Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2020 i Sailing World

Racing is canceled. For everyone. Everywhere. Every day. For the foreseeable future. Except online. This is the new reality spreading across the sport as fast as the COVID-19 virus spreads its devastation around the globe. Shelter-in-place replaces “see you tomorrow.” Physicaland social distancing replaces “see you at the boat.” Sailors, both you and I, hunker down, protecting ourselves and others we don’t know, waiting for “it” to pass as we pass the time with epoxy and gelcoat projects, splicing and boatwork, and exercising to stay fit. We use our free time to prepare for the season to come, when—and if—it ever does. We turn to Virtual Regatta for our tactical fix, to keep our mental skills sharp, to pretend we’re really racing. But gaming gets old, for me at least,…

For more than 30 years, the Snipe—a hard-chine 15-footer almost a century old—has been my teacher. I first stepped into one as a newbie 20-something, as a crew for the most demanding skipper I’ve ever sailed with. That unlikely “blind date” led to countless friendships, fitness, failures and, of course, fun. Snipe sailing takes me all over the country and around the world—and brings me right back home to Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, where Kim Couranz and I won the Snipe Women’s Worlds in 2018. I’ve rigged boats in a shivery, rain-soaked Danish boat park; surfed ocean waves in Japan, where swells seemed to swallow boats and rigs whole. I’ve drifted around a Massachusetts lake so small that I could overhear an international sailor wonder aloud where the races would…

Ernst-Michael Miller glides to the dock at Shake A Leg Miami on his red foiling catamaran. What a cool-looking boat. Looks fast. Tricked out too. I walk over to chat with him about the boat, and I’m surprised to find out he’s the guy who designed it. Very cool. There, on the spot, he gives me a thorough explanation of the boat’s “FlySafe” foil-control system and the “Code F,” which is a light gennaker that promotes early foiling in light air. Curiously, it’s tacked to the leeward bow and has no boom. I’m sure the guy could have chatted for days about the craft he calls an iFly. His enthusiasm for it is immediately contagious, and suddenly I can’t wait to have a go at it myself. We agree to…

I’m having one of those what-have-I-gotten-myself-into moments—one hand gripping a GoPro, the other clenching the lifeline. Moments after the start, the boatspeed jumps to 35 knots, and I am terrified. If I was driving, I’d be white-knuckled. The wind-whipped Caribbean Sea thrashes Argo’s hulls, but Jason Carroll is cool at the tiller of his 70-foot trimaran. He leans back in his driving chair and squints through the visor of his crimson helmet at the turning mark ahead. A few days earlier, one of Argo’s new T-foil rudders snapped during the delivery from Antigua to St. Martin for the Caribbean Multihull Challenge regatta—a delivery of less than four hours despite the breakage. Carroll’s team spent the night swapping to Argo’s older rudders, but combined with the boat’s newer and longer J-shaped…

Does your outfit have an event that defines you? That inspires its members? That embodies pride and spirit? That brings the volunteers with bells on? In my West Coast world, our poster child is the Congressional Cup at Long Beach Yacht Club—canceled or postponed like everything else scheduled for early 2020—but that match-racing extravaganza is the centerpiece of LBYC’S life in the world we used to call normal. To the members, it’s more than a premier event. Past commodore Camille Daniels says: “Our volunteers schedule their vacations around the Congressional Cup. They look forward to seeing sailors they know, umpires they know. That’s especially true for host families, because all our visitors stay in private homes, and the Cup produces lasting friendships. The sailors call whenever they’re in town, and…

Small communities benefit when local groups work together to produce results greater than the sum of their individual efforts. Three organizations combined their efforts to create such synergy in a coastal county on Lake Huron. The Iosco County Family Court, local Elks Lodge 2525 and Heritage Coast Sailing and Rowing (HCS&R) combined efforts to develop a positive training program for youthful offenders and provide a staunch safety boat for the new not-for-profit sailing school. The Juvenile Enhanced Accountability Program (JEAP), a Family Court Program, gives youthful offenders a chance to complete their court-ordered community service, in this case, by building a boat while increasing their manual and group skills. Elks Lodge 2525 has a long and laudable community service history. They have worked with the JEAP program for several years…

For information about WEST SYSTEM® products or technical information for a building or repair project, Gougeon Brothers offers a range of detailed publications that can help you get started. These publications are available at your local WEST SYSTEM dealer or by contacting Gougeon Brothers. They are also available as free downloadable PDFs at westsystem.com. How-to Publications 002 The Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction—A must for anyone building a wooden boat or working with wood and WEST SYSTEM Epoxy. Fully illustrated composite construction techniques, materials, lofting, safety and tools. 5th Edition, revised in 2005. 002-970 Wooden Boat Restoration & Repair—Illustrated guide to restore the structure, improve the appearance, reduce the maintenance and prolong the life of wooden boats with WEST SYSTEM Epoxy. Includes dry rot repair, structural framework repair, hull and…

