Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2023 i Sailing World

Tony Gonsalves’ thumbs caress the sail and rudder joy-sticks on his remote, making millimeter adjustments to his DragonFlite 95’s trim as he silently wills the 37-inch one-design through the leeward gate and toward the 12-foot-long finish line. When his boat’s blunt bow finally breaks the line, the Bajan radio sailing champion from Florida emerges from his flow state with a long and deep exhale. “Sometimes, I forget to breathe,” he says with a grin, his competitive juices draining from his broad and tensed shoulders. After thumbing 21 races, he’s finally bagged one on account of a good start, a lucky shift, and a clean getaway in a breeze barely strong enough to rustle the leaves of a nearby oak. These zephyr conditions, which would leave traditional sailboats at the dock,…

The first time I went to a bush regatta was the 1986 Tasar British Columbia Championship at Lake Cultus. The scene was new to me: camping, bonfires, barbecues, lake racing. I was hooked. When my team went to Australia to race 18-foot skiffs the following year, it was obvious we were way behind the other teams. We needed more practice racing to be competitive and came up with an idea to host informal racing every Tuesday night. We borrowed a 12-foot “tinny” and made marks with plastic milk bottles lashed together. We sailed in the small confines of Balmoral Bay in Sydney, primarily for boathandling practice, but also because our anchor lines were not very long. At first, only one team joined us, but a month later we had the…

LOVE IT or hate it, performance yachting has taken a quantum leap over the last two decades with the proliferation of foiling, which has permeated throughout the sport—from the America’s Cup to all manners of wind-driven board sports. In Italy last summer, however, a new and curious chapter in foiling arrived with the launch of Roberto Lacorte’s FlyingNikka. The sleek black maxi bears a striking resemblance to an AC75, but at 60 feet, it is far shorter and—significantly—has an original remit for a foiler: to compete in maxi fleet races, both inshore and offshore. Lacorte, who founded the pharmaceuticals company PharmaNutra Group in 2003 with his M32 sailor and brother Andrea, is a keen sailor. For many years he raced in the maxi fleet aboard his Mills-Vismara 62 racer-cruiser SuperNikka. However,…

As the sailing coach at Point Loma High School, I spend a lot of time talking to the team about crewing. I also crew almost exclusively in my role as a professional sailor, so between those two experiences, plus sharing information about crewing with other pro sailors, I’ve been able to boil down the essence of a great crew into three manageable parts. Keep in mind that these are “big picture” characteristics. Let’s first start with mindset. In the morning, before you even get to the boat, you should be thinking: “I’m going to help out today in any way I can to help the boat and the team be as successful as possible. I’m going to work really hard; I’m going to have a great attitude; I’m going to…

Besides the rot damage, the corner of the swim platform had been crushed. Since I’d torn the swim platform apart to remove the rotten core, it was an excellent opportunity to rebuild the corner. I cut away the damage and ground the fiberglass to a 12:1 bevel using an angle grinder with 36-grit sandpaper. To maintain a uniform curve while rebuilding the corner, I fabricated a mold with thin cardboard and covered it in Teflon™ tape to act as a release agent. Spring clamps held the mold in position. I needed eight layers of 737 Biaxial Fabric to rebuild it to the original thickness. I wet out each layer of Biaxial Fabric in the mold, one after the next, using WEST SYSTEM® 105 Resin® and 206 Slow Hardener®. Once the…

On the surface, the span looks like any of the thousands of small, narrow two-lane bridges across America. This new, high-tech bridge in Morgan County, Tennessee uses G/flex® Epoxy in a fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite material deck embedded with fiber optic sensors. It replaced a damaged, decades-old concrete crossing which, like thousands of low-volume bridges across the nation, was structurally deficient and outdated. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, about 8 percent of the more than 617,000 crossings in the U.S. are structurally deficient and need repair. FRP composites offer a low-cost, low-maintenance option. The new structure in Tennessee demonstrates the benefits of composite materials for bridgework. Due to the use of technologically advanced materials, including G/flex, the bridge deck system requires less installation time, conserves energy and…

Jeff Hobgood used WEST SYSTEM 105 Epoxy Resin and 207 Special Clear Hardener to epoxy the mahogany veneer to the steel panels on his customer’s ’48 Packard. “I used the epoxy to vacuum bag the veneer to the steel panels before placing them back inside of each door and the tailgate. I also used G/Flex in some of the joints to make them strong. The technical advice on what products to use for my project helped make my project a success, as you can see in the photo.” Phillip Delaney worked from 1982 to 1987 restoring his Thistle sailboat, Osprey, with WEST SYSTEM Epoxy and assistance from our technical service. “Don’t know how I would have ever restored #376 without you. Epoxy changed my life.” Brian Burns makes traditional Spanish…

