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In this issue:
- Upcoming Events
- A Sailin Day
- The Club's Forgotten Custom Boat
- Club Racing, Way Back When
- CSC Discounts
- The Rhodes Returns
- Crusty's Corner
- Contacting the Editor
Upcoming Events at Cal Sailing Club
- July 4 OPEN HOUSE, 1 - 4 pm, weather permitting.
- July 11 Women's Dinghy Lessons, 1pm-4pm Contact Caryl Woulfe
- July 17 Cruise to Mile Rock, one mile outside the Golden Gate, with David Cary 1pm
- July 18 OPEN HOUSE, 1 - 4 pm, weather permitting.
- July 18 ExComm meeting. 6:30pm at the clubhouse. Open to all members.
- July 19-23 Sailing Fast Track for Junior Skipper rating, 5pm-9pm. Contact Dan Pang
- July 25 Women's Dinghy Lessons, 1pm-4pm Contact Caryl Woulfe
- August 1 OPEN HOUSE, 1 - 4 pm, weather permitting.
- August 2,3,5 & 9,10,12 Sailing Fast Track for Junior Skipper rating, 5pm-9pm. Contact Mike
- Sunday Mornings Dinghy Racing 10am-1pm Contact Gary Farber
- Tuesday Evening Spinnaker Runs 6pm-10pm Contact Bob Hood
- Wednesday Evening Windsurfing Slalom Races 5:30pm. Contact Jane Morson
-
Sat Jul 17 9:45am - 1pm
Sat Jul 31 9:30am - 1pm
Stay Informed! Do you miss out on workshops or cruise sign-ups because you learned about them too late? Join our email discussion list, for announcements about club activities, lessons, and work hours. To subscribe send a blank message to cal-sailing-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
A SAILIN DAY by Gene B. Herman (Nantucket Harbor, August 1972)
Wind blowin from port quarter
gulls lazin
water ripplin on the harbor bay
halyards rattlin in the breeze
mornin sun
climbin fast
cloudless sky
coffee quick
donuts
juice
move it topside
make ready
weigh anchor
we're shovin off
it's
a
sailin
day
The Club's Forgotten Custom Boat by Peter Kuhn
In 1957, the club scratched its head over how to replace their aging fleet of boats. The investigation took a brief side trip into planning a custom boat.
The "Cal 14", shown here, was intended to be cheaper than production boats, racy like the club's current I14's and 110's, but safer because it would have built in buoyancy tanks.
At the time, sailing was hot, and plastic was still a little strange to owners of wooden boats with cotton sails and manila rope.
The "Cal 14" represented very conservative technology. The hull was to be a simple fiberglass shell, built uniformly about ¼" thick with a slot cut in the bottom for the centerboard. The rest would be tried and true wood and metal-the deck and centerboard case would be plywood, with wood reinforcements to take the stresses. The hull lines were copied from the club's I14 design, and the spars were to be the same used on the club's 110's. Buoyancy was provided by sealing the bow, stern, and side tanks. Together, the tanks could provide 1900 lbs total buoyancy, and 782 lbs buoyancy to support crew and boat during a capsize, with the boat on its side. The designer noted that after a capsize there would "only" be about 300 lbs of water to bail out of the hull.
In initial discussions, the designer said a cost of $720 per boat could be achieved. At the time, the going rate for similar, commercial boats (fiberglass I14 for collegiate use, Snipe, was around $1,000. Two bids were obtained to construct eight Cal 14's, one for $910 a boat, the other for $1,000 apiece.
The W.D. Schock Company, the Club's dealer for parts for the I14's and 110's, offered the club a 20% discount on its brand-new Lido 14. The Lido looked more stable if slower than the Cal 14, with a 6' beam vs. the Cal 14's sleek (but tippy) 4'8" beam. It also looked to be a lower maintenance boat, owing to its much more advanced use of fiberglass for deck, tanks, and centerboard case. The club's insurance agent opined that the Lido 14 would be 17% cheaper to insure than the existing I14's. The club purchased the Lido's, with bow flotation tanks as an option, along with a double trailer and Dacron sails, using a loan for $9,000 from the Associated Students of the UC.
