Innholdsfortegnelse for January - February 2017 i Sailing World

WE ALL HAVE IT: that human fascination with the new. Even the cereal I’ve been eating for years is now “new and improved” (which makes we wonder whether Quaker has been selling me an inferior breakfast all these years). I digress. Our curiosity is for new, new, new, all the time. New boats, new races, new classes, new experiences — you name it. We fill our social media feeds, our websites and even the pages of this magazine with new things. And while we’re all so focused on the new, it’s easy to ignore the older classes, boats and fleets that the majority of racers hold near and dear. It’s true that once a year we dote on the slick new boats that show up at the boat shows, and…

ORGANIZERS OF the Volvo Ocean Race continue to reinvent the preeminent around-the-world team race before its October 2017 start. New CEO Mark Turner, a sports marketing specialist in sailing, announced 10 changes one year ahead of the fleet’s departure from Alicante, Spain. The first is already underway: the construction of a new, eighth Volvo 65. As for the rest, do they advance toward a better race for the sailors and fans alike? Yes and no. Coerced Coed The boldest initiative is to force female crewmembers into more teams. The inspirational all-female Team SCA was competitive at times in the previous edition, but the reality is all-male squads are faster as the miles add up — and there are a few seriously long legs in the next race. Turner’s goal is…

A PFD IS ONE OF THE MOST important pieces of safety equipment a sailor owns, and the best PFDs are those that are comfortable to wear — that way, we actually wear them. Two new designs from Mustang and Spinlock deliver streamlined profiles designed for comfort. 1. Spinlock Aero Pro For high-performance sailing, Spinlock’s newest design combines efficient form with added protection. The first phase of the project was designing the T2 vest for America’s Cup challenger Land Rover BAR. The T2 then evolved into the Aero Pro model, available in early 2017. The new design, an overhead-entry PFD, is made of pliable, high-buoyancy foam meant to move with the body while also providing required protection for crashes and capsizes. The most unique innovation in the T2 is its back…

THERE ARE MANY ways to describe the forces around sails — in fact, around any foil. One of the most straightforward ways is to split the forces into lift and drag. The lift force is, by definition, perpendicular to the apparent-wind direction; drag is parallel to it. The primary way to get more lift from a sail is to increase its angle of attack. More lift is more power. Two ways to increase a sail’s angle of attack: trim it, or turn the bow off the wind (fall off) without easing the sails. The most important thing to know about angle of attack is the greater it is — or to put this another way, the more the sail deflects the airflow — the greater will be the lift, up…

THE BOOZE HOUND’S latest mission was simple enough: Pick up a four-pack of America’s Cup Bermuda-style pilsner from Narragansett Brewing Co., suck it down and report back. I’ve spent enough time basking in the ephemeral glow and overeager backslapping of a one-boat training session to know that the way to determine something’s true value is by matching it against a known quantity. So I stocked up with some worthy competition and pitted the latest flavor from Narragansett against my favorite domestic pilsner, from Lagunitas, and another microbrew with an eye-catching label, the Two Roads Ol’ Factory pilsner. This might seem like some lofty competition — what chance does New England’s sentimental swill stand against a pair of snooty microbrews? — but then again, anything bearing the name of sailing’s most…

IT SEEMS UNFAIR that grand-prix programs get the best possible sail inventories, but then simply burn through them in a single season while weekend warriors pinch every dollar to get a modestly high-tech wardrobe that’s fast and likely to last a few seasons. Is it too much to ask for just a taste of the grand-prix menu? Not anymore, says North Sails, which is trickling down its once-exclusive 3Di offering into the hands of the serious club racer. North’s new 3Di Race, which will eventually make 3DL obsolete, is the latest application of the sailmaker’s filament-tape sailcloth (there’s an excellent explanation of 3Di in Tom Whidden and Michael Levitt’s revised edition of The Art and Science of Sails). Whereas the grand-prix set blends carbon, aramids, and Dyneema or Spectra for…

AS I SAT IN NBC’S NARRATION booth with Randy Smyth, commentating on the Olympic sailing competition, it dawned on me that eight of the 15 American sailors competing in Rio de Janeiro were past Junior AllStars. Youth sailing in the United States remains vibrant. There are hundreds of strong junior sailing programs, and thousands of young sailors are dedicated to improving their racing skills. I’ve learned that the ultimate goal for many of these aspiring sailors is to reach the Olympics. This aim was expressed to me in interviews over the years by our current Olympians, including Paige Railey, Charlie Buckingham, Annie Haeger, Briana Provancha, Caleb Paine, Paris Henken, Thomas Barrows and Joe Morris. It has been great fun watching all of these Olympians reach their goals. For most athletes,…

