San Juan 21 Class Association

When I bought my SJ21 one of the qualities I heard from SJ owners and owners of other sailboats that race was the the SJ21 does well in portsmouth racing as well. Our club's Wednesday Night Rum Races started a few weeks ago and so far I have two 2nds and a 1st. I am the only SJ21 showing up but I am doing well against different boats like the S2 7.9, Precision 23, Catalina 22 and some others. The irony being that I am in the back of the pack when fleet racing. Whats your guys thoughts on how well the SJ21 does in portsmouth racing?

Pretty well actually IME too...

Fausto Deguzman, Jim Altice, and Myself from Fleet 1 raced the "Winter Vashon" in Pugest Sound, December 2009 in Fausto's SJ21 Habagat. We were the smallest boat on the water, and the slowest as well, but in the end we finished 91st out of 95 boats across the line, but on corrected time we were immediately 3rd, but I think dropped to 4th after a protest. The boats that finished behind us were a good 30-45 minutes behind us as well.

Fleet 1 doesn't typically sail with Genoas, but since there was 3 of us and it was PHRF rated we flew the Genoa and held on tight. With the 30+ year old Genoa up we were really cruising along with good speed. We tried to throw the spin up on the last downwind leg, but were a little inexperienced in the kind of wind that picked up so we took it down and reached the whole way down the eastern side of Vashon. We actually were going faster reaching with the genny than the Spin.

Fausto shot a nice little video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMC7BXyf1U0

Later
C