The Persistent Shift of Regatta Dates
Spring and early summer are typically boom times in sailing, with the Caribbean racing season in its full glory and one-design class championships big and small bringing sailors together in all ports of the world, but with the Covid-19 pandemic grinding the globe to a halt and creating a new world order, we wait under the proverbial AP over A.
Everyone is impacted. From Olympic and professional sailors to beer can and model yacht pond racers, we can now only train at home gyms using soup cans and splice soft shackles at the kitchen table between e-races on the Virtual Regatta portal. We can log on to a wide variety of webinars and online classrooms and gather with our crewmates in online hangouts.
For those who are able, pre-season boat work continues in garages, driveways and marinas, preparing for when the AP does finally drop. When that will ultimately happen is a big and unnerving unknown. It could be summer. It could be fall. Or it could be next spring. But as we do on the racecourse, we anticipate the shift and we will be ready to launch and race when the time comes.
For the event team at the Helly Hansen NOOD Regatta, that’s meant rescheduling event dates in anticipation that the current social distancing guidelines and spread-prevention measures will work to curb and reverse the pandemic. Events everywhere have already moved to late summer and fall and the regatta calendar, as it stands today, is packed.
The NOOD event team, in coordination with host clubs and partners, recently released new dates for the regatta series’ remaining events. The San Diego NOOD, originally scheduled for March, is now scheduled for Labor Day weekend, September 4 to 6, 2020, a fine time to be sailing in Southern California. The Annapolis NOOD shifts from May to August 28 to 30. The Chicago NOOD dates, June 12 to 14, remain unchanged, as do the Marblehead NOOD dates, July 23 to 26. And, of course, the NOOD Caribbean Championship, with Sunsail in late October, remains as the shining light at the end of this long, dark and strange tunnel. Continued updates will be posted on the NOOD Regatta’s social channels @NOODregattas.