Hatteras Island’s First Annual Regatta was a great success with 48 registered competitors! Videos Included of Racing Starts and more….
Thanks to volunteers, sponsors and enthusiastic visiting sailors, it looks like Hatteras Island will continue to be a sought after venue for Spring and Fall festival style sailing events! Notwithstanding some real logistic challenges this year, with communication cut off due to the fiberoptic cable breech last Friday and a massive Northeaster washing out the roads in several places, Hatteras Sailing and most of the 48 registered sailors persevered and made it to the Wind and Waves Regatta at Frisco Woods on Friday and Saturday morning!
Click Here to see Regatta Results and Image Gallery
Organized by Hatteras Community Sailing Organization and hosted at Frisco Woods Campground, the Wind and Waves One Design Regatta this past weekend was a great time according to visiting sailors from a 200-300 mile regional radius. This event featured an exciting full schedule of racing and fun family activities from Friday check-in at 3pm through the Sunday afternoon Awards Ceremony. Dozens of local businesses contributed by sponsoring food, drinks, entertainment, and regatta apparel.
Friday night activities at the Campground Gazebo were hampered due to the wet weather. Nevertheless, competitors arrived and setup camp between rain squalls while the Campground Pavillion Building served the group well featuring a Pit Beef BBQ sponsored by Phillips Boatworks delicious with tasty micro brewed beer from 1718 Brewery Ocracoke. Participants received their fun welcome packages with complimentary Regatta shirts and a mix of cool stickers from local businesses and surf shops.
Saturday morning was still a bit gray and cloudy, nevertheless, Endless Summer Surf Camp OBX donated instructional time to visiting youth and adults at Lighthouse Beach. The surf was big on the outside, but manageable enough for everyone who participated to enjoy a couple hours of wave sliding before the sailing skippers meeting at 10 am.
Pamlico Sailing, Dairy Queen, MSP Media and other sponsors and volunteers hosted breakfast as the Racing Skippers Meeting got underway. Lingering thunderstorms offshore in the morning caused a short postponement while lightening passed offshore of the Campground. Optimist and 420 Sailors got off and sailing for 7 races for each class during the day in moderate breezes of about 10 knots from the S-SW.
Saturday featured a Silent Auction for the Scenic Pathway project between Frisco and Buxton. One of the biggest points of the prospective pathway was safety! The shoulders on HWY 12 are very narrow and can be dangerous for bikers and pedestrians during busy summer months when traffic gets heavier. Many of the Regatta Participants bid on Auction items and contributed to the fundraising results! A delicious lunch of pizza and pork bbq was sponsored by Tavern on 12 while some excellent live music got underway. As sailboat racing ended near 330 pm, Endless Summer Surf Camp OBX brought their boards to the Sound waterfront for a paddle race! This was a fun ice breaker for kids to play and get to know each other. All day long, bystanders and participants took note of sailors getting to meet other sailors from Virginia and Eastern Carolina. Dinner was a big hit with OBX Shrimp and Turners Raw Bar proprietor Brian Harris serving a massive Fish Fry Dinner for nearly 200 people, while drinks and beer from 1718 watered down the crowd! Outer Banks Distillery’s — sponsored the event a case of their delicious Pecan Dark Kill Devil Rum from Manteo which was used to mix up the notorious Painkiller cocktail originally from The British Virgin Islands sailing territory… which was a tasty hit for the parents and older sailors. Weather started clearing up mid day and became refreshingly wonderful for the rest of the weekend!
Sunday Morning featured a fruit and pastry continental breakfast, with some of the left over Pit Beef from Friday night. The wind was non existent in the early hours, but finally started freshening up so that sailors could get in 4 solid races for the day, to make for a total of 11 races. Unique awards for the event were created by sponsors Stash Wompeirski and MSP Media’s Meg Phillips. Custom photography of the competitors while sailing was printed and framed up in the post race/pre award time slot, so that sailors could hang an action shot of themselves sailing on their home walls to commemorate and remember the event! Alan and Pat Backus, trained, experienced and certified US SAILING Race Officials, from Lake Gaston and Research Triangle Park Sailing Organizations came and blessed the program with high quality race management! Dairy Queen’s Brad Doerr sponsored some delicious post racing Ice Cream Cake, which was a real hit with the kids and adults!
Sailing events like the Wind and Waves, and Lighthouse Fall One Design Regatta will be the 2 Annual Regattas sponsored by Hatteras Community Sailing as fundraising and ‘friendraising’ events for regional sailors to get a chance to interact with some of the regions best and most talented competitive sailors. This year visitors came from Research Triangle Park High School Sailing program, New Bern’s ETSYA, Hampton Yacht Club, Norfolk Yacht and Country Club, and Deltaville’s Fishing Bay Yacht Club. The Collegiate 420 Sailing was very competitive and some of the Opti Sailing featured regional competitors with winning East Coast track records! Community Sponsorship, volunteers and all around support for the event were invaluable…. there was good sailing, fun watersports, and social interaction. For Hatteras Sailors, new friendships were started with other peers that they will sail with and compete against throughout their lifetime, if they stick with its and keep pushing to get better!
Hatteras Community Sailing is invested in the Community! Its members, organizers, sponsors and volunteers all support the mission to help provide quality coaching opportunities for local youth, comparable to places like Annapolis, Hampton, Charleston, Beaufort, etc… where the youth are prime targets for competitive collegiate programs offering scholarships and varsity sailing programs to top level sailors. On Hatteras Islander, we are surrounded by water and an uncommonly consistent wind! Being blessed with natural assets that even the best sailing organizations could only wish for, we feel amiss not offering anything but the best possible training opportunities for our children.
This year, Hatteras Sailing has taken a big leap of faith and invited full time coaching staff from ODU and Duke Sailing Programs, so our local youth ages 6-20 years old can see and hear first hand how a passion for sailing and the ocean can lead to unique and rewarding lifetime opportunities to live and work professionally on the water.
This is the 3rd year for Hatteras Sailing! Starting with one small opti we picked up from an old friend in Florida 3 years back, the program has grown fast in popularity with local families to now have its own waterfront location at Buxton Harbor with 20 Opti Sailboats, 5 Collegiate 420’s, 3 coach boats, and a fixer upper Hobie 18 Fleet of 5 boats in the works. The program is only sustainable at affordable pricing through the efforts and support of the Outer Banks Community! Unlike the big organizations in huge metro areas like Norfolk and Hampton, membership to Hatteras Community Sailing is inexpensive and a fun way to support our training programs, facilities and top notch professional staff. Adult sailing, private coaching and sailing lessons are available all year round and help pay for our full time coaching salaries. Summer Sailing Session is 6 weeks long and offers training for all levels beginning on June 11. Please visit our facebook page and hatterassailing.org for current information and registration for our community sailing programs! Volunteers and help are always needed! Please feel free to stop by, call or email us to see how you can participate.
