The St. Petersburg Nood Regatta this past weekend had an impressive turnout of 16 different classes of one-design racing. The largest fleet was the Melges 24’s, with 49 boats. The Flying Tiger had its first one-design debut on the east coast with an 8 boat fleet. The race committee made some interesting groupings of classes on the three circles they were running at the regatta. We found our J-24 class paired with the Melges 32’s, Melges 24’s, J-105’s. It seemed to us that we could have been placed with some more appropriately matched boats like the Ultimate 24 fleet, Sonars and the Vipers.
The race committee had its work cut out for them over the weekend with lack of cooperation from the wind gods. The breeze was very light and spotty for the first two days of the regatta. In fact, there was more breeze sailing out to the course each day than we had for the actual races, with the exception of Sunday. Sunday the breeze kicked up to 25+, just in time for everyone to line up for haul out and rig take-down. The land management and logistics with all of the boats coming and going were handled impressively and in that respect, I would attend another event run by the St Petersburg YC. We were proud to be sailing in the fleet with the overall winner of the Nood Regatta and Sunsail charter vacation, co-skippers Robbie Brown and Chuck Allen of RI.