Sailing World Summer 2023

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…

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…

THE Rhodes Bantam sloop is an open racing dinghy designed by renowned naval architect Philip Rhodes in the mid-1940s. At 14 feet, 325 pounds, and with 130 square feet of working sail (including a large genoa jib and a large spinnaker set on a 7-foot-long spinnaker pole), it was a hot boat in its day. The first wood Bantams were produced by the Skaneateles Boat Company in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York and were an instant hit after World War II. Eventually, nearly 2,000 boats were produced, first in wood but later in fiberglass. Fleet racing was active in upward of 30 fleets, and the Rhodes Bantam Class Association held an International Regatta every summer at venues as widespread as New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and…

THE most recognizable spinnaker in the US J/70 fleet is arguably the white one with a stylized red stick figure. And it is immediately recognizable because Brian Keane’s Savasana has been a fixture of the class since 2012, usually near the front of the fleet and found wherever J/70s gather in numbers. Keane and his teammates have won plenty of J/70 regattas over the years, but never a world championship. Close, yes, but never No 1. However, his current cast of teammates—Thomas Barrows, Ron Weed and Conner Harding—have their collective minds set on the impending Worlds in St. Petersburg, Florida, in November. There’s no reason to doubt this could be their year to win the big one, especially considering they ran the table on the Miami J/70 winter regatta circuit…

ON a dark St. Patrick’s Day morning—some 15 miles from the Lorient, France, finish line for the Globe40 doublehanded round-the-world race—Joe Harris sat down at the bumpy navigation station of his extremely well-traveled Class 40 yacht, Gryphon Solo 2, and commenced to type his final blog post from a cold and rainy Biscay Bay. “We are loping along at 7 knots of boat-speed without our foot on the accelerator for the first time in forever, as we are going to be in third place for this leg no matter what. So we are timing our arrival for day-light, and I thought this last night at sea might be a good time to digest and try to make sense of these past 10 months,” he wrote in the last of dozens…

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…