If you can’t sail an Olympic qualifying regatta in your home waters, the next best thing would be to sail the regatta at your favorite venue away from home. Peter Bromby and Lee White proved this weekend that they are well on their way to qualifying Bermuda for the 2008 Olympics in the men’s keelboat discipline. They won the Schoonmaker Cup, the first Star regatta of the Miami winter sailing season. Peter has his sites set on steering a Star boat in the Olympics for the fifth time. If they grab one of the four as yet unclaimed Star berths by doing well at the 2008 Star World Championships in Miami in April 2008, it will be Lee’s fourth trip to the Olympics as Peter’s crew.

There are many similarities between the Miami’s Biscayne Bay and Bermuda’s Great Sound, especially on a crisp, sunny weekend when the winds were from the North early on Saturday and never went to the right of East all weekend on Biscayne Bay. Peter and Lee could look up the Bay and read the pressure and shifts and then pick their spot on the starting line. Having trained in winder conditions during Thursday and Friday when they demonstrated comfort with the Bay by winning all of the practice races, and determined to maintain their confidence level, they executed a nice pin end start during Sunday’s first race and the first race to be completed in the regatta. They were in the company of Prof O’Connell (IRL) sailing with former Star world champion crew, Steve Mitchell (GBR) and John Dane, III and Austin Sperry (USA). When the boats from the pin end of the line reached the weather mark, they were in 2, 3, 4 just behind Joe Zambella and Chris Lanza (USA); however O’Connell/Mitchell never made it to the offset mark, because their name was posted on the OCS board. Playing the oscillations for the remainder of the windward-leeward, twice around race, Peter and Lee constantly challenged for the lead, but finished about 25-yards behind Peter McChesney and Shane Zwingelberg (USA).

Peter and Lee moved their start further up the line during the second race and finished third behind O’Connell/Mitchell who had had the opportunity to study the conditions from the sidelines during the first race and Miamian Augie Diaz (who won the Snipe North American Championships on the Great Sound earlier this year) and Phil Trinter. McChesney/Zwingelberg were fifth in the second race so Peter and Lee went into the final race of the regatta with a one-point lead over McChesney/Zwingelberg. The Bermudians stepped it up on the line a little more, starting closer to the boat than in the previous two races and rounded the first weather mark in the top of the pack. With the big picture in mind, Peter and Lee protected their position against McChesney/Zwingelberg rather than challenge Eivind Melleby and Petter Moreland Pederson (NOR) for the bullet and settled for a second in the final race of the three-race regatta on their favorite home away from home sailing venue, Biscayne Bay.