Innholdsfortegnelse for March - April 2015 i Sailing World

ON THE OFFICIAL NOTICE BOARD, in the space designated for crew-wanted or crew-available notices, there’s a solitary offering: A neatly penned note from someone with experience in all positions. With each passing day of Quantum Key West Race Week, however, its edges curl, the ink fades, and, like an ignored parking ticket under a windshield wiper, the note eventually gets swept away. Sorry, nobody’s looking. In the heydays of Key West Race Week, I’m told, that would’ve never happened. Back when the big boats rolled into town from the feeders, there were plenty of good sailors loitering, most of them looking for a ride. You could yank a guy off his bar stool at Sloppy Joe’s and be fine. Getting on a boat, even for a day, is damn near…

THE DECEMBER 2014 announcement by America’s Cup officials that the idyllic island nation of Bermuda will host the 35th Match in June 2017 lacked the suspense organizers might have hoped for. The cat had already been let out of the bag by an official with the city of San Diego, which lost out to Bermuda in the bid to host. The announcement, conducted at the boutique Crosby Street Hotel in New York’s SoHo district did have some panache. In attendance were A-list actors Michael Douglas and wife Catherine Zeta-Jones, who plan to build and open an extravagant hotel in Bermuda before the next Cup. And there was Mr. America’s Cup himself, Dennis Conner, sitting in the second row. But with the announcement came the stark realization that the America’s Cup…

IN SEPTEMBER, I observed the ISAF Sailing World Championships in Santander, Spain. All 10 Olympic classes had their world championship, plus the sailors had the opportunity to qualify their respective countries for the Olympics. I was coaching the U.S. 49er team, which allowed me to witness great sailing by talented and prepared teams. What really caught my attention was the performance Peter Burling and Blair Tuke, of New Zealand, who won the 49er class by 46 points. These guys are veterans in the class, having won the 2013 49er Worlds and an Olympic silver medal in 2012, but they have continued to develop their game. They’re now more dominant than ever. w How can a team be so dominant in a fleet that included including three Olympic medalists? As I…

WHEN I WAS A JUNIOR sailor during the 1970s, fleets of Sabots, Lasers, and Lehman 12s crisscrossed the channels of Marina del Rey during our summer evening races. It was the quintessential Southern California scene every night—until the windsurfers showed up. I’ll never forget the first time a fleet of them participated in one weeknight race. It may have been windsurfing’s first-ever race in such a traditional environment. It was the start of a ground-breaking movement. Hoyle and Diana Schweitzer, founders of the company that would eventually manufacturer the ground breaking Windsurfer, were members of California YC, and that night, they corralled their posse of beach pals to showcase what would soon change the world of sailing. The Schweitzer kids were in the junior program, so I made sure I…

AN ASYMMETRIC SPINNAKER only needs to work in reach mode, so it’s typically designed flatter than a symmetric spinnaker. Because the luff is always the luff and the leech always the leech, sail designers have the luxury of optimizing the shape for each. Hence the term “asymmetric spinnaker.” The asymmetric is always in reach mode with the wind flowing from luff to leech, whether truly reaching or, more commonly, jibing at angles to VMG reach downwind. Because a traditional pole with a symmetric spinnaker can be eased forward or pulled aft, the trimmer can set the pole angle to the driver’s steering angle by adjusting it perpendicular to the wind. If the boat is sailing slightly higher or lower than optimum, the spinnaker trimmer can compensate. With an asymmetric, however,…

ERIC PERON is Dongfeng’s resident casa nova. Throughout Leg 3, the Frenchman repeatedly asks Jack Boutelle, the Australian rookie, if his sister will be at our arrival in China. “I’ll have to find your dad to introduce myself to my future father-in-law,” he says, daily. Jack takes it in good stride. It’s one of many funny stories to come from a bunch of rookie Chinese sailors, unknown French singlehanded savants, one baby-faced Australian, and an American reporter (that’s me) onboard a Volvo Ocean 65 racing to its homeport in Sanya, China. Pascal Bidegorry, our navigator, and Charles Caudrelier, our skipper, are something akin to a French Starsky and Hutch. Charles calls himself “Cartesian” and is obsessed with the routing screen, whereas Pascal is more of the shoot-first-ask-later type. In one…

