Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2019 i Sailing World

At our recent Helly Hansen NOOD Regatta at Marblehead Race Week, I’m wandering the parking lot of the Boston YC searching for a guy named Ted Green. He’s agreed to an interview about the 2.4 Metre class, which is new to the regatta and the next candidate in our continuing web series about the one-design classes, new and old, that define what the NOOD is all about: club racers sailing the boats they love. Near the host, a few 2.4 Metres sit in their wheeled cradles, their skippers fiddling with them as they await their turns to launch. They’re such odd-looking boats, I think to myself, so small and narrow with such deep keels. The skippers of these 2.4 Metres face forward in their cockpits, in a hard seat surrounded…

Foiling is the “in” thing. There’s no denying it. The latest ocean racers, America’s Cup yachts, dinghies and boards are all about sailing above the water, not on it. It’s a thrilling dinghy experience that usually comes with a lot of swimming, even after you get the hang of it. Yes, the wet reality of foiling for first-timers is that what goes up will come down. Moth and catamaran foil sailing certainly isn’t for everyone—which is why foil sailing desperately needs a proper entry-level boat, says Rob Andrews, of the Europe-based school Foiling World. Its craft, the F101, is built for the average sailor who will jump on and never want to get off. It’s a $23,000 ride to the promised land. I meet with Andrews and his colleague Alan…

The time Sean O’Halloran was called into a meeting with American Magic skipper Terry Hutchinson and team coach James Lyne is one he won’t forget. O’Halloran had barely sat down on the couch when Hutchinson announced that they wanted him to be a part of the sailing team. “He just put it right out there,” O’Halloran says. “It was a huge relief and really exciting. I didn’t get that emotional at first but when I walked back to my car, I spent a few minutes just sitting there, breathing, letting it sink in.” Now, let this sink in: The next America’s Cup will be sailed in Auckland in 2021, on flying 75-footers. They will be powerhungry machines fed by a team of grinders such as O’Halloran who willed his way…

In the winter of 1977, the crew of the 12 Metre Enterprise, training in San Diego, needed a trial horse. Team member Andy MacGowan knew of a guy in Phoenix who owned a chain of savings and loan companies that had gone bankrupt. The guy also owned a 12 Metre. That yacht was the iconic Intrepid, which had won the America’s Cup in 1967 and 1970 and had come within one race of defending a third bid in 1974. After the Enterprise syndicate acquired Intrepid in bankruptcy court, MacGowan was sent to retrieve the boat. “It was outside one of their savings and loans, on display on a tractor-trailer bed, where it had been for several years,” he says. “The tires were flat and the rims and forward legs of…

Roller-furling jibs, once viewed as a convenience for cruising boats, have become a real game-changer in the sportboat world. For example, in the prestart, when you want to control your speed and kill some time, furl the jib. Feeling late and need to get closer to the line? Deploy the jib. Downwind, when a jib is not useful, it’s much better to furl than to put the weight of a bowman on the foredeck to drop the jib, not to mention the resulting beating the sail takes as it is shoved into a pile on the foredeck, instead of being neatly rolled around the headstay. Furling also makes transitioning between the soaking mode and the planing mode a much simpler affair. The roller-furling jib gives you the unique ability to…

Steve Allen had been in this situation before. It was the last race of a grueling 21-race world championship for the muscular 45-year-old Aussie. Hot. Poland in July. And windy. But it was a new challenge for the 25-year veteran of the Professional Windsurfing Association tour. He was trying to close the deal on the first Formula Windsurfing Foil World Championships after enduring 18 to 25 knots, each day, flying above the waves at 20-plus knots. “I was a little frustrated with the weed in the water,” Allen says, recalling the last race of the worlds in Puck, Poland. “I had to change my tactics.” He’d been leading from the beginning of the event and was always fighting off someone different and was now tied on points with Maciek Rutkowski:…

The start line is set, so we ping the ends using the Tactiqs application that’s loaded onto our iPad, simply tapping a button for each line end on the screen. In my line of sight—on the inside surface of the augmented reality sunglasses I’m wearing—the Tactiqs software tells me the pin is favored by 8 degrees. The app uses the boat’s wind instruments to calculate this bias, but if we didn’t have wind instruments, the app would show us a “wind-shot” icon when we go head-to-wind. As we look up the course, we agree it looks as if there’s more wind on the left side of the course, so we formulate our strategy: start near the pin and go straight. But what if the wind goes right and we get…

