Innehållsförteckning för September/October 2017 från Sailing World

When you find yourself heading back to the line to restart, don’t despair, there’s a whole racecourse ahead to get back in the race. Quickly acknowledge the mistake, take a deep breath, and keep these tips in mind. STICK TO THE GAME PLAN: The frustration of being OCS often causes teams to completely abandon their prestart game plan. Instead, try to find a way to utilize your pre-race research. WORK TO GET A CLEAR LANE: For example, your best opportunity might be to get to the left to clear yourself around the pin and tack back to starboard. You’ll be second row — or worse — but the separation from the boats that started properly may allow you to still execute your plan. GET OUT OF PHASE: If neither side…

STARTING LINE • The E-Scow, at 28 feet and handled by four sailors, is a temperamental, sensitive, sendyour- heart-into-your-throat kind of boat that keeps skippers of all skill levels coming back for more. I’m one of them. In 2011, my father’s middleman was adamant about getting my hand on the tiller of our E-Scow. I was hesitant, since the only experience I had was as extra weight for Sunday-morning races, but I obliged. I sat at the stern — tiller and mainsheet in hand — hoping to keep the pointy side upright. Every Sunday morning that year was a new lesson learned: how to feather upwind, how to get the spinnaker up successfully, communicate effectively, and what it meant to “sail it hot.” It was a summer of learning as…

by Anna Tunnicliffe, US Sailing Blog Contributor As athletes, which is what we all are since we do participate in the sport of sailing regardless of our level of competition, we want and need to be fit and healthy. But in addition to being fit and healthy for our sport, we want to be fit and healthy for life. When we think of fitness, we think of what we do in the gym, yet fitness can be measured by strength and health. Therefore, you want to make fitness a lifestyle, not just a part of your day when you head to the gym and knock out some exercises. What’s the easiest way to do this? We go to the gym and do what we need to do to get strong…

HAILING FROM Hong Kong SKIPPER David Witt NAVIGATOR Steve Hayles The fleet of Volvo Ocean 65s may be stamped from the same molds, but the race’s Hong Kong entry will bear little resemblance to its neighbors come dock-out time in Alicante, Spain, in October. There’s nothing remotely commercial about this squad, which in many ways harkens back to the early days of the Whitbread Race: a bunch of salty sailors from the land Down Under sailing for an owner and a bit of glory. The logos of Sun Hung Kai, a global Hong Kong-based conglomerate, are discreetly placed about the boat, but it’s the squad’s identity as Team Scallywag that they intend to be known as. Befitting the yacht’s name, they’re a mischievous band of blokes, says the team’s 47-yearold…

HAILING FROM China SKIPPER Charles Caudrelier NAVIGATOR Pascal Bidégorry “Charles is one of the most determined guys I’ve ever met. His mindset is to go fast, and that’s what we are here to do with him.” If it weren’t for its Southern Ocean dismasting in the 2014-15 edition of the Volvo Ocean Race, Dongfeng Race Team could very well have gone on to win on its first try. But in this race, what-ifs mean nothing when it comes to the final results. Instead, the international crew finished third, an incredible performance for its French skipper Charles Caudrelier, who spent a formidable portion of his campaign training up Chinese sailors from scratch. Not this time. Caudrelier retained a few of his essential crewmembers, as well as his talented Chinese crewmen “Wolf,”…

HAILING FROM Portugal SKIPPER Dee Caffari “These young sailors have the passion and drive to prove a point that they should be there and not the salty old guys that have been around four or five times.” Dee Caffari, the 44-year-old skipper of the Portuguese-flagged Clean Seas/Turn the Tide on Plastic, is unique among her Volvo Ocean Race peers — not just because of her gender, but also for the many ways she’s already circumnavigated the globe. She’s been around once with a team of amateurs, once alone the “wrong way,” then alone the “right way,” and finally with Team SCA, the all-female squad of professional sailors. For the upcoming Volvo, however, she’ll embark with a predominately youth team that’s 50/50 coed. It’s an experience, she says, that has so…

