Brant Beach Yacht Club

My mission to sail at one new club every year took me to Brant Beach Yacht Club the second weekend in August for the Laser Nationals. With 278 Lasers in 3 fleets this is the largest Laser event ever held in North America. I was one of 105 Lasers in the standard rig fleet.

The first day was a little out of my wind range and I had a tough time keeping the boat flat upwind. On the second day I was a little more competitive, but with 105 boats on a short line, the starts were brutal and I am definitely out of practice starting in a big fleet.

I can’t say I sailed my best regatta, but I had a good time and everyone at Brant Beach Yacht Club did a fantastic job hosting us.

Here are a handful of photos that I took while I was there with my camera phone.

Here’s a couple pictures taken by the photographer here, here, here, and here.

This weekend I was at the 2009 Southern Bay Leukemia Cup Regatta in Deltaville, VA sailing about Wavelength in the PHRF-A fleet. Last year I took photos and did a regular video.

This year my experiment was to take and collect photos from the event and immediately post them to twitter via the Fishing Bay Yacht Club twitter account (@fishingbayyc). I had a couple people emailing me photos from their camera phones throughout the event. During every free moment I had while racing, I would download the pictures, edit them, and tweet/post them to twitter/flickr. Having image editing apps on the iPhone made this work so easily. The only downside was the spotty coverage out in the middle of the bay, so downloading/uploading went slow.

All and all it was a fun experiment. I want to thank Goeff Cahill, Gary Hooper, and Scott Turpin for contributing photos to the video. The event website including results can be found here.

Lasers Beached at 2009 NAC

This past weekend I was up in Fort Erie Ontario for the 2009 Laser North American Championship. I was sailing a Radial in the 4-day regatta. It wasn’t my best showing, but I leaned a lot about sailing a Radial and how a big-time regatta at the level of a North American Championship runs. I’m looking forward to US Nationals in August. Here’s a few pictures from around the Buffalo Canoe Club during the event.

Group Photo Webster/Wade Wedding

This weekend was the wedding of Chris Webster and Heather Wade. Chris was one of my roommates my Senior Year at ECU. Heather was a regular at our parties and despite both of them having significant others at the time, things eventually worked out for them and 5 years later, they are getting married. Congratulations Chris and Heather! I am very proud and happy for you both and look forward to many more years of tailgating and hanging out.

Here are my photos from the weekend as well as a dance-off video.

Housewarming Cheers

After many months of work on the house I finally got it in ship shape and threw a housewarming party. I was joined by friends from work, kickball, high school, soccer and others and everyone had a great time at the bar, play pool, or on the patio playing beer pong and flip cup. Thank you to everyone who came and I am looking forward to many more parties just like it. Here are photos.

District Secretaries

The first weekend of May was the 2009 Laser Atlantic Coast Championship (standard rig). 84 Lasers sailed in a variety conditions for two days in Annapolis, Maryland. Results are here. Off-the-water photos are here.

This photo is of me and my fellow District Secretaries: Jon Deutsch (D11), John Shockey (D18), John Coolidge (D17), Eric Reitinger (D10)

The Company Softball Team Website Screen Shot

This week my softball team kicks off our season. The team is comprised mostly of my co-workers and it has been 4 years since we last had a team. To help the team captain manage the team and provide a way to share information, stats, photos and anything else we might want, I created a website – thecompanysoftballteam.com. This is my first project using WordPress and I think it turned out pretty well. I hope to get a little more familiar with the software and start using it for my other websites to save myself some of the trouble of hand coding everything. And follow the team on twitter @companysoftball.

Chris and Chris Batchelor Party in New Orleans

I got to spend a weekend in New Orleans in March with a few of my buddies from ECU for Chris’ Bachelor Party. It was my first time to The Big Easy. We had a great time visiting the places on Bourbon Street and seeing some of the sights. Two days was definitely not enough time to see New Orleans. Some day I will have to live in a town where you can drink beer on the street. Here’s a short video of some of the things we saw.