Did the club miss a great opportunity by not building the "Cal 14"? Probably not. The narrow hull would have been sportier than the Lidos, but capsizes would have been far more frequent, which couldn't have been fun for beginners in an era when cotton, wool, and oilcloth were about the best you could don to brave the bay. The designer thought the hull could easily stand up to 8 years use, but the boats would have become a maintenance headache as the wooden parts began to separate from the hull, leak, and rot.
A Floating Bottle from that era notes that eight club members and two Lidos took a road trip to Lake Tahoe. A boom broke, and a pine bough was successfully substituted. The "Cal 14" design, along with literature on other boats the club considered buying, was left forgotten in the club's filing cabinet.
Club Racing, Way Back When by Neil Larson
In 1958, when I first joined the UC Yacht Club (now CYC ), racing was not an activity with club's four International 14 boats. At that time, out of a total of 50 members, less than 10 were truly regular sailors. On the rare occasions when two boats were sailing close by, an informal race might be a triangle course from the Harbor mouth to the 2nd break in the pier, around Berkeley Reef (rock marked with a telephone pole off of the Golden Gate Fields), and back to the dock.
However, it was the purchase of the six maintenance-free fiberglass Lido sailboats, which included an auto trailer for moving two Lidos at a time, that eventually started the club's racing program. In the fall of 1960, the top skippers in the club were each given a specific Lido to race as their own at SBRA (Small Boat Racing Association) events around the bay. As the Lido fleets were just getting started at that time (these first Lidos were number 138-142), the club initially entered four Lidos in a SBRA regatta at Lake Merced in San Francisco. With about 15 Lidos there, club members finished in the top six positions ... which was a big mistake.
One of the requirements for racing in SBRA events was skippers must belong in a recognized yacht club. Because the Cal Sailing Club was not then a recognized sailing club, these finishing positions were not recorded. Worse yet, because the Lido fleets wanted to be centered around family sailing, the Lake Merritt Lido fleet refused to accept memberships from any CSC skipper on the grounds that: (1) the CYC skippers would unfairly team race against all others, and (2) the CYC boats were non-standard because they included an extra factory-installed bow buoyancy tank. In response to this rejection, club members started their own racing program.
By the summer of 1961, on Monday through Thursday, the day leader stopped the normal sailing at 5:00 pm and turned the boats over to the racing skippers. At that time, the north side of the Berkeley Harbor contained no docks. However, inside the harbor, a large metal ball was permanently anchored near the current OCSC dock and metal World War II lifeboat was moored close to the Radisson Hotel location. These two marks (windward and leeward) became the race course and training ground for a large number of club members. Races were a beat and a run … and as soon as the last place boat rounded the down wind mark, the remaining boats would cross the wake of the last place boat to begin another race.
Within a year of so, many of the best CYC racing sailors purchased Finn sailboats (then the single-handed Olympic Class boat) with one CYC trained member, Louie Nadie, eventually being named as the US Finn Alternate to the 1974 Olympics in Kiel, Germany.
In the early 1960's CSC also sponsored a number of college regattas inviting teams of student sailors from Stanford, University of San Francisco, Cal State San Francisco, and Cal Maritime Academy. And once, the College Sailing Association of Southern California invited a team from CSC to compete with their members in Newport Beach. Two CSC members with years of daily racing experience drove south for two days of college level racing, won every race (another a big mistake), and were told that their results would not be included as it upset the standings among the other schools.
Also in the early 1960, to encourage sailboat racing among colleges, Cornelius Shields donated Shields sailboats to about 30 colleges, with UC receiving one. However, this program died as the faculty member that received the donation was not a member of the club, did nothing to encourage college-level racing, and kept the boat for his own use.
