
(Santa Barbara, CA)- One of the highlights of the Santa Barbara sailing
season is always the Cinco de Mayo celebration. The event always
attracts a good fleet of one-design classes. In fact, Cinco de Mayo and
the Fiesta Cup celebrated later in July are the highlights of the
summertime sailing season for locals due to the enormous influx of
sailors looking forward to the time-honored celebrations associated with
each event.
Host of the Cinco de Mayo Regatta is the Santa Barbara Sailing Club, a
wonderful "home-grown" sailing organization dedicated to promote
primarily one-design class sailboat racing in the Santa Barbara area.
Perhaps most importantly, it primary objective has been to provide
affordable access to the sport of sailboat racing for the general
sailing public.

Attending
this year's event was one of the strongest J/24 one-design turnouts in
quite some time. Sailing were a dozen J/24s with hot competition,
especially for the top of the leaderboard. Past J/24 North American
Champion, Pat Toole and crew on THREE BIG DOGS, just barely managed to
hang on to win the J/24 crown on a tie-breaker with identical scores!
The 3BD crew took a 3-1-1-3-2-2-1-2-1 scoreline for nine races to win.
Giving them a serious run for the money was Klatt's JADED with a
1-2-3-1-4-1-2-1-2 tally for equal 13.0 pts for their eight counter
races. How was the tie-breaker broken? Well after identical counts for
1st, 2nd and 3rds, it goes to who-beat-who in the last race! Great
racing to all! Taking third overall while watching the histrionics
taking place in front was Zimmerman sailing the mighty SVENJA. Fourth
was Baurley's CRITTER and fifth was Susan Taylor's TAKE FIVE. For
more Cinco de Mayo Regatta sailing information