Lake Murray is a man-made lake of 78 square miles with 520 miles of shoreline, a length of 41 miles and an advertised width of 14 miles. On the other hand, if you sink your boat, you'll never have to swim more than 1.5 miles to shore (assuming that you go in the right direction). It is contained by a large earthen dam -- the largest in North America at the time it was built in the '20s -- that holds back 763 billion gallons of water. It's got lots of islands and other cool spots to explore, but you won't be going anywhere near those during the races. We'll sail in the main body of the lake between the Spence Islands and the dam, where the water is up to 150 feet deep and where racing legs of 2 mile distance can be set in any direction. This makes for great wide-open racing for us, but the race committee will complain about sore arms from lifting anchors all day long.
Weather in the spring-time is highly variable, which is probably a good thing. Your crew will get to sun their buns (sorry, you'll be busy steering) on at least one occasion, you'll probably get a chance to put on a sweater on another occasion, and you might even find foul weather gear necessary to fend off either the spray or the cold at another time. But if it's cold it's windy, so no loss. Here we see boats going downwind in a 17 knot breeze with crew wearing foul weather gear. There, we see WildCard (Atlanta, GA) rounding the weather mark in a 5 knot breeze with crew wearing much less.
