About to tack near Domino Sugar
R2 buoy
Approaching the finish line
The first Downtown Sailing Center frostbite race of 2026 was scheduled to take place on Saturday, January 3rd, but was cancelled due to icy conditions in Baltimore harbor. With the next race on the schedule not happening for another two weeks (on the 17th), and the early forecast calling for drizzly weather with temperatures in the mid-60s, I sought to arrange an informal race on the 10th.
The early forecast turned out to be a complete lie, with actual conditions being light but steady rain with temperatures in the mid-40s. Despite this, the race managed to garner the interest of enough die-hards to be able to field two boats.
I arrived early so that I could grab some coffee and breakfast from the coffee shop across the street, and then set up the GoPro that I got for Christmas. When I first arrived, rain was fairly steady, but tapered off a bit after I got the camera set up. At the docks, wind was initially steady at 6 knots from the north, but shifted to the northeast at 6.5 knots gusting to 8 as others began to arrive.
I had Zach and Josh on my J/22, with Ganesh skippering the other boat with his friend Tony. We had hoped that one more person would show up so we could have three boats in the race, but, alas, that was not to be.
Ganesh and Tony didn't arrive until around noon, when we had our boat already mostly rigged, so we got an early start to scout the conditions on the course. Since winds were relatively steady and the wet conditions would have made running multiple short races difficult, we agreed to run the usual Friday Night Fun Race course out to Fort McHenry and back.
Once Ganesh and Tony were underway, we made our way back to the starting line. It turns out that blowing a whistle while looking at your watch while holding a radio while steering a boat is rather difficult, so my race start signalling was awkward at best, but we managed to get the race started without mishaps.
We took an early lead but Ganesh quickly caught up. They were right behind us all the way out to the NH buoy past Canton. However, we somehow managed to pull way ahead of them through the Fort McHenry channel, making it around the R2 buoy that makes the halfway point of the course about 5 minutes ahead of them.
Despite a few minutes of beating early on, the return trip through the channel turned out to be faster than on the way out, and we made it most of the way back on a single tack, completing the course in about 1 hour and 19 minutes while maintaining our 5+ minute lead.