in place, their residents will have to register with the Feds; so, NY S is proposing a salt water fishing license. The local state officials feel it is best to set up our own and keep any licensing fees rather than give them to the Feds, but the local reps want the money to go to marine interests, not the general fund, in which case they support the proposal.
Meet the Commodores night is June 4 at the Bay Club. This is the boating community's opportunity to show the local politicians that we are a large lobby by having each of the GHCYBC clubs field as many members as they can. Last year there were 160 people at Northport YC (standing room only) and Frank Petrone commented that he didn't realize how large a group we represented. So, we hope that we can expect a crowd from LHYC.
The Centerport Harbor channel is on the schedule for either the October 2009 or January 2010 dredging window. The process to dredge the Northport Harbor channel has begun, with the town approving a resolution to begin the dredging application process. We are pushing for this to be speedily accomplished. We had reports that the channel in front of the town dock at Cold Spring Harbor is closing in and also needs dredging, so we will be looking into that, too.
LHYC is in need of an alternate delegate to the Greater Huntington Boat and Yacht Council meetings. As you may recall June is their Secretary and Jon Ten Haagen their Commodore. Some fresh faces and new blood is being sought. If you are interested in getting involved and articulating our club’s positions on issues pertaining to the waterways we ply daily, please send me an email and I will forward your interest to the council. For more information, please go to their website at www.huntingtonboatingcouncil.org.

St. Patrick’s Day JY 15 Regatta – With the promise of temperatures nearing 60 degrees, eight competitive boats ventured out for the annual St Patrick’s Day Frostbite Regatta at CYC. The wind was slated to be about 4-5 kns. from the south, but we were blessed with light and steady breezes from the north that stared clocking to the NE. RC Chris Schneider, with mark boat assistance from Art Kelley and a new volunteer from HYC, Stephen O’Reilly, ably ran six varied races, inserting a gate at one point, which is something we’ve spoken of, but never initiated. For race one, our fleet’s perennial champ, Brian Simkins, sailing with new crew, his young daughter Ella, leapt across the fleet on port tack, leading us to the right side of the course. In a bold and cohesive family move Mike Sterflinger, sailing with son Peter, followed by Leigh sailing with Sue Belle, all went hard right, practically tacking amidst the Northport docs and finished the race first, second and third respectively. The day certainly had it squeakers, with many light air runs, boats splitting the course and finding slight veins of breeze to carry them down, boats from the rear bringing in some breeze, making the finishes very close. While we hadn’t dyed the bay green like they do in Chicago, we have made this holiday a frostbiting institution that marks the arrival of the season closer, which is at the end of March. Congratulations to all those who made it out for the regatta and watch out for the final Spring Series results which will be announced next month The St . Patrick’s Day Results are as follows: Chris Dara sailing with Eric Francois 7^th, Leigh Sterflinger/ Sue Belle 6^th, Joe Scarpulla /Robert Zagaja 5^th, Mike and Peter Sterflinger 4^th, Thom Hering and Tara O’Reilly in 3rd, Rich Rubel and Doug Vaughn in 2^nd and Brian and Ella Simkins 1^st (with straight bullets).