Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2019 i Sailing World

Our Helly Hansen NOOD Caribbean Championship comes at a perfect time of the year. We wrap up our Boat of the Year testing, complete our annual tour of duty at the fall boat shows and conclude our racing season. The days get shorter and our seasonal affective disorder rears itself again. We all know the cure for such blues: a good dose of sailing and sunshine, and a steady drip of laughter and rum. One guy who also knows the importance of this regatta is Dr. Jim Sears, a Viper sailor from Long Beach, California, who won his first invitation to the championship years ago. He kept winning, and Sunsail kept inviting him back to defend. It was inevitable someone would yank him from his throne in the British Virgin…

My dad was a perpetual boat shopper. Never a buyer. The local J boat dealers were always patient though. They’d regularly take my family sailing on their J/24s at reservoirs around New Mexico. I was 8 years old when he first shared his love of sailing with me, but my own infatuation with the sport came from watching the 1987 America’s Cup in Fremantle, Australia, on TV late into the night. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was sailing a lot, traveling to the Dillon Open, first with a J/24 team and then with a J/80. We trailered the J/80 to Key West, Florida, in 1999, and that same year, I raced with friends at the San Diego NOOD on their Ultimate 20. Soon after,…

The graceful curves and sweeping views of the Atlantic from Newport, Rhode Island’s Ocean Drive is what hooked professional sailor Andrew Palfrey to cycling. He was coaching at the 2006 Farr 40 World Championship and needed to put in a few hours of cardio for his Star-class campaign, so one day he grabbed a rental bike and hit the pavement for some sightseeing. “I had no plan, but I ended up doing that loop, and I was hooked,” he says. “The combination of exercise and a view of the waters we were sailing on was awesome.” He’s never looked back, he says, apart from the fortune he’s spent on bikes, clothes and bits ever since. Like a lot of cycling enthusiasts, he says, he got into cycling fairly late in…

There is no such thing as the right boat for everyone, but there is the right boat for the right time. For today’s fervent offshore racing soloists and doublehanded teammates, that boat — right here, right now — is the Figaro Beneteau 3. This 35-foot ocean racer isn’t just another cruisy crossover from Beneteau. There is zero comfort under its low-slung deck, unless luxury is a white, wet and noisy fiberglass cavern. It’s not a beastly Class 40 type either. For righting moment and power, it doesn’t rely on hundreds of pounds of seawater sloshing in ballast tanks. With the Figaro Beneteau 3, there are the two unmistakable arcing carbon side foils projecting from slots in its topsides. The foils are no gimmick. Neither Beneteau nor Figaro race organizers do…

For the early years of the New York YC’s Invitational Cup, its biennial Corinthian battle of the burgees, the club relied on privately owned Club Swan 42s. Once the 42s began scattering around the world as owners sold them off, however, the club had to seek an alternative. Committee meeting after meeting eventually led flag officers to agree to bite the bullet and build a fleet from scratch. Requests for proposals went out to a select field of designers and builders, and the committee ultimately chose a utilitarian Mark Mills design to be built by Westerly Marine in Santa Ana, California. Stakeholders were keen for an American builder and industry partnerships to keep costs in check. North Sails would build and service the three-sail class inventory, Harken got the hardware,…

There’s a 60-mile stretch of France’s Brittany coast, between La Trinité-sur-Mer and Port la Forêt, where something in the drinking water causes certain individuals with high concentrations of salt water in their veins to want to go to sea, alone, aboard such monstrous and radical craft. Here, too, French corporations and private individuals, apparently drinking from the same fountain, are willing to bankroll the sailors and their Ultime 100 trimarans, which have already proved capable of 850 singlehanded miles in a day. While it seems likely six new maxi-trimarans, known in France as Ultimes, could be on the Brest Oceans start line, there are at least 10 other such large multihulls in existence, designed for singlehanded round-the-world sailing, that, in theory, could compete in the race as well. Because of…

Of all the various Lipton Cup races at ports around the United States, the one that up and died was the one in San Francisco. The old format wasn’t packing them in. That format — enter one boat per club, meet on the water for one handicap-scored race, wave across the water and go home — well, that had come down to one club that, for two years in a row, sent a boat around the course alone, leaving the crew frustrated and thinking no, no, no to a rinse and repeat. Then, in 2018, the Lipton Cup on San Francisco Bay saw nine clubs enter for three days of competition and festivities, with different crews each day. What changed? Everything. Key No. 1 was to embrace the crisis. Key…

