Greetings from the New Head Cheese

Hello Sailors,

Shackles is back and here to provide some updates so please read on. First off, I’m honored to be working with your new CAA board providing members a range of activities to help grow our class. We’ve been busy!

At last we got back to a full sailing season in 2022! After two abbreviated years it was great to see the participation levels rise. I like to use Friday Night Races in Toronto as a barometer of the class health and it was great to see we had 41 boats on the last race of the season. Impressive. Elsewhere Albacore racing is alive and well at Port Sydney Mary’s Lake, Pointe au Baril Georgian Bay, Hamilton, Ottawa and Shelburne NS.

The new Rondar Albacore is as big as any story to share. The CAA has partnered with Rondar, a long tenured UK one design dinghy manufacturer, to design a new class legal Albacore. The key concept behind the new boat is reducing the number of moulds to provide cost savings. We are very thankful to David Weaver, George Carter, Barney Harris and Ian Brayshaw for their guidance, input and countless hours on this project! Barney will assist Rondar in the layout of the rigging. Covid and supply chain issues has created delays, but this project is back in gear, and the goal is to have the first Rondar on the starting line at the 2023 Internationals in Abersoch UK. Rumour has it Chris Maslowski will be at the helm!

Speaking of Chris, CAA’s education manager is very busy. First off, we are planning a rules session winter/spring (exact date TBA), hosted by Pat Healey, a former Canadian Olympic Team coach and tenured sailing judge. Who doesn’t need a ‘rules’ tune up? Next, the CAA is offering to subsidize race management training sessions. Last, Chris is teeing up race training sessions with the likes of Allan Measor. Details coming.

On the regatta front, the CAA manages the Ontarios, the Canadians and the North Americans. The NAs swing between the US and CAN, except when the Internationals are in North America. For 2023 the NAs will be held in the US. Hamilton Bay Sailing Club is hosting the Ontarios on July 15-16. RHYC has a small Albacore fleet and it would be great to show them support with a good turnout. The Canadians are scheduled for September 15-17 hosted by Thornbury YC on Georgian Bay. Tucked between the two are the Internationals July 29 – Aug 4 in Abersoch, UK. Thanks to good and evil Steph for managing our events.

In other great news, Michael Williamson is heading up an overdue overhaul of the CAA website – with the aim to yank it out of the 1990s and into the 2020s. Yeah! Stay tuned for its launch in the new year.

Finally, my ask of class members is to help promote the albacore by taking a friend or two sailing. Thanks and hope you had a great year!

Raines Koby 7919

In Progress: The Rondar Albacore

[Images of the Rondar Albacore in production]

Bringing Albacores Back to Life

Adam Kubik has sailing in his blood. His father was an Olympic sailing coach, and Adam started racing optis in his homeland of Poland, then going on to competitively race 420s, 470s, Mistrals, and F18s. Adam’s passion is shared by his wife and three daughters, and for a number of years he was the Junior Sail program director for the Lagoon City Yacht Club.

Adam was also a Boy Scout as a kid and returned as an instructor and leader of the Tribe Polonie in Durham Oshawa, which spends two weeks of the summer at a camp near Barry’s Bay, Ontario. At this camp, Adam used the shared CL14s to teach his Scouts to sail and race.

In July of this year, Adam was contacted by fellow Scout leaders, Michael Terlecki and Anna Psuty, with the news that they were giving his Tribe seven Albacore hulls, all in need of some serious TLC. As Adam put it when he and other volunteers arrived to pick the boats up, “they blended into the forest”.

But with elbow grease from the Scouts (in the form of a game to see who could make their boat the cleanest), help from two amazing Scout parents, Kamil Mlynarczyk and Marcin Nowak, and Adam’s craftsmanship and expertise, two of the boats will be ready to sail next summer, and two more are getting close. As the boats were missing foils, blocks, lines, masts, and sails, this was a huge accomplishment.

Adam likes that the Albacore is a versatile boat – great for racing or being at the cottage – and three or four sailors can be in the boat at once.

During the 2022 Albacore Canadians in Kingston, Adam introduced himself to our new Commodore, Raines Koby, and the Scouts have since benefitted from the generosity of CAA members and the community clubs who have donated parts and sails. The CAA is grateful for the work that Adam is doing to keep these Albacores on the water and teaching a new generation of kids to appreciate the boats.

Thank you Adam! Keep us updated!

Thank you!

The final and most important 2022 message from the CAA board is a huge thank you to all the volunteers from the season – including the people who worked race committee to the people who prepared food and ran the million other tasks that into what seems like a simple race. We can’t do this without you and are grateful for your time, energy, expertise, and enthusiasm.

See you in 2023!

Are you interested in contributing to an issue of S&C? We don’t pay well (in fact, we don’t pay anything at all), but you can expect lots of good karma and fame. Even better, if you are into spreading the good news about the Albacore, we need an editor for S&C or someone with other ideas to promote the fleet. Please get in touch with [email protected] if you’re interested.

Key Events for 2023