Maxi racing in the Med is hot. Call it a lesson in the value of getting your act together. The game has grown and changed dramatically—and deliberately—with fleets of 50 as the new normal. Ten years ago, none of this was ensured. The secretary general of the International Maxi Association, Andrew McIrvine, tells us, “Rapid change was needed, or it was going to just die.” How it didn’t “just die” is a story worth telling, and we lean on McIrvine for that. “The International Maxi Association was originally a social club for the owners of 80-footers. That generation was going out as I was invited in,” he says. “The racing had categories that were impossible to define, so people were always gaming it. What’s a racer-cruiser versus a cruiser-racer? And…

With the 37th America’s Cup using the AC75 class rule for this second generation of high-tech foilers, all but one of five teams—newcomer Alinghi Red Bull Racing—have the design jump-start of servers full of historical data and real experience with the 75-footer from the last go. It was, therefore, no surprise when the Protocol sought to level the playing field and reduce costs by allowing one prototype per team in the lead up to building their one and only new-generation AC75. Teams are also required to buy a one-design AC40, which could be used as a prototype to design, test and troubleshoot mechatronic systems and foils. They could also leave the AC40 in its one-design configuration and instead design and build what’s called an LEQ12, which means “less than or…

The Total Package Like a runaway, the Beneteau First 36 careens across a westerly-whipped Chesapeake Bay. The boat’s big-shouldered spinnaker and mainsail are silhouetted in the early October morning light. It’s making trees on the Eastern Shore as we peg the throttle down to keep chase in a 19-foot RIB. The four crewmembers on board are having a casual conversation—like no big deal—when a cold and meaty gust fills the spinnaker. The leech flickers, and the boat surges forward onto plane. Twin rudders zipper the slick streaming out from the transom as the helmsman, hands at 10 and 2 on the carbon steering wheel, effortlessly weaves the boat across waves tops. The boat is, as the saying goes, on rails. “Wicked,” is how senior Boat of the Year judge Chuck…

IN 2015, it looked as if the Olympia High School Sailing Team was history. Its numbers had dwindled to three active team members, and if that wasn’t enough, its longtime volunteer coach had recently passed away. Orion Bird, a sailor in the program of that era, recalls, “It really felt like the program was on the verge of dying.” ¶ Enter Sarah Hanavan, recently out of collegiate sailing at Western Washington University. She had moved to Olympia, Washington, and started volunteering with the team in the spring of 2015. That coming summer, she had planned to travel. ¶ “Before I left, one of the three team members, Elena Gonick, a junior, invited me to coffee,” Hanavan says. “She told me she had watched kids from other teams who, at the…

If you’ve ever used Pinterest, you know it is filled with projects that give you a false sense of confidence in your own artistic abilities. Hence, the wildly entertaining “Pinterest fails”. Mindlessly scrolling one day, when I probably should have been doing something productive, I stumbled across a rustic wood wall art piece. A little epoxy, some scrap wood, and I can build that. No problem. The first step was to source some wood. It just so happens that at Gougeon Brothers we have lots of pallets coming and going daily, and they were just about the right size for the wood I needed. Feeling clever, I asked one of our operators to alert me next time he stumbled across a broken pallet that I could “help him dispose of.”…

Lisa Blair sailed her 15.25-meter Hick 50 into the record books this year as the fastest, non-stop, solo sailor to circumnavigate Antarctica. The wild, demanding nature of the Southern Ocean required Lisa Blair to ensure her vessel was in the best possible condition before undertaking her voyage. Equally important was provisioning the proper materials and spare parts to cover every kind of repair job on her epic voyage. Setting the Record On her first attempt at circumnavigating Antarctica in 2017, she made history as the first woman to sail solo around Antarctica—with just one emergency stop to repair a broken mast in Cape Town, South Africa. The dismasting in a violent storm prevented her from beating Russian sailor Fedor Konyukhov’s record of 102 days. Her memoir, Facing Fear, recounts the…

After 20-plus years of vibration and pounding on the water, the molded plastic console on my 2001 Lund® boat was riddled with stress cracks and broken pieces. All of the fastener-mounting points were stripped out or broken. As often happens with older boat components, replacement parts were no longer available. I’d have to repair the console myself. I am familiar with WEST SYSTEM® products but called their technical support line to verify my choice to use G/flex® Epoxy. It’s commonly used to repair plastics such as molded kayaks. The Technical Advisor I spoke with agreed that G/flex was the best option. He assured me it would bond well as long as I used the correct plastic surface preparation methods: stripping the paint and flame treating. The console is made of…

