Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2025 i Sailing World

IT’S the golden hour in Mallorca, and the late-October setting sun bathes the magnificent Palma Cathedral in electric orange. We’re cruising back to the harbor under mainsail and motor as the Cuordileone sailing team flakes the jib into its bag and strips spinnaker sheets. Fashion magnate Leonardo Ferragamo—the boat’s owner and helmsman, and soul of the modern-day Nautor Swan brand—has disappeared belowdecks. The third race of the afternoon was a true test of Ferragamo’s concentration. As a media guest restricted to the back of the boat on the opening day of the Swan One Design World Championships, I can attest that buoy racing ClubSwan 50s loaded with pro sailors and owner-drivers is indeed mentally taxing. If I were Ferragamo, I too would head straight to the aft cabin. “Does he go…

DOUG Newhouse and his boat partner, Jeremy Wilmot, the 30-something Aussie-American pro sailor, won the J/70 World Championship title in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, this past September, in an effort that provides a compelling blueprint for any team with big-regatta aspirations. We sat down for an in-depth debrief in the library of the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport, Rhode Island, with a view over waters where Team Yonder trained and sail-tested for many days and more hours than Newhouse cares to remember, all of which led to a highly honed team and fast sails that propelled them to the top of the 98-boat fleet. Where to begin…Doug? Newhouse: The successes that I’ve had in my sailing career have all started with the crew, and I will say we had the…

A weak southerly breeze straggles across Lake Washington as the last of Seattle’s fall colors cloak the hillsides of the still-leafy Leschi neighborhood. Four local J/70s are gathered for a driving clinic, and the onboard combinations are unusual: all captains and no crewmembers. Ron Rosenberg, an Olympic-level coach and world-champion sailor, is helming a borrowed coach boat—a VHF in one hand, a Timex Ironman strapped to his wrist. “Be thoughtful about your next 35 seconds,” he advises the group as they roll rapid-fire into another starting sequence. Absent are the sharp elbows that often define one-design starting lines. Instead, each team focuses on hitting the line on time and at pace, while extending the “grace and space” to one’s neighbors that Rosenberg outlined in his dockside briefing. But instead of…

MODING involves three ways of sailing upwind: sailing in a VMG mode, which is the best angle and speed for your boat in the given conditions; sailing in a high mode, which means higher and slower; and sailing in a low mode, which means lower and faster. Why would you want to sail anything other than optimal VMG? Generally speaking, a high or low mode can help you with lane management and racecourse positioning. The overall idea is that you are always working to have a great lane and position yourself between your competition and the next mark, thus reducing risk. MODE FOR LANE MANAGEMENT We’ve all been there before—you come off the starting line, hoping to have a nice big lane, but the boat to leeward is a little…

QUIC—name two words that have never been paired in previous generations of youth sailing. Private team. Anyone with an eye on the game in America—no one else does youth racing the way we do it—knows the phrase. Private teams are a 21st-century phenomenon. Then there are the hybrids. Then there are the tribes of coaches who band together in common cause, and all of them together are woven into the game in multiple hotspots of traditional dinghy racing. It’s not the old landscape. This is a sampling of the new. In New York, the Long Island Sound Opti Team was born to support kids who want more than the short summer seasons that their yacht clubs can offer. LISOT is a stable, structured nonprofit. Elsewhere, the acronyms and spinoffs have…

THE smile cemented on Russell Coutts’ face was telling when, on the eve of SailGP’s fifth-season start in Dubai, the professional sailing league’s visionary founder and puppeteer announced that Rolex had signed a nine-season deal worth who knows what. He’d already locked in Mubadala (Abu Dhabi’s investment machine), inked Emirates Airlines for five years, and secured global-shipping giant DP World to move the threering circus around the globe to 13 different venues on multiple continents. Jimmy Spithill’s all-new Red Bull Italy team was revealed on the heels of a new Brazilian outfit with Martine Grael as the league’s first female driver, bringing the lineup to a dozen privately funded teams. Musical chairs and offseason crew poaching had social feeds buzzing, and game-changing T-foils and jet-propulsion boosters are on the way. All…

OHIO might not be the first state that comes to mind when people think about competitive small-sailboat racing, but perhaps a second look is in order, especially when you consider that the Buckeye State is blessed with hundreds of small lakes. There is a popular myth that, other than Lake Erie, there are no other natural lakes in Ohio, and be that as it may, there is an abundance of man-made lakes that date back almost 200 years. Buckeye Lake, just east of Columbus, was built in the 1820s as a feeder lake for the expanding canal system, and much later boasted great Lightning, Highlander, Interlake and Raven racing fleets. More recently, many lakes were built by the state for recreational purposes, including Acton Lake, near my hometown of Oxford,…