BLUE WATER IS NEXT, naturally. Now that the problems of inshore foiling boats are down to buying off the shelf—choose one hull, two hulls, or a board—blue water is the natural next frontier in foiling boats. Sébastien Josse has never shrunk from his what-the-hecklet’s-try-it ways, and he is plotting a foiling version of the Gitana Team’s big trimarans. Once you’ve raced transatlantic on a MOD70, what’s another level of complexity (and perhaps risk) if it delivers another level of speed? In the opposite corner we find another Frenchman, Alain Thébault, who began developing his veteran fixed-foiler, l’Hydroptere, in 1985 and in 2009 set then-records for 500 meters at 51.36 knots and the nautical mile at 50.17 knots. In the America’s Cup year, Thébault brought his 60-footer to the USA, to…

BRENDA CHENEY’S slender legs dangle from the rail of the Beneteau Oceanis 43 Jubilee as we race up and down Savannah’s Wilmington River. “When I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease at 34, my perspective on what really mattered changed,” she tells me. “After my treatment, I became a board member of the Texas Gulf Coast Chapter of The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and I’ve been doing that for seven years, helping with the Leukemia Cup and a bunch of other events. When you’re trying to raise money for any cause, you have to get creative.” In 2014, 47 chapters hosted 50 events to raise funds for LLS. The Leukemia Cup has joined participants’ passion for sailing with the important task of raising money to fund cancer research. Top fundraising individuals…

THE INTERNATIONAL MOTH is a development class with liberal rules in place since its inception in the 1920s. It’s all about progression, especially of late, so plenty of new kit was on display at the 2015 Moth World Championship in Sorrento, Australia, in January. Peter Burling, of New Zealand, demonstrated impressive form in his win over Nathan Outteridge, of Australia, and both sailors used the latest innovations driving the class. Canting and raking masts: Moths heel to windward, which creates righting moment by projecting the weight of the sailor and boat further to windward. Leaning the rig into the wind, however, effectively creates a header, so in order to point higher, side shrouds connect to a complex system that allows the mast to automatically cant to leeward as the boat…

LAKE HOPATCONG, New Jersey’s largest lake, doesn’t stand a chance of making it onto a predictable bucket list. Winds are reputedly light and fluky on this “Lake of Many Coves,” which is about an hour’s drive northwest of New York City. For a long list of reasons, however, dozens of A-Class Catamaran devotees from near and far are drawn here every year in the fall. Lake Hopatcong YC has a strong local A-Class fleet (alongside Thistles, Stars, and E Scows), and is best known for its outstanding parties, great people, and hospitality, hospitality, hospitality. When the A-Class cats roll into town, not a single sailor pays for a hotel room because there’s plenty of host housing to go around. You can pretty much park your car and stash the keys…

THE ISAF ROLEX Sailor of the Year awards ceremony in Dublin, Ireland, is about to begin. Professional-quality videos introduce the achievements of both the men and women nominees. More than 500 delegates from 120 nations are in attendance, and no one in the hall in Ireland knows who the winners will be. After considerable fanfare, Sir Ben Ainslie gets the nod as the male winner. The previous summer he had won his fourth Olympic gold medal. Next came the female recipient, Lijia Xu, of China, the Laser Radial gold medalist at the London Olympics. She is tall and elegant in her gown as she walks to the podium. As I look on, admiring Xu for her accomplishments, I wonder how China, a country with so little sailing history, can produce…

THE INTERNATIONAL Sailing Federation has published its 2015 Supplement to The Case Book for 2013-2016, which includes three new cases, each of which contains a helpful interpretation of an important rule. I will summarize these cases below, with my opinions on why they’re worth studying. The cases are available at www.sailing.org/documents/caseandcall/case-book.php CASE 133: RULE 18.3, TACKING IN THE ZONE Rule 18.3 is intended to help a big fleet round the windward mark in an orderly way when boats are required to leave the mark to port. It rewards boats that approach the zone on starboard tack. It does not automatically penalize a boat that enters the zone on port tack and then tacks to starboard, but it makes such an approach to the windward mark risky when other boats are…

WHILE MANY SAILORS are holding on for dear life, trying not to get passed on the second lap of a race, the clever sailor is licking his chops with excitement, because one lap of data is pure gold to the tactical sailor as he or she can more accurately identify what type of racecourse they’re dealing with. We all know we’re supposed to try and figure out the racecourse before the start, identify the type of conditions in which we’re sailing, and make a game plan. Is it an oscillating breeze or a steady breeze? Is there a land-induced geographic shift? Is there favorable current on one side? Where is the most wind? What racecourse feature will pay the most? Figuring it all out is easier said than done, but…