Our 12 Metre, Courageous, is about 10 boat lengths short of the layline. Four of our rivals are on starboard tack on our windward quarter and they are fetching the windward mark. The wind is blowing a stiff 18 knots. The seas are choppy. If we have any chance of crossing the fleet, we need a perfect tack and set up on the starboard layline. Dipping four boats would cost us the race and valuable points in the 12 Metre World Championship being raced off Newport, Rhode Island, in July. We’d lost three boat lengths in our previous tack because of an override on the winch and a bad set of waves. As tactician, I ask everyone to prepare for a “championship tack.” Our helmsman, Art Santry, turns the wheel…

Russell Coutts said, “I didn’t have a lot coaching as a kid.” Not that it’s held him back. We were talking in an almost-quiet place as the San Francisco SailGP event wrapped up, and we stretched the boundaries of our conversation from the basics of kids messing about in boats to the outer limits of what it takes to build a professional sailing circuit with staying power. As to connecting the dots in between, that’s paydirt, and here is where Coutts turned evangelist. “It’s important for young sailors to have something aspirational that will be there and not change on them,” he said. “Volvo teams come and go. Australia II was an iconic brand that produced the most important sporting event in Australia in a hundred years. Stars and Stripes…

It’s 8:30 a.m. on July 13, and I’m already three coffees deep. The Argo squad has just wrapped up its final weather briefing with Commanders’ Weather before the 2019 Transpacific Yacht Race, and the team looks to me for a simple summary. “Well, we have three MOD70s doing this race, and I can tell you that tomorrow morning one boat is going to have an 80-mile lead and one boat’s race will be over.” The reply from the boss is simple and summarizes the situation well: “Thank God I’m not the navigator!” The exit off the coast of California looks daunting to say the least. From the start off San Pedro, California, to Santa Catalina Island, things look soft. From Catalina to the northwesterly gradient farther offshore, things look even…

Headsets are highly effective tools for on-the-water training. They can be used for “herding cats”—setting up whatever the coach and sailors are doing next—real-time feedback and post-drill, on-the-water discussions. Back in the day, a loud hailer was the only option other than yelling until it hurt, but some coaches still use them, and I was reminded recently of just how annoying they are. A college team was training nearby and sure the whole team could hear, but so could all the beachfront vacationers. It is time for an upgrade. That said, I have no intention of giving up my old-school whistle. Before leaving shore, I prearrange the routines and the signals to start and manage them, but no matter how well I think I’m set up ahead of time, I…

The Tulane University Sailing Team has celebrated a few firsts in the last two years: hiring Charles Higgins as its first varsity head coach in 2017 and elevating the sailing team from club to varsity status during the 2018-19 academic year. The existing club team did not petition for varsity status; instead, it was an opportunity that came to the program. These two changes meant lots of transition for the program and student athletes. “I used that first semester before we were elevated to varsity status as a transition period for the team,” Higgins says. “This period was vital because it gave the team members time to discover whether being a varsity student athlete was going to be what they wanted. Given that only 6 percent of all college students…

The day might come when Paul Goodison yearns to get back into a Laser or Moth and appreciate the simple control lines he once obsessed over as an Olympic medalist and three-time Moth world champion. But for now, as the mainsail trimmer for the New York YC’s America’s Cup challenge American Magic, he wakes and goes to bed at night with neurons firing. On his mind is the incredibly complex double-skinned mainsail, the power center of his team’s AC75 foiler, due to launch any day. Every day is a learning day, he says, and boy, oh boy, is there a lot to learn before the first official pre-Cup event in Italy in April 2020. We meet near the team’s new base, which is now squeezed between corrugated boat sheds and…

Passing lanes offer the opportunity to pass more than a couple of boats at once. If you’re faster than someone and you’re just off to one side, you might be able to lee bow them or beat them on a shift, but passing lanes allow you to beat clumps of boats—perhaps as much as 20 to 30 percent of the fleet. Let’s take a look at a few easy opportunities as we go around the course. At the Start Suppose you’ve messed up the start. You need to get free and clear—not linger in dirty air. More often than not, it’s best to get on port tack early, even before the gun, so that you’re actually going behind other boats. Then, by around 10 seconds after the gun, when those…