Latest / Rick Outzen: (we don’t) color on the dog / Viper 640 Championship
Transcript
- speaker-0: Welcome back. I'm Rick Alson and this is Rick's Blog Live. You can follow us on Rick's Blog.biznweekly.net. We don't color on the dog podcast and all the social media. And please, when you do see us, like and subscribe. That'll help us, particularly with YouTube. So please help us there. We are becoming the sailing capital of North America. It sounded bold and brash six years ago, and it's becoming more and more true. We've got a championship coming. It's the Viper 640 North American Championship. And the man, when I want to know about sailing, I call Tom Pace. Tom, thank you for coming. Tell us speaker-1: Rick, appreciate you having me. Thank you. speaker-0: about how Pensacola Yacht Club landed this race. speaker-1: Well, the Viper 640 is a three-person, they call it a performance boat. So it's kind of a go-fast, it's not a foiler, it's not what you'll see from American Magic. But this is a boat that accentuates crew work and boat speed. and these boats are raced throughout the Gulf Yachting Association. So several of our sailors in the GYA, which is Clearwater to Texas, race these boats. PYC has a very strong team. We won the Gulf Coast Lipton Challenge two years ago and have a very strong chance to win the overall this year as well. And in that, those sailors won. So this class doesn't really come here for championships. They did once a couple years ago in New Orleans, and so we've had a chance to come up now five years later and do that event here. And I think as of this morning we've got thirty-eight boats registered, which is a good fleet and very good competition. So they love the bay. Every reason that American Magic is here, we've got the racetrack and we've got the people to do it, and these people are happy to get after it. speaker-0: That was gonna be my next question is why Pensacola Bay? What makes it work? We've we've heard it about foiling, we've heard it from American Magic and the and and and they and what they like about it and the teams that they train. But for these boats, what makes it so good? speaker-1: Well, a lot of places in the world where you will have a sailboat regatta, you're limited by landmass, by buildings that can obstruct the wind, accessibility to deep enough water. Pensacola Bay, I mean, the Luna figured this out, but it's a natural deep water bay. You don't have small channels you have to get to to get to the saleable racetrack. The entire bulk of our bay, four by seven miles square, you can use. So anytime the wind shifts and changes, which it does constantly, you can alter your course. And we don't have problems with our shipping channel, our commercial work going in and out of the Port with Matt Mileship, the port pilot. And then on top of that, we have a great relationship. So if we're on the water, wind changes, I can call them. Do you have commercial vessels coming? Do we have LNG barges going to Gulf Power? Do we have Transmontane fuel barges going into downtown? So we're never going to be in their way. This track, the geography of the bay, allows us to do that probably better than anywhere. And unlike a lot of great sailing venues in the world from Great Lakes, West Coast, East Coast, we can go straight off of PYC and be at the racetrack. But speaker-0: I I've never seen a Viper six forty race. W what do you look for? What makes it different than you know, the larger sailing vessels? speaker-1: It out. Well, it's fast and it's very dynamic. So if you get 12 knots to 15 to 20 knot winds, you're holding on to a buck and bronco and you're flying. So the windier it gets, the faster the boats go, and the crewer it becomes even more critical. A lot of times with larger boats, especially the GO52s, I mean they're amazing. They are so fun to watch when it's windy. And you have a crew of 11 people. This is a crew of three that have to do the same thing but on a smaller scale. Your mistakes are accentuated and also as your gains. So within this, there's is a huge premium on crew interactivity and their talent, but it's just fun. It's a great race, great boat to race. And in those races, you usually have very, very tight finish positions. And so it makes it interesting for all the sailors as well. speaker-0: No, so they all at the same time. speaker-1: It's called a full fleet start. Wow. And so most regottas, most sailing regottas are a full fleet start. Okay. with sail GP for safety, now they're limiting the number of boats because you have 40 knot, you 48 mile an hour closure rates. These boats can hit into the low 30s, which is incredibly fast for a boat this size. speaker-0: So how does the track work? Do they go out to a point and come back or do they race to a point? I mean these are things I don't speaker-1: No. So in a lot of races, a lot of offshore races, they will go from St. Pete to Pensacola. Right. So we're gonna do that next spring, actually. Petersburg will send a race to us and they'll pitch, we catch, and put on a great party in Pensacola. Buck Mitchell, guys downtown, will help us out with that as well as the yacht club. But for this kind of race, it is a closed course. So whichever the wind blows, you will have one mark at the top of the course upwind, one at the bottom, and a start line. And on that start line, it'll be a two lap course, first one to finish the two lap wins. There will be Up to probably no more than eight or nine races in the series, but you get to discard your