Anyone coming?

The race is happening on January 31st. It is one of the most popular in the San Francisco Bay, (close to 300 boats participated last year and 320+ are already signed-up with a week to go...)

It is sponsored by San Francisco's Singlehandled sailing society. (I am entered in the double handed category...)

You can find out more about it at:

http://sailmagazine.com/ThreeBridgeFiasco/

Or at the San Francisco Single handling society... (SSS) website.

An exerpt:


What a FIASCO !
By Kimball Livingston

There's no explaining the Three Bridge Fiasco to people who expect things to make sense. We're talking about a race sailed in the dead of winter, when you can't count on breeze on San Francisco Bay, but you can expect the currents to be running big-time. A bay, we call it, because the sea floods in, but the Golden Gate is also a drain spout for 16 rivers swollen with winter rain.

Racing the Three Bridge Fiasco, you have three marks to round. Each mark is at or under one of three bridges (San Francisco Bay Bridge, The Golden Gate Bridge and the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge). The shortest-possible route (over the ground, not necessarily the shortest route through the water) is 21 miles, and it does not simplify things at all that going from a reverse-order, pursuit start, you may round these marks in any order or any direction at all. Time and again this race draws the biggest fleet for any race of the year in Northern California. Which only goes to show, if you declare a fiasco, they will come. Darned if the name isn't a brilliant stroke of marketing.