New York Architects' Regatta Challenge

The New York Architects' Regatta is a terrific charity event that provides New York City architecture firms with a chance to battle it out with each other on the race course, right on the Hudson off of lower Manhattan. Having the New York cityscape in the background is particularly fitting for this group of professionals that help to shape the look of the Big Apple.

This year, it was not a night for a sunset and cocktails on the water, like many of the spectators on Manhattan Sailing School's unique floating clubhouse would have likely expected to experience. Instead, it was blowing over 20 as a cold front slowly settled in with record low tempuratures for mid-September. Not to mention periodic rain showers. Not everybody had the kind of top quality foul weather gear we are used to seeing (and we were wearing ourselves), but that didn't hold anybody back. They sailed hard and had a good time! See more photos here.

Stamford Denmark Race

Stamford Yacht Club's Denmark Race is always one of our favorite events to photograph. This year, we had great coniditions for photos, and also had some interesting moments to capture- like a couple of close encounters with a couple of tug-and-barges that went through the course. Everybody was operating safely and responsibly, though! For more about the story behind the Denmark race, check out the boating lifestyle blog that Daniela co-writes for Westport News. See all of the Denmark Race photos here.

The 77th Vineyard Race

Last year's Vineyard Race was a sprint, which made it easy to forget what a Marathon the race usually is. This year's race took between just about 1 full day (Gadzooks, 1 day, 6 min - Cornfield Point Course) and nearly 2 full days (Letting Go, 1 day, 22 hours, 17 min - Vineyard Course). We had to be patient just like everybody else as we sat off of Norwalk for 8 hours yesterday, only seeing a boat every half an hour or so. But thank goodness for Kattack and an iPad, and the fact that our VSR has seats. The wind at the start was a bit light, but we enjoyed photographing a bunch of boats as they sailed toward the finish with a little bit more breeze. We'll be at the party displaying photos on our terminals and providing awards prints. But in the meantime, see the photos here. We got photos of 90% of the boats. Thanks to Rick Bannerot for helping with awards prints for the two boats we missed.

J105 North Americans

Because our business is weather-dependent, we have to admit we spend a lot of time

frustrated by the weather. However, for all of those days when there's not enough wind or not much light, days like the first day of J105 North Americans make up for it. It wasn't even that windy, but 10-15 knots of breeze and an incredibly high pressure day made for some terrific photography conditions off of Marblehead. And to top it off, the fleet raced a very long triangle course for the second race of the day. This course didn't turn out to be very popular with competitors (too long, difficult to find the marks, too much of a navigator race), but it was popular with photographers! We had 40 J105s sailing directly at us under spinnaker- on both downwind legs! See the photos here.

2011 Governor's Cup

"Whenever I print a Gov Cup order, I get a warm fuzzy feeling," Allen joked recently. It's true- Gov Cup is such a great event, with such enthusiastic participants, that we always love covering the race. This year's weather helped us create some especially good photos, as the wind picked up and the seas became lumpy as nearly 150 boats tacked their way down the Chesapeake. Add sunset lighting to the mix, and we're a couple of happy photographers.

Gov Cup was also special for PhotoBoat this year as it was our first event with our new VSR. We went through the entire 10-hour break-in period for our brand new Honda 60 during the race. We had no problem varying the throttle during the break-in period as we chased down more than 100 boats at full speed, then slowed down to photograph them! The VSR handled extremely well, as we knew it would, and moving forward we're extremely excited to use the boat in combination with our dinghies.

See the Gov Cup photos here.