A defining portrayal of America’s greatest living bluewater adventurer can be found in a selfmade video in which Rich Wilson — framed like a newscaster — braces for a storm south of Australia. He’d been at sea for 49 days in the Vendée Globe Race. One eye behind his oversize Poindexter-style glasses droops with exhaustion. Judging by the speed at which he unabashedly wolfs down his freeze-dried dinner on camera, he is either starving or vying to catch up to his 6,000-calorie-per-day minimum. It’s Christmas Eve, so he wishes happy holidays to more than half a million students in 50 different countries who are following his progress at sea — but you can scarcely hear him. Wilson’s narration on this four-minute satellite- transmitted footage is mostly drowned out by Tchaikovsky’s…

STARTING LINE • On October 16, 1992, Mike Plant left New York Harbor on board Coyote bound for Les Sables d’Olonne, France, with plans of a fourth solo circumnavigation, the Vendée Globe. Plant radioed a passing cargo ship a few days later to pass on information that Coyote’s electronics were down. It was the last time he would be heard from. Weeks later, the 60-foot Coyote was found 500 miles north of the Azores inverted and missing its keel. Plant’s story is one of perseverance and grit. After seeing a film about circumnavigation, Plant quit his construction job to race singlehanded around the world. His career was driven by his thirst for adventure. In 1987, Plant won his class in the BOC Challenge, the first of two in which he…

HAILING FROM The Netherlands SKIPPER Simeon Tienpont NAVIGATOR Jules Salter “Winning campaigns get straight As in all areas, from preparation, to creating the right environment and getting the right people with the right attitude.” Simeon Tienpont is towering, strong and square, with a chiseled face that has yet to reveal the wear and tear of thousands of hard miles at sea. But give it a year. With the stress of leading the Volvo Ocean Race’s most high-profile campaign, the AkzoNobel skipper from the Netherlands, now only 35 years old, will surely be sporting a few new gray hairs. This isn’t Tienpont’s first Volvo, however. At the outset of his professional sailing career, he prevailed through a cutthroat selection designed to man ABN AMRO’s under-30 team in 2005. With ABN AMRO…

HAILING FROM The Netherlands SKIPPER Bouwe Bekking NAVIGATOR Andrew Cape Team Brunel skipper Bouwe Bekking is making a run at his eighth Volvo Ocean Race in a Herculean quest to win it once and for all, after coming so close in the previous edition. As if the task of competing isn’t difficult enough, Bekking has made it all that much more complicated by joining the race months before the start — without a team, a boat or a single sailor on the payroll. In any other hands, such an approach would be destined for the back of the fleet, but Bekking, 54, is an old hat with a proven track record to lead a team to the podium. “All of a sudden, Jan Brand, the founder of Brunel, said, ‘Just…

Savannah Yacht Club September 9, 2017 Savannah, GA www.leukemiacup.org/ga Washington Sailing Marina September 9, 2017 Alexandria, VA www.leukemiacup.org/nca San Francisco Stand Up Paddle September 16, 2017 Corinthian Yacht Club of San Francisco Tiburon, CA www.leukemiacup.org/gba Birmingham Sailing Club September 16, 2017 Vincent, AL www.leukemiacup.org/al Buccaneer Yacht Club September 16, 2017 Mobile, AL www.leukemiacup.org/al Charleston Ocean Racing Association September 23, 2017 Charleston, SC www.leukemiacup.org/sc American Yacht Club Regatta, Stand Up Paddle and Kayak September 23, 2017 Rye, NY www.leukemiacup.org/ctwhv Peninsula Yacht Club Pumpkin Regatta and Outrigger Yacht Club Regatta October 14, 2017 Lake Norman, NC www.leukemiacup.org/nc Epping Forest Yacht Club October 13-14, 2017 Jacksonville, FL www.leukemiacup.org/ncfl San Francisco Yacht Club October 22.2017 Belvedere, CA www.leukemiacup.org/gba St. Petersburg Yacht Club October 27-28, 2017 St. Petersburg, FL www.leukemiacup.org/sun Fort Worth Boat Club October…

