PINELLAS PARK, Fla. — Dozens of yachts glide across Freedom Lake several days a week. Now, before you ask, how do you fit that many yachts on such a small body of water? The captains aren’t on the boats.
They sit on the shoreline.
The water at Freedom Lake Park isn’t exactly the high sea.
“Not too long ago, we had milk jugs out here for buoys,” Steve Toelken, a commodore of this boat club.
But, the stakes are high for these competitive sailors.
“There’s a hard set of rules we have to follow,” Chris Dingle said. “The competition is great. There is a lot of tactics and strategy. That’s part of the thrill of it for me.”
This is the Golden Triangle Model Yacht Club. It’s been around since the late 1960s.
The skippers are on the land with controllers in hand.
“Even though it looks like it is very calm. It’s very strategic,” Anita Cafferty said. “You have to read the wind, not when you’re in the boat, but on shore.”
Each sailor is hoping to out-maneuver the others with their one-meter-long remote-controlled sailboats.
“All we control is the rudder and the sail,” Toelken said. “We try to anticipate the wind and the shift, and there’s a lot of them coming through the trees.
The club brings out former professional and recreational sailors like Dingle. He’s been racing these small boats for a decade.
“I want to be ahead of everybody else,” he said. “That determines a lot of my decisions. That doesn’t happen very often. It’s mother nature. You just watch the wind, you have wind indicators on the boat. You try to keep the boat trimmed.”
The same goes for Larry Lefczik.
“I was brought up sailing and racing sailboats since childhood,” Lefczik said. “This is an extension to it. I no longer have to buy a big boat or maintain it. Just come out, and the excitement of racing.”
There are also newbies to the RC world, like Cafferty, who was previously at the helm of a Pram sailboat.
“I said this would be a great transition to when I can’t get my fat body into the itty bitty boat,” she said. “I can sit on the shore and do it.”
The club meets at Freedom Lake on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings.
