Newport Harbor Sailing Foundation: Sailor Stories

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Jeffrey Petersen at the 2019 C420 North American Championship

Posted Jun 22, 2019

Sailors: Jeffrey Petersen | Marbella Marlo

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to compete against 93 other boats for the North American Championship of the Club 420 class. This event was an amazing, full on, and competitive 4 day event where 186 of the best sailors in North America came together to race on San Francisco Bay in 20 knots of wind and 3 knots of current. What a combination. My crew was Newport Harbor Yacht Club’s Marbella Marlo, and we finished 12th out of 93, after a not so great last day. This event was split into two rounds, round one was 2 days of qualifying and round 2 was two days of championship racing. For qualifying, Marbella and I sailed in mixed fleets against a random selection of 46 boats, to earn a score line low enough to make the Gold fleet. We had a great qualifying run winning one race, and having several top 10 finishes and qualified into Gold in 8th place, only 12 points out of third carrying our scores from the qualifying series. We were super stoked, for a team that has had a small amount of time in the boats together, we were sailing like a well oiled machine. Unfortunately our Championship scores were not as good as our qualifying run, and we fell 4 places over the course of the last two days. We still had an incredible event, and learned so much about sailing in the bay and managing a big fleet in shift and tide controlled environments.

Marbella and I would like to thank the Balboa Yacht Club for providing us a boat after we had found our original boat did not meet the class rules, we would also like to thank, The Bahia Sail Racing Foundation for their support of our campaign, as well as the Newport Harbor Sailing Foundation for their support of our campaign in this event.

2019 C420 North American Championship
Jeffrey Petersen | Marbella Marlo