If you have taken a Safety at Sea course we have added greater refinement to the course options available. In addition to the US Sailing 1/2 day, 1 day and 2 day courses we have added Storm Trysail Foundation Junior and for those of you outside the US, the World Sailing Offshore (1 day) and World Sailing International Offshore (2 day with hands on). To change your selection Click on the Silhouette (or your picture) in the upper right corner, select My Info. Scroll down to Crew Finder Profile and select Update Profile. Scroll down a bit for the Safety at Sea Course and select the course that you have taken. While you are at it update the date that you took the course. Don’t forget to hit Update when you are done.

This weekend is the 111th edition of Chicago Yacht Club’s race to Mackinac Island. RailMeets is proud to be the official crew finder for CYC and the race to Mackinac. We wish everyone a fast, safe passage to the island. @CYCRTM

http://cyc.railmeets.com/

Chicago Area Sail Racing Association or CASRA released their schedule today and it will be up on RailMeets in the events section on Thursday 1/10/2019. We will be adding more club and organization schedules as we receive them. I promise on Friday I will show you how to add these events to your boats schedule.

http://chicagosailracing.org/races/

Do you have a club schedule that you would would like to have in RailMeets? Send it to us info@railmeets.com We like them best if in .xls or google sheets format but we will accept cocktail napkins as long as the handwriting is legible. For electronic files we usually have them up in 24hrs, cocktail napkins take a little longer.

Merry Christmas to all our users. We hope you are having a great holiday. If you are spending it with family and the discussion with old weird Uncle Harold gets to politics and you need a diversion? Here great reason to excuse yourself and go to the other room, the Rolex Sydney to Hobart race. 628 Nautical miles and some say the most grueling yacht race in the world.

Race starts at at noon on 12/26 (Boxing day) Australia time. Because it’s on the other side of this great big blue ball that we live on we can catch the start on Christmas day 8PM USA central time (9PM eastern). The Cursing Yacht Club of Australia always puts on great coverage of the start, their yacht tracker is excellent and lots of interesting content on their site. Here is the link

http://www.rolexsydneyhobart.com/

Thinking of deleting Facebook but you are worried about missing these tips and tricks? Check out our blog https://blog.railmeets.com/ There is also a link on the bottom of every RailMeets page. We post the same content in both places but the blog usually has the addition of a witty headline. Sorry you will have to go elsewhere for funny cat videos.

Earlier this week I received a message via the RailMeets messaging system from Alex. He was in Chicago on business and was looking to get out for a race. We had a spot on my boat so I added him as a guest. You can add guests by going to the Change My Signups screen. For any event tap on the two people and a box will open, there you can indicate the number of guests.

 

Alex showed up at the appointed time, gear bag in one hand six pack of good beer in the other. He helped us rig the boat for the first CCYC pursuit race. For those of you that don’t know what a pursuit races is the Race Committee takes everyone’s handicaps and calculates the start time based on everyone finishing at the same time. So every boat with a different rating starts at a different time. We slot in after the T-10’s but just before our main rival a Farr39.

How did it go? We started late, had a decent upwind leg, passed a boat on the reaching leg. We then headed downwind into heavy fog. During a botched spinnaker take-down in the fog we lost sight of the fleet and the next mark. We missed the mark and realized our mistake when we sailed out of the fog and noticed everyone else on a different angle. We withdrew, opened some beers and sailed around a bit before heading in. On the way in we hit the heavy fog again. Predictably the GPS batteries died but fortunately one of the crew had his phone on him. Google maps, the ships compass and going slow got us home.

After we hung out in the club with our new friend Alex, a good time was had by all.

Do you have a RailMeets success story? Send us an email and tell us about it. If we use your story we’ll send you a nifty new RailMeets hat.