From Deseret News archives:
Sailboat racing — Yacht club takes on Great Salt Lake
There are many things out there that call the Great Salt Lake home. Out of all the things the state's most famous landmark has become well known for, however, sailboat racing is not one of them.
But the sport of sailboat racing, or yachting as it is commonly called, has enjoyed a lengthy and storied history on its waters.
Founded on May 10, 1877 — just a few months before the death of Brigham Young — the Great Salt Lake Yachting Club is one of the oldest operating yacht clubs in the United States. Since holding its first regattas in 1879, sailing enthusiasts in the club frequent the Great Salt Lake Marina to hold a variety of weekly and monthly races.
In a time when motorboats are popular and plentiful on other Utah lakes, the Great Salt Lake holds a distinct appeal as a destination strictly for sailboats.
"Motorboats have really taken over all the reservoirs," said Dave Shearer, a longtime member of the yachting club and its current harbormaster. "This is really the last sanctuary that sailors have."
Shearer has participated in sailboat racing or yachting around the world over the past 30 years. One of the things that keeps him coming back to the Great Salt Lake is the challenging nature of the races.
And the races staged by the GSL Yachting Club indeed present a wide spectrum of challenges that require different strategies.
Regattas feature as many as 15 to 20 boats broken down into different classes based on PHRF ratings. PHRF ratings measure the maximum speed a boat potentially can reach in prime condition.
That means a regatta will typically feature different starting times for each class, even though all the boats follow the same course marked off by buoys. A sailboat crew in such a race not only must worry about navigating around boats from its own class, but it also must account for other boats it isn't even technically racing against.
"Sailboat racing is not really a good sport for linear thinkers," Shearer said. "You have to be a peripheral thinker."
Offshore races, which the GSL Yachting Club also puts together, require more long-term thinking. These races can be as short as the Partners Cup, a 12-mile race held in early July, or as long as the Reynolds Cup — an 80-mile race in May that takes sailors to the northern shore of the lake — near Promontory Point — and back.
Finishing such races can take several hours and sometimes even days. And with shoreline virtually inaccessible to sailboats except at a few scattered marinas, sailors have to tough it out through complications like stormy weather.
