The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Mini masts set sail, take center stage
Nationally sanctioned race being held at Camp Stigwandish
People who passed Camp Stigwandish in Madison Township and caught a glimpse of its southside lake Sept. 23 might just have done a double take.
After all, it’s not every day that 9-acre Bass Lake at the Ross Road Boy Scout camp hosts a nationally sanctioned sail boat race. Granted, the boats only weigh 10 pounds or so and stand 65 inches from keel to mast. But, as the people who love, build and race the little boats, like Painesville Township resident Larry Lamphier, will tell you: “They’re not toys. They’re just small boats.”
Lamphier and several other members of the Western Reserve Model Yacht Club, gathered at the camp Friday for the first day of the club’s 2016 Open Regatta for Soling 1-meter-class boats, which lasts through Sunday afternoon.
Friday’s part of the event consisted of match racing, in which two boats are pitted against each
other, as opposed to fleet regattas which will take place Sept. 24 and 25 and pit several boats against several other boats in two separate fleets based on performance, Perry Township resident Mike Wyatt, who helped launch the WRMYC in 2007, explained.
An American Model Yachting Association-sanctioned event, the regatta adheres to the same rules as full-sized vessels, with a few exceptions that are mainly due to the fact that “they can turn around 180 degrees within their own length,” said Lamphier, the club’s commodore.
Everyone involved sails identical Soling 1-meter yachts, Lamphier explained.
“Everyone buying one of these boats gets the same thing,” he said. “They all come off the same mold. The hull, sails and masts are all the same. So it’s one class and one design.”
Full-size Soling vessels were Olympic-class boats until 1996. They were 27 feet long and operated by a three-person crew.
Wyatt said the crowd involved range in age from their teens through their 80’s and many of them either
are, or were, avid fullsize boat sailors.
“Full-sized sailing — I did that for 40 years,” he said. “I started racing them when I was 22 or 23. It was a lot of fun.”
He said the best part about the scaled-down version is “when I used to sail the big boats, I’d drive for an hour. It’d take me an hour to set everything up. I’d spend an hour taking everything down and then drive an hour back home.”
But with the scaled-down
version, he said, all you need to do is get to the race and get your boat in the water. They go for about five hours at a time on the rechargeable batteries on which they run and, if they run out of juice, it’s just a battery-swap or a 40-minute recharge before being back in the water.
He said the ease of transport, crewing the things and staying on dry land (yet still employing many of the techniques used on full-sized boats like hand-eye coordination, gauging the wind
and many other tactile techniques) makes it an attractive hobby for senior sailors or folks who have become sidelined with injuries or chronic ailments who still like to race.
He said one of the members of the sailors’ club was even involved with the 1967 Swedish Sailing team.
“The guy’s well into his 80s. But he’s still racing and you can’t do that with fullsized boats into your 80’s,” Wyatt said and giggled a bit about a model-yacht sailing
club in Hartford, Conn., called “The Dry Pants Club.” “It’s a lot of fun,” he said. Sailors past and present aren’t the only folks who enjoy the club. Take Madison Village resident Tom Schreiber, for example.
He said he’s being doing it about three years and it all started when his father left him the wooden hull of a model yacht and told him it was his father’s — a project he’d begun in the 1930’s but never got around to finishing.
“He told me: ‘Either finish building it or throw it away but don’t tell me what you decide to do with it,’ ” Schreiber said, adding that he’s since finished it and returned it to his father’s custody.
So Schreiber said it’s the model-building aspect of the club and its regattas that attracted him initially. But now he’s grown to enjoy the whole scene the WRMYC nurtures.
“I like being outdoors. I enjoy being around a group of people that enjoy what I enjoy,” he said. “It’s two or three hours. You’re around friends and you’re doing something you enjoy doing.”
Schreiber seemed to enjoy sharing what he enjoys, too, as he entrusted his craft’s controls in this reporter’s hands and explained that “You’ve gotta just try it out
to understand.”
Relying solely on the power of the wind and a single rudder for steerage, the boats take a bit of adjustment to operate, especially for someone whose only sailing experience consists of tugging on a few lines during a Windjammer cruise in Maine a dozen years ago.
After rounding a marker successfully and wishing to end things on a high note, the remote was passed back and Schreiber assured more than one of these boats will score a few dings before the season’s through.
“Some of these boats you see here have been racing all summer,” he said. “I mean, it’s not NASCAR. But you’ll scrape some paint.”
He said by the end of the season, which comes once the water freezes, “you’ll put some Super Glue or epoxy on ‘em, repaint it if we feel like it and throw ‘em back in the water next season.”
According to Wyatt, the initial kit to build a Soling model runs around $210 and, by the time they’re rigged up and ready to go, their owners spend about $400 or so on the whole project.
Check-in and measurement on Sept. 24 begins at 8:30 a.m. and the event runs through 6 p.m. The championship races Sept. 25 begin at 9:30 a.m. with lunch and awards ceremony at 12:30.