In 1964, a black club member, Bill Pritchard who owned a Thunderbird sailboat, was pictured standing on the foredeck of his boat on the front page of the SF Chronicle because he could not race in YRA (Yacht Racing Association) events as he was not a member of an YRA recognized yacht club. Because CYC was one club that did accept his membership, in the race-conscious uproar that followed, YRA decided to formally recognize CYC as a yacht club, many of the bay area yacht clubs that were located on public property quickly removed such membership restrictions, and a number of owners of larger boats joined CYC to race YRA events perhaps because of the lower membership dues or as a protest against the traditional yacht clubs.
However, the intense racing of Lidos on summer weekday evenings did not last forever because: (1) the best racing sailors moved on to owning or crewing on better or larger boats, (2) the club summer membership meanwhile had grown to 500 plus members, and (3) this emphasis on racing did take the boats away from the many more casual recreational sailors.
For that reason, 1964 Ex Comm decided to curtail the weekday summer evening racing preferences and replace it with Sunday morning racing. And if you perhaps dream of someday racing in the Olympics, all it takes is joining this open-to-anyone Sunday morning program that has now been running for 40 years. And to this day, it is still the fastest way in the club to move up the ladder of acquiring sailing skills.
CSC Discounts by Jane Morson
CSC Members receive in-store discounts from Berkeley Boardsports, Copeland Sports, and Svendsen's Chandlery.
CSC has also arranged special prices on certain merchandise from Aquata, Douglas Gill, Gul, and O'Neill when members order these products through CSC. Amazingly, some of these prices are as little as 14% of retail, so what are you waiting for? Click on Order Merchandise through CSC or email to cscxtras@yahoo.com for more details.
The Rhodes Returns
On July 3, 2004, our Rhodes keelboat was returned to service after being "Do Not Sail" for most of the past two years.
Robert Towler, first vice commodore, takes the helm [see photo],
putting his new advanced dinghy
rating to good use by driving the 19-footer through the gap in the Berkeley Pier. ExCom recently
expanded the Advanced Dinghy Area to be the same as the Senior Skipper Dinghy Area,
so it was all legal.
The next day, on July 4th, the service life of the Rhodes might have ended again when we moved it down the dock by the bow painter, and allowed the boat to move parallel to the dock, putting it abeam of the wind. Since the mainsail was stopped by the shrouds, it powered up forcefully enough to pull the painter from the dockhand's hand and started sailing away. Luckily, crew was aboard and returned the Rhodes to the dock, but the lesson learned was to keep the bow to the wind when moving a keelboat down the dock!
Juniors may sail the Rhodes after they receive a checkout, which emphasizes docking a keelboat.
Damn Spring by Crusty
In the cruelest month, Crusty slinks behind gabbing sailors to snag a sixpack behind a tray of BBQ'd mackerel, when a hand encircles his scabby biceps.
"Weren't you the one who wanted to go out on the 470?" Crusty nods, thinking only of the necessity of oblivion.
Crusty finds his loins being girdled with a strange contraption, his manliness mocked by a gleaming steel appendage.
"Now don't forget to duck under the boom when we tack" says a voice. Crusty only regrets a lost six pack, the weeds crowding his haven, the hordes tramping his hillside home in search of spots to picnic and beget.
Crusty steps out over the watery waste, the halyards shriek, chop smashes against the hull.
"Marie, Marie, hold on tight!" he cries. If nothing else, he thinks, this wild ride should merit a trip to the emergency room for painkillers.
From the Editor - Mike Hummell
It's been a wonderfully windy summer so far, so come on down to the club and enjoy it! And if anything interesting happens, write it up and email it in to the Bottle at floatingbottle@cal-sailing.org for publication. Meanwhile, while you're at your computer, check out the Waterfront Photo Of The Week - great photojournalism of the Berkeley Marina environs.
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Copyright 2004, Cal Sailing Club. All Rights Reserved.
