2010 Lightning Great Lakes Championship - LaSalle, Michigan

In the colder months of 2010, the Lightning Class Pan Am guru James Taylor contacted the organizing team at North Cape to see if the Great Lakes would like to be one of a few qualifying locations for the US Pan Am Trials.  Immediately the wheels went in motion and suddenly our annual Lightning event was to have more punch...and not long after that, the Thistle Class asked if NCYC would hold the Thistle Great Lakes too. 

Kudos to Chairman George Sipel and NCYC Commodore Bill Pribe for pulling this off.  The tag line for the event was "Two great classes, One huge party" and it turned out to be just that!

The Lightning Fleet had some great racing as PRO Dave Shaffer set up some really fair courses (long too!) and we ended up with 4 fantastic races.

David Starck with crew Ian Jones and Jody Starck won with ease.  They nearly swept the event.  Only a 4th in the 2nd race prevented the clean sweep. 

The race for 2nd-5th proved to be tight after Saturday's 2 races.  Sunday, Skip Dieball found the conditions to his liking and put his Dieball Sailing equipped boat into gear and locked up 2nd for the event.  Third went to light-air specialist John McCree from Bay City.  The tight racing was fun and fair with very few altercations on the race course.

Special thanks to the two teams from Mexico that used this as a training event for their own Pan Am & Youth World campaigns. 

Thanks, too, to the Thistle Class for being great party partners!