IT’S mid-October, and the bases of Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli, Alinghi Red Bull Racing and American Magic are ghost towns, save for shore teams decamping and craning chase boats onto the hard. All three have been dismissed from the Louis Vuitton Cup, leaving INEOS Britannia to eventually get crushed by Emirates Team New Zealand 7-2 in the 37th America’s Cup Match. American Magic’s skipper and president of sailing operations, Terry Hutchinson, meets me at Gate M29, the high-security entrance to the team’s Barcelona base. He escorts me through a second security gate and then through the team’s bike-storage room, usually jampacked. With most of the team’s sailors and cyclors sent packing after three long years of going hard, there’s plenty of parking. We continue to the front office, where boxed computer…

Conor Fogerty was feeling it. Aboard the husky, well-prepared Beneteau 44.7 Black Magic, with Fogerty on the wheel, we were closing in on the fifth day of the 700-plus-nautical-mile SSE Renewables Round Ireland Race. Having just passed Thor Rock, we were fast approaching Rathlin Island, the northeast corner of the Emerald Isle’s rugged, wild coastline. The lights of Scotland blinked on the far horizon. The next 24 hours would unfold like a fever dream. But first we had to negotiate dark, craggy Rathlin. The island marks the crossroads between two converging ocean currents, where the North Atlantic jumps the Irish Sea. It was more than a bit messy. Before the race, I’d heard many a Rathlin horror story; boats had been known to park there, anchor deployed, for double-digit hours…

THE warning gun fires, and the prestart dance begins in the Classics fleet at the Rolex Big Boat Series hosted by San Francisco’s St. Francis YC. We’ve got 19 knots of wind already, and it’s still early. It will blow. I can feel the building sea breeze that has whipped San Francisco Bay into frenzied whitecaps nearly every summer day for as long as I can remember. For this regatta, I’m not in my usual position as navigator. Today, I’m the tactician. That’s because Mayan is special, and I find that it gives me insight into the expectations of the great tacticians I normally sail with on other grand-prix programs. “Time to burn to the boat?” I ask Lance Berc, a retired Silicon Valley technologist with an Albert Einstein hairstyle.…

WE all know what happens when six champion one-design keelboat teams meet in the British Virgin Islands to race for glory in 43-foot bareboats of dubious equality. It’s a whole lotta fun, frustration and challenges by the day, but it’s one heck of a sailing adventure that comes with an equal-size rum buzz. For my teammates from the J/35 Falcon, winners of the 2024 Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series in Detroit, and present in our signature straw hats, that’s how this Caribbean Championship plays out. Our BVI adventure begins at the Sunsail base in Road Town, Tortola, where the first order of business is to source a whisker pole for the boat’s furling jib. Fellow team member Jim Allen and I set out to recon nearby boatyards, where a…

SPOTTING the starting line by eye is a practice that has remained unchanged for generations. For small fleets, a simple look down the line works well, but as the line gets stretched out to accommodate a big fleet, calling the line by sight is an impossible task for even the most seasoned and eagle-eyed spotter. And bigger fleets are usually more aggressive, which compounds the problem. General recalls are no fun, unless you like starting practice, and black flags are real buzz killers. Rumor has it that the black flag was invented on the fly with a skull and crossbones flag back in the day out of a race committee’s frustration at a J/24 Midwinters in Miami. I once sailed a world championship that had 14 black-flag starts in…

Lake Ray Hubbard, on the outskirts of Dallas, is a honey hole for Texan jig-slingers dropping hooks for white bass, catfish and crappie, but it’s also a sweet spot for fish of a different sort. We’re talking Sunfish, sailing’s most iconic and colorful one-design dinghy. Hubbard is plenty big, but when 100 sailors schooled for their world-championship title, it was indeed one fantastic feast. Neck-deep in the action was Rod Favela, a competitor wearing multiple hats as boat wrangler, parts supplier, overnight repairman, broker, and entertainer. Those who’ve been in Favela’s position with a hand in hosting a major class championship know well the mental load: Racing in a world championship is tough. Doing it while on the clock is exhausting. Doing both well is superhuman. The simple Sunfish…

WE were in a bad position off the start. The wind unexpectedly shifted in the wrong direction, and we were immediately at the back of the fleet. I could sense anger building in my head, and I was struggling with how to deal with the “unfair” bad break we’d been handed. The leading boats all looked to be well ahead, and it appeared that there would be no coming back. I went dark. One of the crew saw my emotional state, came aft, and said to me, “If anyone can get us out of this, it is you.” At that moment, my sour mood shifted, and I asked myself, How can we recover? Snapped out of my misery, I went to work. Over the next four legs of the windward-leeward…

There is truth to the old saying “no pain, no gain,” which flies in the face of what I hear today about the “wimpification” of sailing. ’Tis true that the Good Doctor’s files once overflowed with nautical maladies, misfires and misfortunes, but that’s because, back in the day, dogs-off-chains was a call to action, a reason to suit up, rig up, and return with yarns of glory. Sure, boats and gear were heavier and more robust, capable of taking a good licking, and race committees were more reluctant to sky the postponement flag to the yardarm because it was too blowy. Sailors today are far too spooked by whitecaps and wind whistling through rigging, but clearly not this crew, who I’m told ventured out for a speedy session while all…