By Kyle Heffernan

On January 3 at about 6:30am, three High school teams from Santa Barbara were on there way to the Rose Bowl Regatta at Alamitos Bay Yacht Club in Long Beach. This regatta is the country's largest college and high school regatta combined with more than 300 of the nation's best young sailors competing for 24 college entries from the East Coast to Hawaii and 52 high schools from throughout the state, some with multiple teams.

The teams from Santa Barbara included Santa Barbara High School, Dos Pueblos High School, and Laguna Blanca High School who each competed in the Gold fleet. Saturday we were faced with tricky conditions of light and shifty winds ranging from 3 to 6 knots. We ended up squeezing in four rounds of racing; one more than what was required to qualify the event as official. At the end of Saturday Santa Barbara was in contention for first place with A fleet skipper Oliver Toole and crew Kyle Heffernan getting 5-5-18-3 and B fleet skipper Paul Heffernan and crew Travis Benton getting results of 6-4-12-7 the SBHS team also included Michael Papa, Kieron Kavanagh and Garrett Tesman. Dos Pueblos A fleet skipper Sky Adams and crew Nicholas Perez receiving results of 15-2-17-16, along with B skipper Hanna Vincent and Hunter Yegendorf getting 20-20-23-19 there team also included Spenser Branch, Jay Melograno, Hunter Yegendorf, and Nuet Cutcliff. In case you all don't know, Laguna Blanca is a newly started team by Carly Shevitz who didn't want to stop High School sailing because of transferring to a new school so she recruited five sailors, Savanna Brown, Jullian Messina, Matt Putzer, Patrick Ferroni and Jake Bartlien. Laguna's A fleet skipper Carly Shevitz sailed with Matt Putzer and B fleet skipper Cassidy Shevitz sailed with Jullian Messina. Congratulations to Cassidy Shevitz who took Savanna Brown's place as B fleet skipper, this was her first time sailing a high school regatta. Cassidy is in Junior High at La Colina and will hopefully be coming up in the rankings very soon.

Sunday was a little bit windier with slightly warmer temperatures. At one point during the day Santa Barbara High was in contention for a top 3 finish, with all of it coming down to the last B fleet race with skipper Paul Heffernan and crew Travis Benton out on the water. Paul ended up getting a fourth with everyone wondering about the outcome. Paul and Travis were in a few protests from the last race but after they were all resolved and a couple of other teams in front of Santa Barbara got thrown out Santa Barbara High School ended up 3rd. Dos Pueblos High School got 21st and Laguna Blanca got 26th out of a total of 26th boats. A special congratulation to Oliver Toole who won Gold fleet A division by 24 points with crew Kyle Heffernan.

I currently go to Santa Barbara High School and I'm lucky enough to sail with Santa Barbara's top skipper Oliver Toole. This regatta was a great experience for me just to see all the colleges and learn a little more about each of them at the college talk on Saturday night. I'm looking forward for some good sailing and fun times at the next regatta at SYC in San Francisco hosted by the Stanford sailing team on February 21-22.

Calm Seas and Smooth Sailing,
Kyle Heffernan