Latest Viper 640 Class News

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 […]

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 […]

The last Viper regatta on Western Long Island Sound for 2012 had no entry fee, no recorded scores, no trophies, the smallest turnout of the year, and had boat owners in a panic derigging boats to avoid a hurricane that was closing in on the area.  Yet it might have been the most successful regatta […]

Several people have requested that this guy be profiled for a while now…not just *that guy*, but the f***ing new guy, Dr. Jim Sears.  Jim may not be the new guy anymore now that he’s had his Viper for two years, and he certainly doesn’t sail his Viper like the new guy, taking podium places […]

Dave Nickerson is the Viper 640 class’s Technical Committee chairman.  Dave, along with his Tech Committee colleagues Ben “Carbon Mongoose” Steinberg, Tim “Timbo” Carter and Professor Bob Matthews, are the keepers of the sword, inspecting Vipers with rulebooks in hand and ruthlessly burning tow lines that are a millimeter too thin and declaring that the […]

Garrett Johns is the secretary of the Viper class.  At the risk of insulting those of you who have the Class Constitution memorized, “the Secretary shall be responsible for taking minutes of meetings, maintaining records including a record of class members and class registered boats. The Secretary shall ensure that the Executive Committee pursue objective […]

Keith Magnussen (above, Sailmaker at Ullman Sails and West Coast Viper Rock Star) and Phil Toth (Aussie Olympic Star contender, below)  will be hosting a Viper tuning and boat mechanics clinic at ABYC on Friday before the Turkey Day regatta in November. Friday November 16th. They will have a coach boat and videos. Keith writes “This […]

We continue the “BKAV” series on the Viper class officers with treasurer Tony Chapman, a/k/a “the Road Warrior”, “the guy with the funny teal Viper”, or just “the British guy with the bandanas.”  Tony is one of the mainstays of the Viper fleet in Arizona — yes, there are Vipers racing in the desert.  When […]

27 Vipers made the annual pilgrimage to Western Long Island Sound’s American YC for the HPDO (aka, the “High Performance Dinghy Open”).  Despite the lead appendages, Vipers have been a mainstay at the HPDO for several years, with 35 Vipers in attendance in 2010 and 27 Vipers in 2011.  The 2012 edition had 31 Vipers […]

Now that we’re into October and on the wrong side of the class’s Annual General Meeting where our class officers were reappointed for another term, we’ve decided that it’d be worth the effort to get to know some of them better for the latest in the “BKAV” series — our officers hail from New Jersey, […]