single worst finish after four races. And in that it gets to be very tight and competitive points-wise. You may win the first race rig and just demolish the fleet. speaker-0: What about the local interest? You talked about the yacht club has a pretty good team. What can we expect from the locals? speaker-1: Well, we've got one of the better teams in the GYA. Mike LeVere has been our team captain for this for a long time. Grew up at Southern Yacht Club in New Orleans, been racing here at Pensacola now for gosh, nine or ten years. Mike is real good and he's got an exceptional crew with him. So he's our number one boat. Harrison Prochaska and Kyle Gamble, George's son, will be on the boat or on our B-boat. And they are both incredibly good sailors. So any given day, they should be in the mix. But we really don't know. The GYA boats normally stay here. On the Gulf and race here among all the yacht clubs from Texas to Clearwater, whereas the Viper 640 class races all over the country. So a lot of times our sailors don't go race these guys. And I think right now we've only got six of the GOA boats registered to compete, and that may have gone up by one more today, but we've got 32 visitors. speaker-0: So there'd be people they haven't so they don't know. speaker-1: Exactly. So now the tolerances for trimming your sails, getting your boat set just right. you look a lot in Formula One and they've got all these buttons on the steering wheel and they're changing the dampening and all the shocks and how they do to make the car work for better ground effect. And sailing it's similar. You can take tension off of either side of the wire, holding tension on the mast, which shapes your sails, which allows you to be faster on certain points of sail. And then after that, it gets to be tactics, Rick. So is the wind really shifting, coming around the downtown, past the Bay Bridge, through Gulf freeze along with the current. So if Rick doesn't know that and I do, I'm gonna go around and I'm gonna get him to that first mark. So there's that, then there's that head to head. You may call the right tactics. I might also, but I'm getting right next to you, man. I'm gonna squeeze every bit I can out of that sail and that wind to catch little bumps of waves and get a half a mile an hour faster than you. And that's the game too. speaker-0: Cool, cool. So this is what the dates what are the dates? Okay. speaker-1: This will be September 30 through October 4th. speaker-0: Yeah, they've got on the screen for us. They got it got ahead of us. Where's the best place for someone to watch this? How how's the best way to watch it right now? speaker-1: Like, well, any chance you can be on the water. historically we have a lot of private boats that'll show up for the regatta, but anybody who's out on the bay, you'll see a regatta, and it's pretty simple to know where not to go. You know, if you see 38 boats all gathered around getting ready, even if you've never sailed, you can tell what a start is and where the buoys are. Stay away from the buoys and you can see what happens. Other than that, anywhere downtown, if you happen to be near a Maritime Park, you should be able to see that. If you're on the Bay Bridge, you will see a bunch of sails on the bay. And with sailing, Always, even with the GL 52s, these big huge boats, it's hard to say exactly where because we don't know exactly where we'll be because the wind might change. Right. You know, if the wind is hard out of the northwest on an early cold front, we may be over by NAS and pushing towards the south and southwest. if the wind is more out of the north northeast, we'll be closer to downtown. So so anywhere along the waterfront, but if you can get on a boat anywhere, that's the best spot. speaker-0: So you're looking at eight races? Hopefully eight if the weather permits. Sure. speaker-1: Sure. Sure. And with that number of days we can, but you like to try to build in in case you have weather anomalies. Right. So sometimes you get a storm, lightning coming for safety, we pull people off the water. you can get fog, not this time of year though, but we do. Every racetrack in the world, Rick goes, it's never happened before. Right? Why it's never been this windy. We've never seen lightning. Well our our head of our race is our principal race officer. His name is Hal Smith. Hal is arguably one of the best PROs running races anywhere in the country. And when we did the Opti Nationals in 2018, we had 301 kids from twelve countries. I came in, actually I was picking up a stringer from News Journal who was gonna come do some photos. I came in, the whole fleet was back at the yacht club. I looked at Hal and said, What you doing? He goes, We came in for weather. I go, it's beautiful. He goes, Look behind you. The sky was black, boiling. That was when Pennsylvania recorded over 300 air-to-ground lightning heads that afternoon. Okay. Hal was aware of it, got everybody in, kids were safe. and sound so how will be on top of weather, everything else, but I would think we should get eight would be a minimal. we could get up to twelve races. Thank you, Val. Always appreciate it. Always speaker-0: Great. Well, Tom, Tom, thank you so much. Pittscola Yacht Club. This this race is September 30th through October 4th. you can go to the blog, find out more about it. You can go to the Yacht Club's website and learn even more. Listen, we're gonna take a break, pay a few bills, we'll be right back. I'm Rick Altson. This is Rick's Vlog Live.