The Arizona Yacht Club Birthday Regatta held January 18 – 20 saw 10 Vipers on the line with more than half of the boats from out of state.  The road warrior award clearly went to Rafe Beswick, who towed his boat more than 1500 miles from Olympia, Washington to get away from the gloomy weather of the northwest and enjoy the sunny and clear Arizona weather.

Each day there was good breeze in the morning from the north, which would settle down as the day progressed.   An early start of 9am on Sunday saw the best races on the final day, with the wind in the high teens for the initial races.

(photo at left: Big wind and winter hats in Arizona -- what the what?!?  Great Vipering weather for Laurent Dion and crew on Viper 145.  Photo courtesy Tom Errickson / Sailboat Shop)

Happy New Year to Viper 640 sailors everywhere!  With the turn of the calendar comes the time to join or renew class association membership for 2013.  If you missed the blast e-mail from the class earlier this week, here's why you should be a part of the class association...

With the holidays here, we decided to bring back the Better Know a Viperer series as a present to everyone in the class and to give folks something to read if they're tired of watching Christmas specials and college football bowl games.  The only natural choice to break this spell was Viper 640 supercrew Lee Shuckerow.  While a co-owner of Jackpot, Lee is most often found in the front of the boat, where he has crossed the finish-line ahead of teammates Brad Boston and Eric Vigrass in each of their three Viper North American championship titles.  To find out what makes Jackpot tick and to address rumors that Lee doesn't know what the tiller looks like, we sat down with Shuck over a pitcher of Labatt's...

Alamitos Bay Yacht Club is host to one of the largest annual small boat regattas on the West Coast, the annual Turkey Day Regatta.   I remember doing this regatta as a youth in Lasers in freezing cold weather in 30kts of breeze and knew the conditions would dictate the event.  Local Viper rep Tim Carter has been asking for a clinic for sometime and Turkey Day seemed like the perfect time to get something going.  It has been a fun and successful year racing the Viper for myself and it was now time to give something back to the fleet.

Phillip Toth, who recently started working at the Ullman Newport Loft, and I set forth a plan to host a Turkey Day Tune Up on the Friday leading up to the regatta.  I focused on tuning and technique and Phil brought his expertise from his Olympic campaign to line out some boat handling and starting technique drills.

[read more for Keith's crew roles tips at the bottom and Turkey Day Regatta results - photos courtesy Rich Roberts]