Christmas in April
- Apr 20, 2021
- 4 min read
AKA Flow State Sailing at Charleston Race Week 2021
Hi everyone! It’s me, Annie, back with an update about the ladies of Flow State Sailing competing in #CRW2021 last week. I was racing the Mudheads Melges 24 Committed skippered by Woody Bergendahl with some friends from home. One of them is my former sailing student! It’s always really cool to see my students staying involved with the sport. My biggest goal as a sailing instructor is to teach my kids how to love sailing, so when I see them sailing in the off-season, I get really excited. Two of the other guys on the team are also MudRatz Offshore sailors. We did the Newport to Bermuda and Marblehead to Halifax races together. I love learning from my friends.
Sarah filled in for an injured crew on Blue Lobster Racing’s VXOne on the last day of Race Week.
We had great weather all week and got in 9 races. The first two days were steadily in the range of 10-15 knots and 75° and mostly sunny, just the way we like Charleston Race Week to be! Day 3 was good for the first two races but RC decided against a third race for the day as the strength of the breeze was overtaken by the current (a problem you see in Charleston that we’re not as used to back up north). We held our own against the pro teams all week! I’d never raced against so many professionals before this event. The fleet of 37 boats (the biggest in the regatta) included 21 pro teams. It was fun to watch them sail and cool to learn from them, too.
I felt very lucky to be a part of this regatta in such a beautiful city once again. Even better to be doing it with Mudheads! This was only my second time at Charleston Race Week. My first was in 2019 with the MudRatz in Melges 24 Opportunity, skippered by Jack Derry. That was a great event but we did lose the rig in the last race of the regatta…
Pretty crazy, right? I’m pretty sure that’s the fastest I’ve gone in a sailboat - 17.2 knots! Major shout out to Jack for telling me to move back from the bow to the stern about 45 seconds before the rig came down. After the rig came down, one of my former sailing instructors who was on a different Melges 24 hopped from his boat to our coach boat right after he finished the race to come help us with our newfound problem. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: it takes a village! But really, it’s awesome to have the support of Mudheads and MudRatz no matter where we’re sailing. I’m really proud to be a part of this community. We managed to salvage most of the sails and the Ratz got the rig fixed soon after. Jack skippered Opportunity again in the 2021 Charleston Race Week (and he and his team crushed it)! She’s a solid boat.
That video went viral (and we sold it to magazines to get some money to pay for fixing the boat) and when I was in the airport on my way home, I heard some professional sailors talking about it and I told them it was me in the video and they didn’t believe me. Pretty funny.
Besides some great sailing and gorgeous weather, I loved Race Week 2019 because I spent the week staying at Sarah’s apartment! We had so much fun getting ready for racing together and debriefing after because we were on different boats. Now is a good time to explain how Sarah and I ended up as roommates down here in Charleston! Even though I spent most of that week in April of 2019 on the water, I fell in love with the city of Charleston. The people are great, the sailing is great, the food is great, and the small size of the city is nice and manageable for a small girl like me. I remember when I left I told Sarah, “I want to live here someday.” So, about a year ago when I realized I probably wouldn’t be able to do the international traveling I wanted to do after graduating from college because of COVID-19, I started thinking about Charleston. Sarah was planning to head back here in the fall after a summer of teaching sailing, I convinced her to let me come with her. Thank goodness she said yes! We’ve been having a blast and spending most of our time on or near the water. We’ve also been working on all things TRADER and Transpac together. It’s great to have someone to bounce ideas off of all day long.
I hope you enjoyed this update. I also hope that explanation makes it a little more clear how the four of us ended up in this position together. Soon, you’ll get the full story of how Flow State Sailing came to be. We were chatting last night about it and we think the story probably begins sometime around the summer of 2009...
Stay tuned! Big things are coming.
Sail fast, have fun.
-Annie L
Comments