ATTENTION: NEW RACE ADDED

If you are racing with OPA this season or planning to attend an OPA race, you might want pull out your calendar.

www.OPARACING.com has added yet another race to the 2005 schedule. (Do you remember when OPA only ran one race a year in Pt. Pleasant?) This new race will be held in Saint Clair Michigan. Apparently the breakup of the Great Lake Silver Series has left a longstanding race site without a sanctioning body to run the event. In the spirit of camaraderie OPA has agreed to produce the St. Clair race on the weekend of July 29th – 31st.

The St Clair race WILL be an OPA points race. To accommodate the OPA teams and to keep this as a non mandatory race, OPA will revise it's rule book to allow teams to drop the one race where they received the least number of points. So even though the OPA schedule now has six races, the national champions will be crowned based upon the highest points in five of the six races.

At the St Clair Race, OPA – Performance Class boats will race on Sunday morning while the OSS fleet (see www.offshoresuperseries.com for more details) will hit the water from 1pm to 5pm. It will be a full day of racing and should be a wonderful event, just as it has been for many years.

As a thank you for helping out with the St Clair race, we’ll see several of the OSS teams join OPA in Atlantic City on July 17th. 2005 is shaping up to be another interesting season of OPA Offshore Racing!

road trip

We'll be there, never been to Michigan, looking foward to it

I believe this race has a huge spectator turn out.

Should be a fun weekend.

Last years event was great, good weather and a lot of spectator's a walk accross the street from the dry pits and you are watching the race.
hotel space is limited though, closest large area is Port Huron whicjh is just up the road.

So how may Great Lakes boats will show up??

You weren't deceived, they just needed a rule book that allowed for open cockpit boats in order to let the Great Lakes boats run. OPA agreed to help.

I am currently working with Ed Smith from the Silver Cup Series, in ref to the Cape Cod race. After many disscussions, we have agreed to work together to build the Divisional racing in the NE. Too many boats in the Great Lakes with nowhere to play. So, OPA will work with him to bring P class racing back to the Great Lakes. If anyone from the Great Lakes needs to contact me I can be reached at 732 920 3945. I will try to answere any questions you may have. Smitty

Great job...keep up the good work

thats good to hear , the NE needs to rebuild a strong divisional fleet I remember when the local ( what is now P-class) class would field 40-45 boats at the last few "national races" on the chesapeak bay heck we were in what would now be P-1 and had a 24 boat start in just that class it was wild. Anyway I got off topic sorry and st clair did have a good spectator turn out last year and I would expect a huge one this year the town seemed really into it , hey augie maybe I will get some of that famous cooking in the pits
Larry