Indholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2017 i Sailing World

• Finn sailing has been a part of my life for nearly two decades. It has taken me to places I never I imagined I would visit, much less sail a dinghy. After sailing nearly every Finn event since 2000, in the United States and Canada, I decided after eight years to venture abroad to Europe, and then Barbados, for the Finn World Masters, an event that attracts fleets of 150 to 350 entries. As a young sailor, I’d read and heard reports about sailing venues in Europe, but I never thought I would ever sail in places such as the Isselmeer, the Baltic, the Mediterranean, the Irish Sea, the Bay of Biscay, Lake Garda or the Caribbean. I was a college English teacher with a mortgage, family, responsibilities. I…

• Since 2009, the New York YC has relied on privately owned Club Swan 42s for its signature event, the Rolex New York Yacht Club Invitational Cup, but with many of the 42s sold to overseas owners over the past few years, the club’s marquee marque regatta was in jeopardy of being without a fleet. It was time for action. “For the Invitational Cup to be a continuous event, we determined that we needed to own the assets,” says Dr. Paul Zabetakis, who led a small committee, including chairman of the selection subcommittee, Art Santry, through the yearlong selection process that resulted in the commissioning of the IC37. By spring 2019, the club will own and manage a 20-boat charter fleet of these stripped-down 37-footers. Having boats available to the…

• Ken Legler, Tufts University sailing coach and professional race officer, can legitimately lay claim to some sort of Guinness World Record for starting 50,000 races without ever resorting to the Black Flag Rule. Legler’s starting procedures were initially developed in the 1970s at Association Island (NY) Sailing Center. Since then, he has honed them in hundreds of regattas for boats varying from Optimists to Farr 40s, including, most recently, the 2017 Atlantic Nationals at Kollegewidgwok YC in Blue Hill, Maine. I recently reviewed articles by Legler about starting races and had the chance to ask him some questions about the reasons for and the details of his procedures. Any time competitors enter a regatta, they expect the race committee to be focused on giving them as many great races…

“There would be no clean slate in the championship series, so the strategy shifted overnight to a more aggressive approach knowing that we needed a few keeper scores to achieve a top- 20 overall finish.” • As a tactician alongside Evan Aras and Sam Rogers on board Oivind Lorentzen III’s Nine at the 161-boat Audi J/70 World Championship in Sardinia, Italy, our pre-regatta plan was simple enough: With a four-fleet qualifying series to determine gold and silver fleer fleet. If we could average fewer than 60 points over three races, we’d be through to gold fleet, with our scorecard resetting. But the mistral came whistling in, and for the first two days of scheduled qualifying races, it pumped through Sardinia’s legendary Bomb Alley. The race committee held everyone onshore, where…

• At the Great Chase Race at the Hull YC in Hull, Massachusetts, 121 boats competed for line honors. A pursuit race, the Great Chase is not your typical regatta. The pin at the start is a rubber duck. The official T-shirt looks like it came from a Grateful Dead show. The entry fee is just $90 for boats with crews up to five people, and it includes a party with a band, dinner, dancing and trophies. At the after-race party, while the band rocks, more than 500 people bob to the music and relive the racing. In the midst of the melee, Bill Bradford has a smile on his face and a beer in his hand. He’s having a hard time eating his dinner because well-wishers are stopping by…

FROM A DRIVER’S POINT OF VIEW, IT MATTERS B IG-TIME THAT THE LONG-KEEL ATTACHED-RUDDER CONCEPTS ARE 80 TO 90 YEARS O L D. THE WHEEL I S WORK. TIME stops when the sails fill on a J Class yacht. Then she comes alive. Acceleration is smooth, reeking of power. The rail dips to kiss the water. It seems so easy, and a nonsailor might romanticize it just that way. A little trim on, a little trim off. The boat charges along — until it’s time to tack. The jarring cry of the loaded genoa sheet as it’s eased around a 14-inch drum shudders through the boat. There is no missing the message that every inch and every pound of this beast is wound up tight. Communication — bow to stern…

Years drop away the farther you travel down Maybank Highway, which turns into dirt where ancient oaks hang overhead. The road ends at the front door of Sea Island Yacht Club, an open building with a wraparound porch overlooking Bohicket Creek. Each corner of this dance-hall-style building has a piece of history; wood planks from famous hulls hang alongside articles cut out from the local Post and Courier. A solitary dock juts out over the marsh, and tethered to it are a few of the club’s namesakes, the flat-bottomed wooden-hulled Sea Island One Designs. At 20.5 feet LOA (with a 7-foot-4-inch beam), these flat, wooden vessels look more like the box that the Y-Flyer is shipped in rather than the highlighting vessel of one of Charleston’s summer-circuit regattas. The class,…

THE first time I ever spoke with Ed Adams, I lied. It was 1990, and I was eager to get back into competitive dinghy racing. I’d sailed in college with Adams’ longtime Star crew, Tom Olsen, who suggested the Snipe. To make sure I got paired up with a good skipper, Olsen told me to call Adams. I was pretty intimidated by the idea of cold-calling a recent Rolex Yachtsman of the Year, a name I recognized from the sailing magazines. I was also very, very hungry to go sailing — and this was my best lead by far. So the familiar predictability of Adams’ first question was reassuring: “How much do you weigh?” “One-hundred twenty-five pounds,” I answered, honestly. “How tall are you?” Here was the pesky detail Olsen…

• Words can easily be lost over the noise of wind and waves, overpowered by a loaded sheet being eased on a winch, or silenced by some mechanical system at work. Add the extra pressure of racing — where decisions need to be made in a split second and sharedHowever, I can guarantee that team will still never feel like they are doing it perfectly. In my 25 years as a professional sailor, I have never had a day when I’ve felt as if my comms were as good as they could’ve been. Communication on board is a constant evolution, and something almost all teams can improve on. I’ll share some common mistakes and how to avoid them. Avoid the words “No” and “Go” situation: We did not want the…