Regatta Planning and Debrief

The next regatta is July 9 and 10.  It's bigger than this one was.  Not quite double the size, although maybe.  There will be two lines, and two committee boats, and four mark boats.  I need to find a lot more volunteers to help.  And my goal is to sail in the regatta myself, so I need to organize and find these volunteers well ahead of time.  Yikes.

I haven't been able to meet with the club manager to look at the numbers (how many people bought dinner tickets, what our income and expenditures numbers turned out to be, how many bottles of rum and beer were consumed, etc.).

The mistakes I made this time:

    ** I miscalculated the number of classes that would be sailing and didn't get enough prizes the first time I went to order them, so had to go back.  I think I'll be able to predict this better for the next regatta.

    ** The sailing instructions didn't have the starting sequence exactly right.  Also, they didn't specify that racers should honor the start/finish line while racing.  That led to a dispute after I made an oral amendment to the sailing instructions at the skipper's meeting.  I asked people to honor the line, but because I didn't put the amendment in writing, I don't think it has the force of a real rule.  So when one boat didn't honor the line and another boat protested him, I am not sure who would have won.  I think the boat that didn't honor the line would have been able to have his score count.  As it was, the protesting boat didn't lodge a protest.  Word got out, and the next day hardly anyone honored the line.

    ** I gave verbal directions over the radio to two boats who called in asking which marks they were going to.  I shouldn't have done that during the race.  I was very accomodating and communicative on the radio before the starts, and had announced my willingness to be hailed on the radio at the skippers' meeting.  But responding to a hail during a race about a mark of the course is going too far.  I shouldn't have done it.

    ** I lucked out on Sunday with decent weather.  I had only one mark boat.  If Sunday had been as shifty and tricky as Saturday, it would have been hard to move the line and the course quickly and well.  One mark boat works, but two work MUCH better. 

    ** When I was running the awards ceremony, I forgot to write down the first names of the skippers who won prizes.  I knew almost all of them, but there were a few whose names I SHOULD know that I blanked on.  Luckily my dad was standing beside me and he whispered to me the right information.  Still, I felt like a dope, stammering out names that I should have known cold. 

I goofed up a couple of times when I was counting down the time for my volunteers to shoot guns and raise or lower flags.  This is a mistake but not a huge one -- we just shot off two guns to postpone and started the sequence again.  Also, I was speaking on the radio reading letters and couldn't remember the special nautical words for letters, so I would say something like, "First mark is mark C, Charlie, round to starboard, second mark is mark E, Echo, round to port, third mark is mark P, um...., Pizza, round to starboard..." That was sort of embarrassing to broadcast to a fleet of 35 boats, each with five or more people listening in. 

For those who are interested in pictures of the whole scene, there are some gathered here at the Portland Yacht Club Race Committee blog. 

I got a lot of nice feedback following the race.  People really liked that I wore the blue blazer.  We don't usually do that at our club. People just wear whatever they might wear to go sailing.  My dad has started doing it when he runs a big J/24 race for the past few years, and I think it's a nice touch.  It shows that there is some respect for the event and the racing, and some formality and tradition to the whole thing.  It made it clear that someone was officially in charge, and who it was.  I got a dozen or more compliments.  That was nice.  I wore a skirt on Sunday, which also got a lot of compliments.  A number of racers commented on the fact that I was a woman -- a longtime woman sailor said, "It was so GREAT to hear a woman's voice broadcasting on the radio, and you sounded so competent and in charge."  That was nice, too.  There hasn't been a woman race committee chair before me, and although I've seen women race officers when I've sailed out of state, I can't think of a regatta here that's been run by a woman. 

So for the upcoming event, I want to improve the following things:
-- more volunteers and mark boats
-- less running around by me in the days immediately preceding the event.  Prizes ordered well ahead of time.  That means now.
-- figure out our inflatable mark situation.  Right now, we don't seem to have any inflatable trapezoid marks, and we have too few anchors.
-- get a new chart for the Lindsay Lord
-- fix the sailing instructions, and get them done and published well ahead of time.  Change the starting sequence, note how ties will be broken and the PHRF guys scored (there were some questions about this), and specify that boats not starting or finishing should stay clear of the line.
-- make sure dinner is served for longer
-- try to increase participation by cruisers
-- order a little less food for the RC.  We had lots of leftover chips, cookies, sandwiches, and beer.
-- smoother distribution of parking passes to volunteers.  Maybe a volunteer meeting beforehand.

Comments

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thanks for sharing. i'm not much for regattas, but have done plenty with event planning for other types of things, and the same "what was good, what was bad, how to fix for next time" is the same, and just as necessary, for any event. May the next one be even more of a success for you!