KSA
Knickerbocker Sailing Association

Home	About KSA	Activities	Racing	Links	Contact KSA	Members Only

 
TEAM KSA Participates in Gay Games in Chicago July 2006

By Richard and Geoff

Hey all, we weighed in on Sunday. No problems there though the guy there said the scale was light. They even have gay friendly scales here. Chicago is a nice town - Mayor Daley did a greet speech about inclusion at the opening ceremonies. We had our practice but the winds were over 20 so they wouldn't let us use spinnakers. We had a nice meet and greet with all the sailors and we all left early to rest to be on the docks at 7:30 am tomorrow for our first day of racing. We ran into a few people from Sydney, and Chris who raced for KSA is now skippering for a San Francisco team.

Our first day of racing on Tuesday morning had us sailing in choppy conditions with 15 knot breezes from the N.E. We raced against 5 other boats in the Spinnaker class and finished with a 3rd, a 2nd and another 3rd - in the last race we were 6-8 boat lengths ahead at the windward mark and then we had our infamous super duper spinnaker wrap on the head stay which put us in 7th place overall in our division. We all went back to our places and did our homework rehearsing how to get the kite up and flying well. We were eager and ready for the next day to redeem ourselves when we race again on Wednesday afternoon. Our primary competion was the Australian team and Chris Bates' Team from San Francisco. It all turns out its a great vibe racing with the world and in a really hot city, in many ways.

Wednesday- we arrive early for our 3pm heat which is postponed because of an impeding storm front coming through.

Thursday-The thunderstorms actually arrived very early in the morning and stayed with us until just past noon. Of course we had been there since 7:30am praying for an end so we could show our stuff. Finally it broke and we sailed out to the course waiting for another 3 hours for the wind which never came causing the race committee to abandon the race. The race committee decided to use the first days results only to determine who would be in the finals, if there was wind to have them. Unfortunately, and depressingly so for us, we didn't make the cut. They sent the finalists out telling there would be only one race if there was wind. They finally got it off. We watched from the shoreline and when we saw the lead boat set the spinnaker, the same spinnaker we had been so eager and may i say desperate to use a few hours before, we were kind of on the boat with them. It turned out to be our friends Team Newport. We cheered them on loudly (- Phyllis the fabu heavy handed bartender at the club had already served a few very stiff vodka tonics to ease our pain). So Newport got the gold and the rest is history.

TEAM KSA were interviewed by the local CBS News team live at the event.

Click here for the CBS News Report CBS Story:

Click here for the live roving reporter interviewing KSA live at the event CBS Video: This is no longer available