From ghoulies and ghosties And long-leggedy beasties And things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us! Launching any new raceboat for the first time is an eerie experience. Creaks and moans, pings and tangs, all the noises of the rig, foils and joints settling into place are reminiscent of the old Scottish poem. But the New York Yacht Club challenge’s American Magic 38, known as the Mule, perhaps fits the rhyme better than most. Its ghostly matte-black hull, ghoulish dark sails and long-legged beastly foils protruding from its topsides and transom do suggest some scary creature. Our pre-dawn boat launch on the eve of Halloween, evading the watchful eyes of Luna Rossa and INEOS Team UK spooks, adds to the supernatural mood as our silent water spider…

In a career stretching back 25 years since Brian Thompson set a class record in the OSTAR singlehanded transatlantic race, he’s gone on to break sailing speed records on more than 40 occasions, everything from a circumnavigation of the planet to a circumnavigation of the Isle of Wight. Speed records bring to mind a certain intensity in a man, yet the day we meet for coffee during a short break from the Volvo Ocean Race, Thompson is anything but intense. He was supposed to do all legs of the race with Dee Caffari’s young crew of Turn the Tide on Plastic, but he broke his leg four months before the start. The accident happened in Long Beach, California, in the days before the Transpac race start with Lloyd Thornburg’s MOD70…

Annika Garrett is a skipper, crew, team racer, keelboat sailor, scholar athlete and more. “She does it all,” says Andy Johnson, head coach for the University of Hawaii sailing team. “She’s a good example of an all-around college sailing team player.” “I have tried my best to always show my coaches that I am up for a challenge,” Garrett says. “That being said, I have been fortunate to have been on the traveling team since I was a freshman.” Garrett sees her role on the team as helping out wherever needed, which has included being able to jump in a boat at the helm or in the front, and also helping new teammates learn the basics of sailing. “Bouncing between skipper and crew always keeps my life interesting, but crewing…

AS I step into the darkened briefing room I’m immediately star-struck by the assembly of professional sailors waiting for their morning debrief to start. I scan the space for an empty seat. Almost all of them are occupied by recognizable Olympic, America’s Cup and Volvo Ocean Race icons, but I eventually squeeze myself into a chair between American yachtsman Doug DeVos and his strategist Dean Barker. At the stroke of 0900, James Lyne, the performance coach for the TP52 team Quantum Racing, looks up from his computer at the front of the room, glances at his watch and then promptly starts the briefing. On the enormous plasma TV is a graphical leg-by-leg analysis of the previous day’s racing at the 52 Super Series event in Mallorca, Spain. Each graphic shows…

A few years ago, I was working with two Melges 20 teams in preparation for an upcoming world championship. Both had world-class sailors aboard and performed quite well, but when it came to downwind pumping technique, there were dramatic differences. Generally speaking, one team worked mostly with large, powerful pumps while the other focused on smaller, short-stroke movements. Sometimes one technique worked better; other times it didn’t. So, we set out to quantify the difference in performance to get a better sense for which technique was most effective in various conditions. Our boats were instrumented, and we had data feeds coming off each boat, so we could plot VMG. I also had a program called Dartfish, which among other things, could plot movement at the end of the boom, making…

Portugal’s Ferdinand Magellan is credited with the first sailing circumnavigation of the planet. His crew completed it in 1522, after Magellan’s death in the Philippines a year earlier. We have 500 years of experience, which should be plenty of time to understand and document the vicissitudes of sailing around the world. For the first 300 years or so, knowledge of the planet’s currents and weather patterns passed by word-of-mouth — if it passed on at all. Matthew Fontaine Maury, an American, is responsible for the first efforts to gather and publish the collected learnings of the seafaring community, after he was put in charge of the Depot of Charts and Instruments in Washington, D.C., in the mid-19th century. The depot held logbooks of thousands of voyages, and Maury realized the…

Sustainability is the buzzword today, so Russell Coutts and Larry Ellison are to be commended. They could have easily discarded millions of dollars in technology and hardware from the past two America’s Cups, along with most of the America’s Cup-class monohulls built over the past 20 years. Instead, with their new SailGP pro-sailing circuit, the duo will continue the work they first started in San Francisco and continued in Bermuda. Cup fans still nostalgic for 12-Meters won’t get excited about SailGP, but the progression of foiling — the most significant development the sport of sailing has ever seen — is exciting. SailGP’s F50 catamarans are a turbo version of the platforms used in Bermuda, and they will no doubt be the fastest one-design class ever created. The AC50’s peak speeds…

