How the Buccaneers Raided Alaska

After an especially hot and humid weekend in Tampa, Florida, during the 2024 Buccaneer North American Championship in 2024, the sailors were ready to consider holding their next big regatta somewhere cooler, somewhere in the polar opposite direction.

But where to?

Avid Buccaneer sailor Bruce Lee floated the idea of holding the 2025 version 5,000 miles away, a remote flyer to the more temperate and midnight-sun environs of Alaska. The regatta organizer would be the Alaska Sailing Club on Big Lake, an hour's drive north of Anchorage.

There were, however, a few obvious challenges with this scheme. Competitors were not likely to hitch their boats and tow them all the way to America's 49th state, but maybe they would fly there and use local boats. It just happens that Alaska Sailing Club is big on Buccaneers with members owning more than a dozen of them. The regatta could split entries into A and B fleets and there would be just enough boats to make it a round-robin style regatta. Problem solved.

But now for the bigger question: Would anyone come?

For Buccaneer sailor John Weiss, there was "no hesitation."

And he wasn't alone. Sixteen teams from the lower 48 signed up and the regatta was a go.

The club itself has only 110 family memberships, but people quickly jumped in to help. "Steve Ryan said, ‘If you organize, I'll get the boats,'" Lee says. "Nancy Black headed hospitality. Tom Harrison and Jim Auman were on the water. Elaine Hunter, Dave Johnson and Darren Black did everything. Brie Busey kept things together."

The Alaska Sailing Club has carved out a rustic nook on the south shore of Big Lake, with one club building and a half-dozen basic private "condos." The club is "dry," which in Alaska-speak means no running, potable water. That also meant water bottles and port-a-potties for competitors, but this, too, was no barrier to inviting 60-plus friends for a week of sailboat racing and partying.

To ensure fair racing, the boats had to be equal and that task fell to Ryan, who worked on the fleet for nearly a month, sometimes with Lee's help. Lee, who now escapes Alaska winters by snowbirding to Phoenix and sails with the Arizona Yacht Club's Buccaneer fleet, brought some racing sails from Buccaneer sailors there to supplement the Alaskan quiver. Well before competitors arrived, the two of them measured and tweaked and did side-by-side speed comparisons. Dock gossip suggested that one or two of the boats were just a bit slower than the rest, but a statistical breakdown at the regatta's finish found them to be essentially equal. Mission accomplished.

They also imported me from Arizona to serve as principal race officer, and with that they got my wife Maryellen and daughter Elizabeth as a Race Committee package. We were lured by the legend of this Buccaneer championship, the tales of friendly competition and fun times. Before the regatta began, Harrison briefed me on Big Lake, known for frequent and substantial wind shifts. He also imparted one bit of very useful local knowledge: if a float plane lands, it has right-of-way. Good to know.

The typical wind pattern on Big Lake brought sailing breeze in the afternoon and evening. With daylight lasting until midnight, the schedule was a little unusual. "They flipped the script," says Jimmy Yurko, who has been sailing Buccaneers for 27 years. "Instead of rushing to get a boat ready in the morning, we sailed into the evening. After racing it was saunas and campfires."

With kids, dogs, s'mores and a steady supply of good food, the regatta and its Alaskan hosts had it all. The food was plentiful and delicious. Volunteers served continental breakfast, then around midday Nancy Black and crew laid out an elaborate meal that they called dinner. During racing in the evening, they followed with soup and sandwiches. Three kinds of soup each time: such things as vegetables and wild rice, salmon chowder or moose chili. One dinner included reindeer sausage.

"We wanted to actually share some Alaska," Black says. "Not everywhere can you get salmon chowder and moose chili."

While Black was handling hospitality, husband Darren was racing with their 15-year-old son Jake Black in B Fleet. Their other son, Gabe Black, was racing with his girlfriend Adrianna Ramirez in his own boat.

"Gabe's a serious sailor," Lee says. "How many 17-year-olds do you know who bought their own Buccaneer?"

The A fleet had 12 competitors and the B fleet had nine. We met the goal of 21 races over four days with boat swaps between every race. After on-the-water boat-to-boat exchanges bent a masthead fly after the first race, they decided to send everyone back to the nearby docks for exchanges from then on.

Meanwhile Big Lake lived up to its shifty reputation, but Harrison and the mark-set team kept up, actually twirling the course nearly 90 degrees between a couple of races, with no delay.

On a hill overlooking the racecourse, non-racers gathered to watch and hoot and holler. Someone even live-streamed the action on Facebook and bragged that he had 55 people watching.

After stumbling to a bad finish in the penultimate race, enduring champion Ed Mantano and Shannon Devine fell behind John Weiss and his crew Jay Foght by a fraction of a point to decide the championship. Trevor and Rachel Bach claimed first in B. The young Black and Ramirez team rode consistent finishes and a couple of bullets to a second-place standing in B.

Weiss summarized the Alaskan Buccaneer 18 North American Championship as "An insane vacation wrapped around a highly competitive regatta."

Where, he asked, "can you get 12 close races and then take a helicopter to a glacier and go snowmobiling?"

"They made it a family vacation," Lee says. "I've never seen so many of the families before."

The vacation theme sat well with a fleet of close friends.

No protests, one redress, one general recall, three boats OCS and no shouting. After trophies and the requisite group photo, it was off to glaciers, mountains, mushing trips and the rest of what this great, wild land has to offer.

It was, indeed, a good time.

"There's a comfort and familiarity to the class," says Yurko, who with his wife Kristi, will host the next Buccaneer National Championship (their third) in Maryland in October 2026. "We're friends on and off the water, we support each other and it goes way beyond sailing."

That is the Buccaneer way. They're just happy to be together wherever they meet.

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