It’s Pete and Blair. Journalists say Burling and Tuke, respectively, but because they are so intricately attached to each other, it’s appropriate to associate the two as practically twins. Every boat on which they sail together, they move in synchronization. Even the most trained eye finds it impossible to find flaws. At the 2020 49er World Championship in February in Geelong, Australia, the pair won an unprecedented sixth world title in the class. No one in the crowd even blinked. Their emotions, despite having also won the 2019 world championship three months before in their native New Zealand turf, were surprisingly high as they pulled their skiff up the seaweed-covered ramp in a cool drizzle after the medal race. It never gets old for these two. “I’m pretty stoked to…

Potential. So much potential. That’s what Tom Pace, the ponytailed vice commodore of Florida’s Pensacola YC sees as he scans the club’s vast 22 acres. The sun-parched front lawn stretches as far as the eye can see, dissected by a long driveway lined with tall, weathered and moss-covered trees. The estate-style property at the entrance of Bayou Chico Inlet dwarfs the diminutive white clubhouse with blue awnings. The converted house itself was built in the early 1900s, right about the time when the Pensacola Yacht and Motor Boat Club was formed on paper. Back when, according to club history, 75 charter members voted to pay $6 in annual dues. “It’s a bunch,” Pace says of the club’s property where his family roots run deep. “We have 5 acres of pure…

As I flew home from Cape Town after the TP52 Super Series earlier in the year, I had a feeling the future might be different. A lot different. The novel coronavirus was starting to really erupt, and suddenly the world I knew—traveling to regattas, sailing cool boats, dinners with friends old and new—all seemed at risk. When I got home to Seattle, it all started to really sink in: There might not be another regatta for a while. For someone who lives to race sailboats, this was a startling and disturbing thought. When I stopped feeling sorry for myself for a minute, I realized I was going to be fine, and there were many millions of people with far more serious issues than mine. I had temporarily lost my livelihood,…

Inside Building No. 5 at Safe Harbor New England Boatworks, Jocko Alpress stands on Running Tide’s new deck. When the boatyard is quiet, he can hear voices from the boat’s past. He was on the boat for seven years, with two owners. On this cold March day, however, quiet reflection isn’t an option for Alpress, who is on the team responsible for the Tide’s comprehensive refit. Those voices are inaudible over a cacophony of power tools as a small army of craftsmen swarm the vessel, which has been stripped to the bones and is in the process of being refaired, repainted, rerigged and reimagined. Running Tide was built in 1970 by Jakob Isbrandtsen, a shipping magnate and passionate racer, who commissioned Sparkman & Stephens to design a yacht that could…

A boat that gets off the starting line in a good position and has good upwind speed is probably going to be near the top of the fleet at the first weather mark. That’s easy to say but challenging to do, especially the starting part. However, if you learn to follow a script or plan that makes the starting routine mechanical, you’ll discover that each start becomes better, and your starts, overall, become more consistent. The good news is that plan can be followed wherever you start on the line and whatever the breeze. How do you know when you’ve managed a good start? Simply put, you’ve gotten off the line in the front row with competitive speed so you can take advantage of the first shift. It’s cool to…

I ADMIRE THE CAN-DO MINDSET of the classic-yacht racing community. They are in it for the love of wooden boats, and always seem ready to go the extra mile to help their friends and competitors. Tightknit are these aficionados of hemp and cotton. It could be the loan of a specialty tool or providing a helping hand to a sailor in need, but whatever it is, this generous spirit seems to trigger a temporary suspension of good sense. Pardon me, sir? Would you happen to have any wood glue?…

On Wednesday, June 20, 1979, while sailing in a qualifying race for the OSTAR (Original Single-Handed Transatlantic Race), Jan Gougeon’s self-designed and built 31’ trimaran FLICKA was capsized by heavy seas in the North Atlantic. Jan survived on the overturned plywood/epoxy multihull for four days before he was rescued by a passing freighter. The following is the transcript of a phone call between Jan, his brothers Meade and Joel, as well as fellow multihull designer/sailor Mike Zuteck. Their discussion takes place on June 26, 1979, just hours after the freighter that rescued Jan delivered him to dry land. FLICKA was never recovered. We’ve divided their lengthy discussion into two parts. In this first installment, Jan discusses FLICKA’s capsize, what it was like surviving in the upside-down trimaran. Jan Gougeon: The…

Many products, especially boats, are now being manufactured with a process called Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer Molding (VARTM), also frequently referred to as infusion. The main topics of this article are: what infusion is, how to repair an infused part with vacuum bagging vs. infusion, and the results of our study comparing a vacuum-bagged repaired laminate and an infused repaired laminate. What is Infusion? Infusion uses a vacuum to create a pressure differential between the part and a resin bath which pushes the resin into the dry laminate, wetting it out. To make an infused part the reinforcement fabric and coring are laid dry into a mold with vacuum bag, release fabric, flow media, etc. laid on top of the laminate. Then the vacuum bag is sealed and vacuum is…

