Two yacht clubs on Lake Tahoe have racing on Wednesday nights. Since they’re at opposite ends of the lake, they’re not really in competition with each other. Lake Tahoe Windjammers Yacht Club sails out of South Lake Tahoe, while Tahoe YC sails out of Tahoe City, at the northwest corner of the lake.

Wednesday had been a particularly windy day, with breeze in the high teens punctuated by gusts into the mid-twenties. A high wind advisory called for gusts to 40, but these didn’t quite materialize. The wind on the 22-mile long lake fetches up sets of waves which break on the shallow, rocky shore and toss the race boats in their mooring fields. Tahoe City residents Jim and Jamie Casey were happy for the wind, as their J/124 Pleiades sails better with a stiff breeze than the light air which has been more typical of the Tahoe YC Wednesday nighters. This is their third summer with the boat, which stays on Lake Tahoe year round. Pleiades spends winters hauled out at Obexer’s in Homewood, while the Caseys sail another boat on Mexico’s Banderas Bay.

This Wednesday night’s race had three divisions. The “A fleet” consisted of just the pretty green J/125 August Ice and the Farr 36 Wicked, a bright red boat which sails the midwinter season on San Francisco Bay. Two more divisions comprised of all the rest, including the J/124, the J/105 Chinook, three Melges 24s, a Santa Cruz 27, a Tarten Ten, an Olson 30 and a 25, a Santana 20, and a few others in between.

The racers were sent on a double-sausage course. The wind and waves settled down by the time the race finished, so the dinghy shuffle from mooring to shore was less crazy than the earlier shore to mooring operation.

Current overall leaders of the three divisions are Dick Ferris’s J/125 August Ice, Dan Hauserman’s Melges 24 Personal Puff, and Les Bartlett’s Venture 24 Groovy. See results of Tahoe YC racing at www.tahoeyc.com/sail/results.php.

Tahoe Yacht Club also runs racing on Monday nights for Lasers, a tough bunch of sailors indeed. More on Tahoe Laser sailing in a bit. Many thanks to the Caseys for taking us along as pickup crew, and to Ellen Busch for finding us.