Owner: Rich Washington

The Boat: Chocolate Chip, twenty-two-foot Marshall catboat

Home Port: Lake Tashmoo in the summer, the Washington garage in Vineyard Haven in the winter

The Name: “I bought it last year – it wasn’t [called] Chocolate Chip. It was some ungodly name that you can’t even pronounce that meant nothing to me at all. I have a forty-four-footer, and the name of that boat is Hot Chocolate.”

Racing Streak: “I bought it and I did the Moffet right off the bat. I came in sixteenth, which surprised everybody, including me. Sixteenth of forty-three. It’s a heavy, fat boat, very stable, and much faster than I expected ... but this boat had been raced quite a bit.”

“I started racing my own boat around 1980, but I’d been racing another boat with someone else three to four years prior to that, in California.”

Where Did the Sailing Bug Come From: “I actually started sailing here on the Vineyard, on a Sunfish.”

What About Hot Chocolate: “I really did more sailing in that – I went from here to the Caribbean and to South America. Maybe twelve or thirteen trips back and forth, down to Venezuela, the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and all the islands in between except for two or three of the little ones.”