Before jumping into building a strip kayak, I wanted to find out all I could about the process. I read the book Kayakcraft: Fine Woodstrip Kayak Construction by Ted Moores cover-to-cover and referred to it frequently during construction. I selected Bear Mountain Boats’ 16' 5" Resolute touring kayak from their online catalog. I chose this boat based on my size and weight, and its excellent stability. The next step was deciding whether to build it from scratch or from a kit. Building from a kit means everything is provided except for the strongback, which is a long, low table used as the foundation for the molds that define the shape of the kayak. People who don’t have my kind of woodworking and fiberglassing experience can also build a kayak (or…

It’s just before 1 p.m. on a weekend afternoon in mid-August, and Snipe sailors are rigging their boats. There are eight of them, including one that my daughter, Meredith, and I have borrowed; it’s our first time racing together in years. The fleet ranges from 40-year-old boats to a pristine new model, and the plan is to get in three races before the afternoon thunderstorms roll in. We’re racing out of the Union Sailing Club on Union Reservoir, in Longmont, Colorado—not exactly what comes to mind when you think of sailing. But adhering to the “if you build it, they will come” model, a determined group of locals, along with a number of transplants from more known sailing venues, have been making it work since 2004. The Snipes, Union’s largest…

20 seconds after the start, I look over my shoulder and can tell we’re going to have a rough one. We’ve started near the pin in the first race of the 2022 E Scow National Championship on my home Lake Minnetonka. With a half-mile-long starting line set to accommodate 69 boats, the righty I’m now seeing sends a parade of sails marching up inside us, and our only option is to keep going left. With patience, situations like this can often work in one’s favor. On inland lakes, it’s common for both sides to be advantaged at some point during a beat. “Win your side” is the adage. I glance up toward Brackett’s Point on the lake’s western shore-line, where I’ve seen countless lefties roll through from this direction in…

When approaching the leeward gate, there are a lot of possibilities to consider: Which mark to round? How to best round it? What’s the exit and the next windward leg plan? All of this needs to be discussed on the run so your overall game plan is clear well in advance. It’s much easier with a single leeward mark, in which case you can jump ahead to the next section—the approach—and focus on techniques used for rounding the left-hand gate, which is likely what you’re doing when there is only one leeward mark. But when there are gate marks, things get complicated, and the tactician has a number of factors to consider. Let’s start by defining your choices. Closest and most windward mark: If the gate marks are in place…

The wooden core in fiberglass boats will rot unless properly sealed to prevent water intrusion. Holes drilled for wiring or to mount hardware commonly expose wood’s grain, absorbing water and leading to rot. This happens frequently in areas like wooden stringers, cockpit soles, balsa-cored decks, and transoms. Swim platforms are one area that typically suffers water intrusion but are often overlooked. They are drilled into for mounting and are constantly wet. This is the perfect combination for rot. A 1986 Carver swim platform made its way to our shop. I wish I could say it came off my 50-foot boat—maybe someday. I guess I better start playing the lottery. The deck of the swim platform was spongy. Upon inspection, it was obvious the core was rotten near the multiple holes…

Boats can be complicated structures. Sailboats endure multiple loads from the rigging as the shrouds are pulled in tension and the mast is compressed into the hull. Inboard powered boats must transfer the thrust from the engine mounts into the stringers while outboard and sterndrive boats place substantial loads on the transom. Even the steering wheel at a stand-up helm can undergo high loads when the boat moves fast through large waves — the security of which many go-fast boaters may take for granted. While we always encourage people to take on their own fiberglass repairs and boat modifications, I wanted to discuss a few projects and areas that require special attention. Relocating Thru Hulls When breathing new life into an old boat with an updated engine, it is very…

I've been restoring an MFG 15®. The transom was made up of one very thin fiberglass hull transom sandwiched between two ¾" mahogany layers and bolted together. I chose to reinforce the fiberglass transom with 12 oz. fiberglass. I also laminated the backside of each mahogany layer piece with 6 oz. fiberglass, and the front (exposed) side with 4 oz. fiberglass. After doing all this work, I decided the original transom wood was too marred so I added a layer of mahogany veneer. Since I don’t have a veneer-clamping table, I simply used another transom as the clamping table. The original transom, glassed with 4 oz. and three coats of WEST SYSTEM 105 Resin®/207 Special Clear Hardener®. The 105/207 coating was sanded with 40-grit in preparation of applying the veneer.…