October, 2010 Action

October was a wet and wild month. Here's a montage of our broach and capsize shots from J80 Worlds, Heineken HPDO, and US Sailing Championship of Champions. Click the link below or press the play button to view the video!

October, 2010 Action

2010 US Sailing Championship of Champions

Between AYC Fall Series, J/80 Worlds, and the HPDO, we had 10 straight days of shooting and took, edited, sorted, and posted more than 20,000 photos. The 3-day break before the Championship of Champions was much needed, especially since the C of C proved to be another very intense event. Put champions from 20 different fleets around the country in Ideal 18s and send them out in 35 knots, and it makes for some interesting photos (yes, apparently Ideals like to pitch-pole).

To get the full flavor, see Carol Cronin's write-up about the event here and more shots on the US Sailing site, and ours, of course.

2010 Heineken HPDO

The High Performance Dinghy Open was a fantastic event again this year. Better-than-forecast breeze and good participation (including a huge Viper fleet) made for another photogenic weekend. Having packed up our boats in Newport at 11 pm after the final evening of J80 Worlds photo displays (and after 5 hours of photographing in 30 knot conditions before that), we were pretty tired when we got out on the water in Rye for the 11 am start the next morning. Adrenaline kicked in, though, and the HPDO is one of our favorite events to photograph, so we were fine. The fact that Heineken sponsors our coverage, and participants receive free medium-res photos, makes this a happy event for everybody. See the 2010 Heineken HPDO photos here.

2010 J80 Worlds

The word of the week at the 2010 J80 World Championship in Newport was Epic. All 4 days, plus the practice day before the event, we saw wind speeds above 15 knots. The event started with a nasty, grey-skied Noreaster that brought huge seas to the offshore sailing area, and ended with a 30-35mph westerly with bright skies and porpoises playing off of Newport. Every day was memorable in its own way, including Wednesday, during which we all got drenched by pouring rain for several hours. We probably took more photos of broaching boats at this event alone than we have in our entire career so far. Even the winner was caught on her side at one point- it was just part of life during this regatta. The photos are a must-see. Check them out here.

AYC Fall Series

AYC Fall series was a 2-weekend, 4-day series, as always. This year mother nature delivered for us on the last day, starting off a long stretch of extremely high-wind shooting for us in October. In fact, we shot for 10 consecutive days, with the wind speed averaging around 25 and reaching a max of 35. We know everybody loves high-wind photos, and we had so much web traffic in October that we had to increase our bandwidth- twice!

Check out the 2010 AYC Fall Series shots here and stay tuned for the rest of the October story.

IHYC Classic and IRC LIS Champs

The weekend of Sept 18-19 brought two new regattas to the Long Island Sound sailing scene, right in the heart of the busy fall season: the Indian Harbor Yacht Club Classic Yacht Regatta and the IRC LIS Champs/Fall PHRF Classic. We covered both- not only were they both run out of Greenwich, but some of the classic yachts actually sailed through the IRC/PHRF course while sailing their distance race. It was great to see so many sailboats out on the sound, though apparently not everybody thinks so. I was photographing at the windward mark of the IRC course when one of the big charter fishing boats- the kind that takes hundreds of people out at a time- actually came over to race committee to complain that the course was taking up too much space...

It's nice to still have some surprises out there after shooting 50 regattas a year for the past 5 years.

We're looking forward to shooting these two great events again. As always, the classics are beautiful. Check out the photos here.