Thousands of Star class boats are spread around the world, each with a unique personality, and certainly a unique story. It’s true that a boat can eventually reflect the persona of its owner, and this is especially true of the Star boat Gem IX, once the pride of Bahamian legend Sir Durward Knowles. Gem IX is an appropriate name for this boat, for many reasons. Built by the late great Skip Etchells at the Old Greenwich Boat Co. in 1963, the hull is as stunning today as it was when Etchells sculpted its Port Orford cedar, a light, strong and fine-grained timber milled in the coastal mountains of Oregon. The boat was commissioned and first owned by Knowles, my mentor and dear friend. Knowles and Cecil Cooke won the Gold…

My daughter likes to watch the television series Friends while studying. We’ve had discussions about how this either helps or hurts her ability to study and absorb the material. She claims it relaxes her and helps her study for longer. I say she can only do one thing at a time, and what seems to be multitasking is actually switching between two different things. I recently sailed the J/70 Worlds in Marblehead, Massachusetts, on board Glenn Darden’s Hoss. My job is tactician, but I also trim the main. We sailed pretty well and finished 14th, but I was left with the strong impression that we would’ve done better if I had been either a main trimmer or a tactician, but not both. Sailing a J/70 upwind at a high level…

Now is an exciting time to be a sailor. Cranky pessimists will bemoan dying one-design classes and complain that new boats today are no good for average sailors — too complex, too expensive and too exotic. But every design has a shelf life, and while the good ones endure well past their expiration date, it’s new sailing experiences that excite new generations of sailors. Imagine if Hobie Alter, or Bruce Kirby, or Rod Johnstone had sat on their hands. Where would sailing be? Innovation, progress, development — call it what you will. We call it Boat of the Year, and with the Figaro Beneteau 3, IC37 by Melges, TF10 foiler, RS21, RS Cat 14 and Beneteau First 14, performance sailors have at their disposal six incredible new boats. There isn’t…

Seventy-five-year-old foiling fanatic Malcolm Gefter, dressed in tattered neoprene sailing gear, with an impact-padded PFD and sailing helmet loosely clipped and askew, is beaming ear to ear as he watches his 35-foot trimaran stream across the horizon, hovering 3 or 4 feet above the water with plumes of spray spitting from its rudders. We’re chasing them in our RIB, the big diesel outboard humming at full speed. On board the trimaran is one experienced pro and three of our Boat of the Year personnel. The three of them have zero foiling experience and less than 30 minutes on this boat. Yet, there is BOTY judge Tom Rich, more familiar helming his 41-foot IMS-era lead dragger, perched on the TF10’s bench seat, carbon tiller in his left hand, just absolutely sending…

Around the Eastern YC the night before the J/70 World Championship was scheduled to begin in Marblehead, Massachusetts, there was a tremendous amount of nervous energy among the 91 teams preparing to race in one of the most talent-laden one-design events of modern times. More than 25 teams had coaches on hand, and 56 teams were racing with two or more professionals on board. The J/70 is a simple boat, but there would be nothing simple about getting to the front of the fleet. As emcee at the opening ceremony, I looked out over the crowd of 500 sailors or so and wondered, What is it going to take to prevail in such a star-studded field? In the end, Marblehead native and hometown favorite Jud Smith and his crew won…

While sitting in the US Sailing Team house in Aarhus, Denmark, I watched the Laser Radial World Championship medal race with the young U.S. kite-racing squad (which brought home a gold medal from the event). We were talking tactics, and how the Radial racing applied to the faster-paced, shorter-course kite racing. Looking out to the racecourse from the shore, we talked about new pressure coming down the course, and which side each sailor had picked, but the really useful imagery was the live overhead video streaming on the big-screen TV. The visuals on screen highlighted positioning decisions, showed the shape, speed and location of puffs rolling off the shoreline and gave a perspective of how each competitor’s mode decision was playing out on the racecourse. As the fleet got closer…

STAND UP AND STARE! I’ve seen such a reaction on many crews when they’re pushed outside of their comfort zone. In fact, I have a theory that the number of crew standing is directly proportional to the speed of the boat. In other words, the more lookie-loos, the lower the number on the speedo. I suspect the only person on this crew with any idea what to do is the helmsman. He clearly has a plan: obscure the obvious that he just hit the mark, at all costs. —Dr. Crash…