Successive hurricanes and floods pummeled coastal Texas in the early 2000s, dealing a crippling blow to the many one-design fleets long rooted in the region. Recovery was slow, and while it took the better part of two decades for dinghy and keelboat fleets to flourish once again, youth sailing, particularly at Lakewood, needed more young sailors among its ranks. Ten years of building a strong youth program led them to ask the very same question posed in yacht clubs across the nation: How do they get those same young sailors back and active? “From a membership perspective, the level of growth wasn’t where we wanted it to be,” says Lakewood’s past commodore Ash Walker. Younger members, who are building careers and families, want team and match racing as well as…

Pop quiz: Which technology did not exist in sailboat racing 10 years ago but will be decisive in the 36th America’s Cup? No, it’s not foiling. Sailboats have been “flying” for more than two decades. It’s the human-in-the-loop simulator. It didn’t exist a decade ago, and now it’s central to the design and development of America’s Cup boats. Simulation is a technology whose time has come—thanks to the increase in speed and the decrease in price of computing power—but it got a big nudge from the rules of the 36th Cup, which banned all the traditional means of design evaluation and optimization. For the first time, the protocol banned full-scale testing with two boats, but also tow-tank and wind-tunnel testing as well. The new rules ensured that the technical battlefield…

The first full weekend in March, life was about as good as it can get for Stanford senior Jacob Rosenberg—a regional collegiate-team race-regatta victory in his rearview mirror, his coursework finished with a semester to spare, the spring college sailing season just ahead, and plans for a unique business opportunity incubating, one that sells high-quality sunglasses lenses directly to customers. Then, it all changed. “We were at our first team race of the season, at St. Mary’s, when we heard the rest of our winter-quarter classes were going online. At that point, we didn’t really expect it to go past spring break. The next week, things progressed, and everything shut down. It was really a bummer losing the last quarter of sailing and having the end of my senior year…

When everything on the racecourse is running smoothly, it’s important to remember that it’s because good decisions were made by the race officials, leading to a fair and well-managed race. There are many variables that need to be addressed before a racecourse is set and the starting sequence commenced. While perfection is the goal, it’s incredibly difficult to achieve. Pressure on race officers, judges, umpires and handicap measurers is immense these days. Highly motivated owners, professional crews and paid coaches push hard to win, again the reality that regatta organizers are staffed mostly by volunteers and have to deal with the strain of demanding competitors. There have been many changes in our sport over the past 10 years: faster boats, foiling craft of all kinds, kiteboards, new race formats, more…

“Ease, hike, trim.” Say what? This a common phrase that’s been around for a long time, and one that has always bothered me. I understand that the point of this age-old piece of advice is to keep the boat flat and humming along through gust, but taking it literally, it’s misleading. If the goal is to go fast, I think a rewording is in order to make the technique more accurate through a range of conditions. Hear me out. It’s safe to assume that the phrase lays out a sequence of events meant to handle an upwind puff: 1) ease the sails; 2) hike the boat flat; 3) trim the sails back in. The specific condition this phrase refers to is hazy to me. By telling us to “hike,” is…

In late 2018 my son and I were given a unique opportunity by the Michigan-based Water Wonderland Chapter of the Antique and Classic Boat Society (ACBS) to build an 8' MiniMax hydroplane based on original plans from the early 1960s. Almost anything from that era seems to be popular again. Maybe it’s nostalgia or maybe the designs of that groundbreaking decade were just ahead of their time. Either way, the MiniMax’s appeal seems as relevant today as it did in 1962. We accepted the challenge without hesitation. Th e youth-centric building project commenced in February 2019 at the Grand Rapids, Michigan Boat Show. We were in front of a live audience, and ACBS members generously donated wood and fasteners. Sons and daughters participated and even younger siblings got involved. Th…

After a few years of racing on the J22 This Little Piggy, the owner was ready to take a step back and gave me the first option to purchase it. I took advantage of the opportunity. As with many boats I’ve owned over the years, the first couple winters I plan on spending money upgrading and doing repairs. Not that a lot has to be done, but a few changes in hardware placement and re-bedding the deck hardware are at the top of my list. The sea hood of the J22 is the control center with mainsail, jib, and spinnaker halyard cleats along with the pole topping lift and cunningham. In the early days of J22 sailing, everyone was sorting out the best placement for hardware on the sea hood.…

Nonskid surfaces may need to be replaced because they are worn down from years of use, or were removed during a deck repair. If you want to match an existing pattern, flexible molds are available for matching a production boat nonskid pattern or for use if a molded appearance is desired. Molded non-skid surfaces are often very open making them easier to clean and they have a more finished appearance (See Epoxyworks 22, “Repair Non-Skid and get Professional Results”). For applications where it is not practical to use molds, or a simple and functional non-skid surface is desired, there are some easy options. It is important to note that when applying a nonskid surface with epoxy, you’ll need to make it pretty rough because epoxy requires a UV-protective topcoat (typically…