The Great Texas Catamaran Race, or GT300, has now marked a full decade of thrills, spills and bumps and bruises. Carrying on the tradition established by such beach cat classics as the Worrell 1000, the GT300 is a 300-mile marathon run in June that takes place in four stages between South Padre Island and Galveston. Typically about a dozen teams sailing high-performance multihulls like F18s and Nacra 20s take part, with 10 teams entering the fray in 2012.
Winning this year’s regatta was the Florida-baased F18 Cirrus R USA, with skipper John Casey, crew Dalton Tebo and team manager Robert Remmers.
In 2011, 16 boats took part, but only four actually finished, thanks to a particularly rough series of beach starts. In 2010, a severe storm hit the fleet near Corpus Christi, damaging two boats so badly their crews had to be rescued by the Coast Guard.
Clearly, it’s best not to mess with Texas—weather that is.
Photo courtesy of GT300/Steve Piche
