Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2023 i Sailing World

NO matter how good the beer tasted on my lips or how glorious the fire-breathing spring sunset was through the windows of Newport Yacht Club’s second-floor bar, I couldn’t muster an iota of joy. If I could’ve reached my backside in this very moment, it would have been covered with shoe prints from kicking myself for doing what I can unequivocally say is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my 40 years of sailboat racing. Allow me to set the scene. It’s late March and my Turnabout Frostbite season is winding down. I’m knocking on the top of the overall season scoreboard, with third or even second place mere points out of my reach. To shuffle the deck and get me there, all I have to do is pull…

THE Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series kicked off its 2023 edition in the vibrant Tampa Bay enclave of St. Petersburg, Florida. As a destination regatta with the guarantee of reliable winds, a seasoned race-management team and a buzzing nightlife, the St. Pete stop of the series drew 250 entries across 21 classes, ranging from the diminutive foiling Waszps to the larger keelboats of the PHRF and ORC classes. The regatta’s largest gathering was the 48-boat J/70 fleet, packed with teams gearing up for the J/70 World Championship in St. Petersburg later in the year. Here, 26-year-old skipper Edward Lebens, of Oyster Bay, New York, and his teammates on Reggae Shark approached the final day of the regatta with a clear plan: to cover their rivals while carefully defending their…

COLLEGIATE keelboat sailing does not get nearly the amount of attention it deserves. While offshore teams were long seen as a secondary option for sailors either too big or not experienced enough to compete in dinghy fleets, several teams are shifting away from traditional collegiate dinghy sailing to focus on the growing number of competitive collegiate offshore regattas held across the country. In the 2022 college offshore season, a new squad made its mark on the world of collegiate keelboat sailing: the University of Wisconsin. Wisconsin is an unlikely candidate to win in offshore sailing; as a club team that practices on an inland lake, the university is hard-pressed to match the resources of government-funded teams, such as the US Naval Academy, or teams located near coastal sailing hotspots, like…

It’s early April on Miami’s Biscayne Bay, with an 18-knot easterly, gnarly chop and ribbons of sargassum seaweed—tough fare for racing any boat. We’re at the 2023 Don Q Snipe Regatta, heading uphill and racing against competitors with decades of experience in the class, as well as a slew of young hotshots and some first-timers—40 teams in all. It’s baptism by fire, my first real experience racing a Snipe. And like many who jump into the boat for the first time, I’m being served heaps of humble pie. About the only time my crew, Danielle Wiletsky, and I see the top of the fleet is when we cross paths on opposite legs of the course. The upside is that we have a ringside seat to their techniques. At one point, we…

IN the spring issue of Sailing World, I authored a column that posed a simple but important question: Where are our modern-day sailing heroes? And now, with a new film featuring the extraordinary sailing career of Buddy Melges, I’m still wondering. The first public screening of this 85-minute documentary was at the Annapolis Film Festival on a bleak, rainy Saturday morning in March. To my surprise, 600 people showed up to see this film about the most accomplished racing sailor of our era. His accomplishments are awe-inspiring: Olympic champion, winning America’s Cup helmsman, Star-class world champion, superstar of numerous Scow classes, iceboat champion, three-time Rolex Yachtsman of the Year. He’s an author, a modest, down-home guy who likes to spin a good yarn, and a consummate outdoorsman who found great…

After a long time in the planning stage, my son Adam and I began work on a tiny house in 2022. While it was possible to purchase small, modular shower pans and enclosures, small soaking tubs were virtually impossible to find. I’ve built several small boats using wood and WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy, so it occurred to me that building a small tub might be possible. On YouTube® I found videos of several do-it-yourself hot tubs made from 2x4 cedar strakes. Because these were made for mounting outside on a deck, there was no need for adhesives. They relied on steel bands, and the natural swelling of the cedar, to enable the tubs to hold water. Since our tub was going to be inside a tiny home, it needed to be…

The day after Thanksgiving 2020, we adopted a 60 lb. dog from a shelter in Danbury, CT. She came with a plastic bag of turkey scraps and not a lot of info. I thought we might have accidentally got a Leonberger pup, but a DNA test showed we had a mutt with no dominant breed. My wife and I named her Babka because of her heavy double coat of black and brown. In hindsight, we were lucky. Babka is relaxed, rambunctious and playful. She is good with children. Perhaps she had come from a family. Oddly, the shelter had given us strict warnings against leaving Babka outside in the cold. This was a conundrum, as Babka seemed quite comfortable napping in snowdrifts, delicately slurping flakes off the seat of our…

Knowing how much epoxy you will need for a project, before you start, will save time, money, and frustration. Luckily, it is fairly simple to get a ballpark idea of how much epoxy your project will require before you start mixing. Calculating the Amount of Mixed Resin and Hardener The first thing we need to do is calculate the volume of your project that needs epoxy. The formula to calculate cubic inch is length x width x depth. It’s pretty straightforward, but let’s use it in an example. Say you want to coat a bar top with a ¼" deep coating of WEST SYSTEM® 105 Epoxy Resin® and 207 Special Clear Hardener™. The bar top is 6' long (72") and 2 ½' wide (30"). To calculate the volume of the…

