Race Week

The ultimate status symbol in the Annapolis sailing community is a little red hat."I'll wear mine to death," said Richard "Snake" Stimson, a sailboat racer from Annapolis. "You couldn't buy it off me."The cap -- emblazoned with the logo of Mount Gay rum -- is available only to a small number of racers in the nation's top sailing regattas. Cover your head with it and it will cover you in glory."I'm certainly qualified to wear it," said Mr. Stimson, 62, who races year-round and has done so since he was a child.

Under Armour founder and CEO Kevin Plank has aggressively marketed his company from the beginning, unabashedly challenging established titans like Nike, Adidas and Reebok. A man who often speaks in sports-centric slogans, it can appear at times that he runs his primary business with the fury of a soon-to-retire linebacker facing playoff elimination. But in his secondary pursuit, Plank has shown patience in a sport that, by nature, often destroys it. He has owned Sagamore Farm for seven years, rebuilding it gradually and allowing manager Tom Mullikan - an old high school buddy and football teammate - to methodically put together a breeding, training and racing program.

While the hunting season for migratory Canada geese has been closed in the Atlantic Flyway by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, parameters for duck-hunting seasons and bag limits likely will be expanded in response to population increases.In Maryland, the Department of Natural Resources proposes to expand the October split of the season to four days, the November split to seven and the final split to 39 days in December and January.DNR also proposes a daily bag limit of four birds, although the Fish and Wildlife Service guidelines would allow five.

After three days of competition on the Chesapeake Bay, during which much of the attention was on a seeming duel between Canada's Cup rivals in the high-tech, big-ticket Level 30 Class, the winner of this year's MORC International Championship was John White of Severna Park and his team, which came up from MORC B to take top honors in the 41-boat fleet.The regatta, which ran from Sunday through Tuesday, was sailed out of Annapolis Yacht Club. It was co-sponsored by Annapolis MORC Station 15, and featured two relatively short windward-leeward races in light and shifty breeze on Sunday; three increasingly longer windward-leewards in Monday's building breezes, which increased from light and fluky in the morning to a solid 15 knots by the third race, and a single race of almost 12 miles on Tuesday, the event's longest, sailed in the strongest breeze.

John F. Kennedy once remarked that sailing was in the blood of every American, saying that "all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean. ... We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea — whether it is to sail or to watch it — we are going back from whence we came. " The only problem with the then-president's speech, made on the eve of the 1962 America's Cup races, was that a large percentage of the U.S. population had never been on a sailboat.

Eastport Yacht Club was jam-packed on Jan. 15, as Chesapeake Bay Yacht Racing Association officials handed out trophies to Region II and III sailors for top performances in the 1993 season.In addition to High Point awards in dozens of handicap, cruising one-design and one-design classes, several overall awards were made.Honored as the winner of the Labrot Trophy, representing the year's highest achievement in the handicap division, was Annapolitan Chuck O'Malley. He sailed his modified Kirby 30 Rude Awakening to first in both the 17-qualifier MORC North class and the 25-qualifier PHRF B/Region III class.

SOLOMONS ISLAND -- Annapolitan Peter Gordon's Farr 44, Gaucho -- with 1992 Olympic silver medalist Jim Brady of Annapolis at the helm -- took the overall performance trophy yesterday as Yachting Race Week at Solomons Island came to a close.The Gaucho crew turned in a perfect five-ace series, repeating the accomplishment of a clean sweep in the boat's debut regatta, Yachting Race Week at Key West in January 1992.Eighty boats participated in the three-day event that had two IMS and five PHRF divisions.

The Baltimore Grand Prix will return to the Inner Harbor on Sept. 2, according to the 2012 IZOD IndyCar Series schedule released today. Despite financial woes, it appears IndyCar remains committed to Baltimore, one of the few East Coast races on the schedule. Terry Angstadt, president of IndyCar's commercial division, told The Sun two weeks ago that his organization remains supportive of the event, even amid revelations that Baltimore Racing Development faces more than $12 million in debts.

This fall, there will be a new tournament in town for Ocean City's bluewater fishermen, the Toyota Fins Offshore Game, which organizer Mike Pivec said "probably is the most level offshore competition there ever was."According to Pivec, the competition will have boats entered fishing the same five locations over a three-day period, with points earned for catches at each spot.Eligible species are dolphin, wahoo, tuna and white and blue marlin."It's similar to the skins game in golf," Pivec said.

Annapolitan Peter Gordon and his newly purchased Farr 44 Gaucho swept the 1992 Southern Ocean Racing Conference series to rack up a second solid string of aces for the yacht.Gaucho, built on specifications in Argentina to naval architect Bruce Farr's first IMS-specific design, also was indisputably the overall champ of January's Yachting Race Week at Key West in her racing debut, winning each of the five races in that event.Sailing with a nearly all-Annapolis crew, including Geoff Stagg, Tink Chambers and Jim Donovan of the Farr operation, sailmaker Bruce Empey, Dave Heller, Brian Lees and his 15-year- old son Ian, Gordon said Gaucho won each of the four races out of the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area she started by substantial margins.