FROM THE EXPERTS PINWHEEL AVOIDANCE This one’s a classic: If you’re the outside boat of a group approaching the leeward mark and blindly carry on with pace, you’ll sail extra distance in bad air, carry wide around the mark, and then exit in a terrible lane. This is one of the rare times when it pays to slow down and let other boats move ahead. To kill speed, take your spinnaker down early and steer a little extra distance. If you’re slightly advanced on the group and they barely have room, you can slow down a lot by steering hard, swerving back and forth, and swinging wide to slow your boat and kill time. Once you’ve slowed, let the pinwheel unfold, and watch as the boats swinging around the outside…

THE INTERNATIONAL 505 A powerful sail plan and easy-to-adjust rig that can be adjusted while racing ensures this challenging doublehanded trapeze dinghy performs superbly—from 30 knot smokers to light-air breezes. Designed in 1954 by Englishman John Westell, the 5o5’s sail plan and hull shape are strictly controlled, but rigging layout, spars, and the foils are more liberal, allowing the boat to be set up in a number of ways to suit racing preferences. Physically demanding in a breeze, most combined crew weights average around 340 lb. The 2017 World Championships will be held from September 20 – 29 on Chesapeake Bay, Annapolis, Maryland. MAINSHEET To get the most out of the 5o5 in lighter air, teams have begun to pull the boom to windward. Pulling the mainsheet bridle across is…

STARTING LINE “Sustainability” is one of the most misunderstood social movements today. What exactly does it entail for sailors, besides the low-hanging fruit of the elimination of single-use plastic bottles? Much more, says Todd McGuire, of 11th Hour Racing. The organization’s high-profile efforts to date have been with the TP52 Super Series, Land Rover Ben Ainslie Racing, and the Volvo Ocean Race—and with these programs they’ve identified sustainable practices applicable to sailors, yacht clubs and any other waterfront facility. McGuire shares the organization’s top five. 01 Shooters from the Solent Land Rover BAR’s training base in Portsmouth, England, uses renewable energy, water-collection systems and a long list of environmental best practices, but the team’s efforts extend to the water too. It has implemented a program to re-establish the Solent’s native…

• I was racing on an owner-driven J/70 at a recent regatta, and we were a little early while approaching the start. We luffed our sails to slow. Then I saw it: a boat coming in from behind with speed. We bore away to accelerate and defend our hole, but we were tooed for a moment and then did our penalty circle, even though we didn’t feel we’d fouled. We felt we had done all we could to keep clear, but our chances would be slim in a protest, and more important, our social hour after sailing would be wasted in the protest room. The experience got me thinking about the way we interact with our competitors. Yes, we got too close to the line and had to slow, and…

STARTING LINE • At the third Windsurfer World Championship in 1976, with several hundred triangular sails swarming the bay in Berkeley, California, it was a 13-year-old scrawny kid with a mop of whiteblonde hair named Robby Naish who whooped the fleet. He didn’t know then that the passion this surfboard with a sail ignited in him would drive him to the peak of wind-driven exploits, making Naish synonymous with windsurfing, kitesurfing and now windfoiling (windsurfing on hydrofoils). Though Naish won every windsurfing world title from his first until he graduated high school in 1981, racing was not his intended path. He saw the laid-back beach scene and exploring the sea with friends, sharing his stoke, as the lifestyle he wanted to promote. Naish dominated the market with his neonsplashed windsurfing…

HAILING FROM Spain SKIPPER Xabi Fernández NAVIGATOR Juan Vila Xabi Fernández, the second-time skipper of Mapfre, remembers well the worst moment of the 2014-15 edition of the Volvo Ocean Race. It was in Cape Town, at the conclusion of Leg 1, and in the preceding hours they’d been passed by Team SCA. As they berthed in the basin, the sting of finishing last was especially sharp “I remember docking and talking about how this last position would be very expensive for the whole around the world,” says the Spaniard, who is embarking on his fifth Volvo Ocean Race. “We had to remind ourselves and our sponsors that it was not the end of the world, and for sure we would be getting better.” By the fourth leg of the race,…