Maurice Godin built this standup paddleboard and paddle a few years ago. The paddle and the exterior of the board are made of local eastern white cedar. The interior frame is marine plywood. The finish is fiberglass and WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy. “Thanks to the pre-cut interior frame, and excellent tutorials at WEST SYSTEM and Sliver Paddle Boards, it turned out great. This was my first time working with fiberglass and epoxy. I was pleased with how easy it was to work with and the excellent results obtained.” Micheal Stendzis built this Camilla C, a 14' Seneca Pacific Power Dory from plans. The boat is a plywood on frame design, wrapped in fiberglass/epoxy and paint. Michael Stendzis confessed to using “copious amounts of WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy.” As his largest woodworking project to date,…

HERE is the honest-to-goodness truth: After a North U Performance Race Week in St. Thomas, you will be faster, smarter and definitely a little sunburned. Most importantly, though, you will be ready for your home-fleet racing, with one distinct advantage: You will have done more starts, more mark roundings and a lot more boathandling than in an entire season. It’ll feel like boot camp in paradise, but when you get home, you’ll be ready to serve. This tropical Performance Race Week happens twice each winter, once in February and once in March, and running the immersive sail-racing clinic is the kind professor himself, Bill Gladstone, who’s been teaching the North U curriculum for decades and always greets the students with a kind smile and inquisitive head lean. North U is…

VICTOR Diaz de Leon often rides his road bike for a couple of hours before and after a day of racing. In the saddle, he doesn’t listen to music. Instead, he’s simulating racecourse scenarios: what was happening on the boat, what the tactical play would be or could have been. “It’s a time of meditation; a place where I get ideas,” says the Etchells world champion tactician, who calculated a brilliant final-race win in Miami in April, a race executed alongside his teammates on John Sommi’s Veracity. To earn the title on that light and shifty last day of the Aon Etchells World Championship, Veracity had to beat series leader and past world champ Steve Benjamin and his all-star crew on Tons of Steel, but there was a lot to…

It may never happen again. What we’re talking about is The Ocean Race’s monster of a stage through the southern Indian and Pacific. What was originally a solution to the impossible challenge of trying to organize a round-the-world race with stops through Asia in the time of COVID-19 may have manifested itself as a new classic course—the new Everest peak for fully crewed ocean-racing teams, starting in Africa and ending in South America. It was always going to be one hell of a challenge, this great distorting marathon sitting among six other standard-size Atlantic-based stages in the 50th anniversary edition of The Ocean Race, formerly the Volvo Ocean Race and the Whitbread. And it looked to have disaster written all over it because there were so many unknowns: Would the…

THERE are three growing boys in the household of Sarah and John Sangmeister, all of them still in school but big enough and hungry enough for racing Finns. While the youngest, Will, waits his turn, the older two, twins Peter and Jack, are rostered as 2023 Transpac crew for the Andrews 68 Rock n’ Roll. And it’s not their first rodeo. Then there is boat partner and longtime shipmate Justin Smart, who is also bringing two sons, 20-somethings Cooper and Harrison. For the sons, this is a first big offshore race. Smart, who had great rides in the days of IOR maxis, says: “I didn’t get a chance to introduce my boys to sailing. I was too busy racing, and they had other sports, but it’s always gnawed at me.”…

Have you ever wondered how laminate thickness can be determined without breaking out the epoxy and reinforcement fabric? The answer is simple—use math. While some of you may have just lost interest because you think math is too difficult, I can assure you that this math requires nothing more than some basic multiplication, addition, and division. Let’s get to it. Here is the equation we’ll use to calculate the average thickness for a single layer of laminate: In this equation: • tL represents the total composite laminate thickness.• WF represents the aerial weight of the woven or knit reinforcement fabric you are using in your composite laminate.• PF represents the density of the reinforcement fibers.• PR represents the density of the resin system you are using. In this instance, the…

What do you do with 154 sample size specimens of wood? I decided to craft a decorative charcuterie board for my kitchen. While doing a large shop cleanup here at GBI, we rediscovered a set of 154 samples of wood species from all around the globe. They had previously been used for an Epoxyworks article on adhesion testing. Having served their purpose, they were now sitting around the shop collecting dust. Since the samples were still in good shape, I wanted to turn them into some sort of decorative project. A light bulb went off in my head. I should make a decorative piece for my kitchen inspired by a charcuterie board. (Note: WEST SYSTEM® Epoxies are not certified as food safe.) Selecting my Woods The first thing that I did was…

When we purchased our 2006 Winnebago® RV, we knew we would need to complete some repairs. We never imagined the back wall would need to be removed and rebuilt from the ground up. One of the edges of the back wall was compromised which allowed water to penetrate the wall and eventually saturate a majority of the plywood within. After determining that the damage was too great to spot treat/repair, we began the process of removing the wall. After studying the engineering diagram from Winnebago, we learned that the wall was a sandwich construction. The wall had a fiberglass exterior, plywood and polystyrene foam core, and a wallpapered lauan plywood on the interior. If we were going to go through the work to rebuild the wall we wanted to insure…

