4 Days, 5 Courses, 15 Fleets, 140 Sailboats, 1,200 Sailors

North America’s 2nd largest keelboat regatta to welcome hardcore racers, casual cruisers, classic wooden yacht lovers and tourists. The principal race officer of Chester Race Week North America’s 2nd largest annual keelboat race week today issued the official Notice of Race marking the kick off for skippers eager to register for the event running from August  13 to 16 in the picturesque town of Chester, Nova Scotia.

Chester Race Week 2014, hosted by the Chester Yacht Club, boasts a race course for every skill level and boat class, daily events with live music, great food, and the return of racing seminars from famed J/Boat designer, cofounder and sailor, Rodney Johnstone.

“Recreational sailors and hardcore, competitive racers alike love Chester Race Week because we have diverse courses in a beautiful setting, and the results are so unpredictable we strive to make racing competitive and fun,” said Elizabeth Shaw, CRW 2014 Principal Race Officer. A Sail Canada certified National Race Officer, Shaw has served in an elite leadership capacity with national and world sailing championships in Canada, the United States and Australia.

J/Boat cofounder Rodney Johnstone, felt right at home at his first Chester Race Week in 2013. “Chester’s race organization and competition are first rate, the locals receive outsiders warmly, and the scenery is beautiful it reminds me, a lot, of my home in Connecticut,” he said by phone.

“I plan to race at Chester Race Week again this year on my friend Gary Bennett’s J/35 with mostly the same crew that raced the same boat 27 years ago. So I am really looking forward to it.”

What makes Chester Race Week North America’s 2nd largest annual keelboat regatta? Named one of Sailing World magazine’s 14 greatest sailing events in North America, each August, 1,200plus sailors arrive in Mahone Bay on Nova Scotia’s scenic South Shore to compete in one of 15 fleets racing simultaneously on

five different race courses. With an average of 140 fixedkeel sailboats of varying size and shape registered each year, Chester Race Week is North America’s secondlargest annual race week based on number of competing boats (South Carolina’s Charleston Race Week is largest with 288 boats in 2014).

Courses range in size from a 0.5 nautical mile windwardleeward course for the Bluenose class in front of the Chester Yacht Club, to the 20plusnauticalmilelong, offshore distance course for big boats. The fleets can accommodate everyone from competitive onedesign hulls to classic wooden boats and cruising boats racing without spinnakers. “We don’t finalize course designs until race day when we know the actual conditions and have confirmed our competitors’ interests,” said Shaw, a Halifax native who takes the customerservice aspect of her job seriously. “We are constantly talking to our competitors so we can produce the kind of competitive courses our sailors want to race.” International 14 demo class a gateway to more growth To grow further in size and stature, 2014 will see Chester Race Week hosting a demonstration class for International 14s, a leadingedge, highperformance, onedesign, tandem racing dinghy that can reach speeds up to 25 knots (50 km/h). While the “fourteen” is not a keelboat, many fourteen sailors also own keelboats.

Attracting International 14 sailors from New England and Ontario to the beauty and competitive sailing of Chester Race Week will result in some returning with their bigger keelboats.
Sailors to get race results faster with new webbased race management system, enotices Chester Race Week is bringing both sailors and race organizers important benefits through its investment in Yacht Scoring, a webbased, race management and scoring system used by some of the competitive sailing world’s top organizations including the 2013 Rolex Farr 40 World Championships, 2014 J/70 World Championships, and Charleston Race Week the only annual keelboat race week in North America larger than Chester Race Week, based on number of competing boats.

 Benefits will include:

● Realtime online scoring so anyone with a web or wifi connection can see results from the water or dock. Race result reporting will be managed by a trained specialist on the water for all race courses

● Instant, direct communication with skippers and crews before, during and after each race via convenient email notice function. Note: Email notificaton is a courtesy service. Official notices will continue to come from race committee boats via traditional flag and horn signals.

● Easier, faster online registration and payment service will reduce headaches all around

● Handy mobile web sites for smart phones via www.ChesterRaceWeek.com and www.YachtScoring.com/mobile type
“Chester” into List of Events, then bookmark the Chester Race Week 2014 results site
 
“This year each skipper, crew member and family member on shore will be able to get their boat’s exact finish time and ranking via their smart phone before the start of the next race it’ll be hours faster and more accurate than it used to be,” said Shaw.

“If we have to delay a start due to wind or weather, the Race Committee Boat will still communicate changes to the fleet with traditional signal flags, but skippers and tacticians are going to love the convenience and speed of the new Yacht Scoring email notices delivering the same updates, faster,”she added.

In addition to Yacht Scoring, Race Week sailors will also appreciate the new www.ChesterRaceWeek.com site that can handle
 
the heavy loads of 1,200 sailors seeking race results, is tablet and smart phone compatible, and makes it easier and more intuitive for sailors to find what they need, quickly.

Visit www.ChesterRaceWeek.com for race and social event schedules.