PCCSC Women's Championship

Day 1 of the Women's PCCSC Championship was riddled with strange breeze from every direction. An early morning strong Northeasterly was immediately an unusual sign for Santa Barbara. It began to clock right to a point where it looked like it might actually become consistent from the west, but even then it was fluky.

After setting the course and getting into a start sequence at 10:45 am, 30-45 degree shifts resulted in several postponements during sequence and a few abandoned races. Shifts were coming frequently enough that a square course would become a fetch within a matter of minutes. On top of it, a strangely strong current had sailors working much harder to get around the course than is typical in Santa Barbara. Finally around 12:00pm, the wind clocked to the west with the illusion of consistency and allowed the RC to get a race started and through two legs before it began to twirl around again. Close to the end of the race, they let it run and decided to move the course to a location more to the west in hopes of avoiding the wind eddy that is created off the mountains.

Some good races occurred after that even though the conditions were very shifty and difficult to predict, but in the last race of the day, as boats were crossing the finish line in a dying breeze, it shifted around 180 degrees to the east. Off in the distance was an immensely dark wind line with obvious white caps. What was a 3-4 knot race from the west became 20+ knots 5 minutes later from the east. Numerous boats capsized, caught unprepared by the waves going in one direction against the heavy breeze. The course was shifted around as the safety boats cruised to help the teams out (sometimes jumping in themselves to get boats up). Even as the RC was ready to go, it quickly became apparent this was the end of the day at 4:00pm. NOAA predicted 40 knot breeze in the next 20 minutes and the RC pulled the plug to get the girls ashore as quickly as possible.

Trying conditions is probably an understatement. The Race Committee did a phenomenal job trying to get things going despite the most difficult of wind shifts. One fisherman said "I ain't seen anything like this in my 30 years of fishin'".

Stanford led the first day, followed by Hawaii, UC Berkeley, Cal Poly, and UCSB.

A huge thank you to PRO John Long, Umpire Latham Bell, and the coaches of Hawaii and Stanford for assisting with rotations.

Day 2 had the look of a much more typical day in Santa Barbara and it was. Starting off glassy, the wind filled by 10:30am from the South steadily increasing over the course of the day and clocking right. Pressure in the first race at 10:45am was at 3-5 knots and built to 12-15 by the end of the day. Starting on race 4B, PRO John Long was able to get in 6 more races for A & B division resulting in 10 A/B races total for the weekend. There was one request for redress that was filed and denied. There were no protests filed.

Stanford held the lead handily while Hawaii maintained 2nd over the course of the day. The UCSB Gauchos surged on day 2 grabbing the 3rd place qualification spot. Newcomers, Westmont College grabbed 4th place followed by USC Trojans in 5th.

Congrats to all the PCCSC ladies, it was a fantastic weekend with lots of great competition. Good luck to Stanford, Hawaii, and UCSB at the National Championship!

Once again, thank you to PRO John Long, Umpire Latham Bell, and all the rotation boats.

The following chart shows the relative rank of the teams as of the race indicated. Note that the races are ordered by number, then division, which may not represent the order in which the races were actually sailed.

The first place team as of a given race will always be at the top of the chart. The spacing from one team to the next shows relative gains/losses made from one race to the next. You may hover over the data points to display the total score as of that race.