IN OUR THIRD installment of articles covering important rule changes that take eff ect on January 1, 2017, we explore new Rule 18.3, Tacking in the Zone, which is much simpler and more consistent with the rule’s original intent. Rule 20.1, Hailing for Room to Tack, is now clearer and may save on your repair bills. Finally, Rule 22.3 puts a sensible limit on “crabbing,” a tactic used by dinghies on the starting line. NEW RULE 18.3: TACKING IN THE ZONE If a boat in the zone of a mark to be left to port passes head to wind from port to starboard tackand is then fetching the mark, she shall not cause a boat that has been on starboard tack since entering the zone to sail above closehauled to avoid contact, and she shall give mark-room if that boat becomes overlapped inside her. When this rule applies…

SINCE OUR OWN home, a Grand Soleil 39, is on the hard, our family of four is invited aboard Ryan and Autumn Helling’s coldmolded Wylie 31, Velella, for Sloop Tavern YC’s annual Race Your House event, off Seattle in late October. With the sun shining bright and laughter in the air, we do our best wind dance while running sheets and relieving the boat of some cruising gear and potted plants. When the starting sequences for the seven classes begin, 37 cruising boats with names like Gypsy Wind, Tranquility, Twisted Journey and Cinderella sidle up to the line, solar panels charging, dinghies swinging on davits, and dogs wagging their tails ondeck. While many of the participating homes are decidedly unsporty for a race, and heavily laden with gear, beer and…

WHEN BUYING A one-design sportboat, one may eventually enter another dimension: shipping said boat to other ends of the earth to enter that bucket-something regatta that class leadership cooked up after too many Dark ’n’ Stormies. This phenomenon occurred in the Viper 640 class when Bermuda was selected for its international and North American championship. The question quickly became how to safely get a Viper to Hamilton, Bermuda, without spending a fortune. For West Coast Viper owners, the solution appeared easy: get a 40-foot container, pack in four Vipers, and Great Sound, here we come. The Pacific Northwest 505 fleet ships boats to international regattas all the time, so Viper owners looked there for guidance. Paul Von Grey, a local 505 guru, has organized container shipping of 505s from the…

1. Use your class’s tuning guide to get in a good range for rake, shroud tension and lead position. 2. Use the leech telltales to determine sheet tension. In stable, underpowered conditions, you can stall the upper leech telltales as much as 30 percent of the time. As you get overpowered or the wind becomes unstable, the telltales must steadily flow all the time. 3. After the sheet, the most important variable is headstay sag. As you become overpowered, it is critical to reduce camber and twist the jib with a straighter headstay. Doing so can be even more important than achieving optimum mainsail shape, so sometimes the main has to be fuller than desired to achieve a tight enough headstay. A straighter mast gives straighter headstay. 4. As a…

I HAVE A FRIEND WHO SAYS no goal can be achieved without first saying it aloud. We all find our source of motivation, and putting an agenda out into the public does get the ball rolling. Failure in full view is a bummer. With 2017 looming, I thought about what plans I could make — what I will do differently or better, what actions will have a positive impact on my sport of choice, and what I need to do to remain enthusiastic. A few topics came to mind. The first comes from a quote attributed to Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin and Mark Twain (pretty good company, right?): “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” When issues impact participation, it’s time…

IT’S THE FINAL RACE of the 1999 Farr 40 Worlds in San Francisco, and the breeze has built to 20 knots. I’m trimming the jib on Samba Pa Ti. Our experience tells us we don’t need any jib inhauler in anything above 15 knots, so I ease it all the way off. Our speed is excellent, and we overcome a large point deficit to win the championship by a point. Fast-forward 17 years to the first day of racing at the 2016 Farr 40 Worlds in Sydney. This time I’m trimming the jib on Plenty. Again it’s blowing 20 knots, but this time the jib is almost fully inhauled. We come off the starting line, peel off three boats that start above us, finish the dayin the lead, and go…

IT DOESN’T MATTER which type of boat you race, because success is all about dealing with the details. It’s just a sailboat, with a jib and a mainsail and a spinnaker. Sure, we make it more complicated than that, but at the end of the day, everything is what British cycling coach David Brailsford calls an “aggregation of marginal gains.” In 2008, Brailsford led the British team to an unprecedented eight gold medals and said at the time, “If you broke down everything you could think of about what goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1 percent, you [would] get a significant increase when you put [it] all together.” Sailing is no different. Everybody knows how to sail upwind and downwind, but it’s the aggregation of…