Located on the banks of the picturesque Huon River at Franklin, Tasmania, The Wooden Boat Centre is Australia’s only wooden boat building school, creating original masterpieces and restoring heritage vessels while mentoring students from all walks of life. For the past 30 years, the Wooden Boat Centre has been dedicated to keeping the tradition of hand-made boats alive. Their one year shipwright course, and a variety of shorter courses, give students hands-on experience in both traditional and modern boat building techniques. Locals and visitors are always welcome to visit for a guided tour to explore the age-old craft of wooden boat building. “The appeal of the wooden boat is universal,” explains Cody Horgan, head shipwright and manager of the Wooden Boat Centre. “They are functional, beautiful and represent the pinnacle…

TRANSITIONING from collegiate sailing to keelboats can be difficult for many young-adult sailors who lack experience or connections. It’s not a new problem, and while there are national events and local efforts across the US to retain these young sailors, one program in Rhode Island is having a real and positive impact on the local crew pool. “You have a lot of people between 18 to 25 that love sailing and maybe do it in college, but then life takes them in different directions, so sailing loses them,” says Peter McClennen, a beneficiary and supporter of Sail Newport’s EOS Sailing Program. “Our view is that college-age sailors don’t really have strong big-boat crew skills. A lot of sailors have never used a winch before and never really worked in anything…

MY CURRENT project is a partnership in a Sunfast 3300, a 33-foot double-handed offshore boat. Our intention is to sail the best races in Europe over the next few years, and while there are clusters of similar double-handed boats in England, Spain, Italy and Scandinavia, the cream of the crop is racing in France. The French have been playing this game for a long time, so we decided to enter the springtime Spi Ouest Regatta in La Trinite sur Mer. This is one of the biggest regattas in the world, with over 460 boats. The format is short coastal races in the Bay of Quiberon, a perfect opportunity for my doubles partner, Alyosha Strum-Palerm, and I to test our skills. Using this regatta, we figured we can see where…

I Just off our bow, an orange inflatable buoy bounces in the waves—our weather mark at the Melges 15 Midwinter Championship. The port-tack layline is not the smartest place to be, especially when there’s a wall of starboard tackers visible beneath the boom. With 65 boats converging to a single point on Florida’s Indian River, seemingly all at once, I know this approach is borderline stupidity, but we manage to tack into a miracle gap beneath a pack of fetching boats. Our rushed maneuver isn’t pretty, but this is only my second day racing the Melges 15, and my dinghy skills are feeling a little rusty. Up to this point, two days into the regatta, my teammate and I have made countless errors around the racecourse: bad starts, lousy gate…

THE importance of comparing your performance to another competitor during a race is an underrated part of sailing a boat competitively. We hear a lot about having good onboard communication about what’s happening on the boat. While that’s true, it’s also important to communicate what’s happening outside the boat and what’s happening relative to your nearest competitors. So, let’s cover some techniques to improve this aspect of your next race. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on calling upwind relatives. It’s best to start calling relatives as soon as possible after the start. This first few minutes is a critical boatspeed part of the race, and the sooner your team can get locked in, the better. Oftentimes, the teams that get their performance going the soonest after…

THE MASTERMIND OF THE OPEN SKIFF class have championed their “Un-Regatta” as an antidote for the eventual exodus of overstructured kids from high-performance sailing. This novel approach is to focus less on keeping score and more on having fun through freestyle sailing competitions. It appears to be taking hold in adult racing these days as well, but for this Laser Olympic hopeful, the kids would likely give it a score of 5. Feet together, toes pointed, and you’ve got yourself a 9.…

Those new to the process of fairing a boat’s hull or deck are quick to mix up a batch of fairing compound, WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy with a low-density filler, and apply it to the surface, so they can start sanding right away. My experience in boat repair and construction has taught me the importance of making a fairing plan and selecting the correct materials before any epoxy is mixed. Understanding Fair and Smooth It is important to understand the difference between fair and smooth. Smoothness describes the texture and fairness describes the shape. If you run your hand on the surface, and you feel bumps and hollows (or highs and lows), the surface is not fair. Another way to see a fair surface is by using a wood or plastic…

Epoxy safety begins with working cleanly. When handling WEST SYSTEM® Epoxy resin and hardener, take steps to keep epoxy out of your eyes and off your skin and clothing. Ventilate your workspace to protect your respiratory system. Minimize the amount of epoxy that gets on your work surface and tools. Regardless of the type of boat repair you have planned, follow these safety practices: Protect Your Eyes and Skin Whenever working with epoxy, wear safety glasses or goggles to prevent epoxy from splashing into your eyes. Neoprene gloves are a great choice for keeping epoxy off your hands. These gloves offer chemical and puncture resistance, good finger sensitivity, and flexibility for manual dexterity. While it might seem like you’re getting away with not wearing gloves if you haven’t developed a…