Innehållsförteckning för January/February 2018 från Sailing World

• “Hon? Are you staying up?” “Um ... er ... no. Hold on. Just … uh … finishing something,” I yell up to my wife as I’m closing gauge with a starboard tacker. What the? I can’t believe that guy just hunted me like that! What a jerk. There I sit, alone in my living room in the soft glow of a small lamp, mumbling to myself and cursing someone I don’t even know, someone who has just suckered me into fouling them mere seconds into the first leg of the race. Whoever he or she is, they’re ruthless on this virtual racecourse. Because of my penalty turn, I lose another race — granted, a race that has zero consequences. But I hate to lose, even if it is a…

• The Nashville sailing scene was dying before Chris LaBorde’s eyes. Immediate action was required to stop the bleeding. Nashville’s older racers were on their way out, and behind them was nobody. Over glasses of bourbon one evening at Harbor Island YC in Old Hickory, Tennessee, LaBorde, Robert Mattix and Tim Fitzgerald assembled a ragtag group of racers and hatched a plan: They would commit to buying six boats and to sail eight weekends. By process of elimination, the doublehanded Vanguard 15 made it to the top of their list. It’s self-bailing, self-rescuing, fast and exciting in breeze, and there were plenty of used boats and parts available. They then built a six-boat trailer from donated parts, drove to Chicago and returned with their starter fleet in tow. One year…

NINETY-THREE M ILES SOUTH OF MEX ICO C ITY S ITS Valle de Bravo and Lake Aventura, a watery gem between mountains in the countryside. This pueblo is nothing like Mexico’s coastal resorts. There’s a quiet lake and a quaint village, on the edge of which is Club de Vela la Peña, named for the dramatic cliff that towers above it. The club’s lawn and gardens are lush and manicured, and a bright-blue pool and open-air porch look out over the racecourse dotted with orange tetrahedrons. Here, on the first afternoon of the International Women’s Keelboat Championship, an impromptu gathering is underway on the porch as women of different ages and backgrounds devour rice and beans and squash blossoms covered in cheese. The rained-out afternoon race has brought them together,…

• What’s a Volvo Ocean Race team director to do when one of his starters is put on the injured reserve before the start of a crucial 7,000-mile leg from Lisbon to Cape Town? Simple: Find the guy who can practically do it in his sleep. For Vestas 11th Hour Racing’s Mark Towill, the search to temporarily fill teammate Phil Harmer’s sea boots led to Spaniard Roberto Bermúdez de Castro, a six-time veteran and two-time winner of the race who happ “He was very keen to do the leg,” says Towill. “To get a guy with his experience was a nobrainer.” Vestas 11th Hour navigator Simon Fisher won the previous edition with Bermúdez de Castro on Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing, but the rest of the team had yet to experience…

• Seeing an ice boat fly across the ice at more than 40 miles per hour is usually met with excited and amazed curiosity from bystanders: “Wow, how does that work?” they ask. “I’d love to experience that, but I don’t know how to sail” or most commonly, it’s, “Dang that’s cool, but I know I’ll never experience it.” I grew up racing sailboats in the Midwest and competed on both coasts of the United States. However, from an early age, I knew I wanted to live and raise my family on a Midwestern lake: Weatherby Lake in Missouri is perfect mid-America, where I could raise my family surrounded by similar people, who would be my friends for life. I accomplished my first goal when I married my wife, Lyn,…

HH66 2018 BOAT OF THE YEAR BEST MULTIHULL DESIGNED FOR Distance racing Globe-trotting THE JUDGE SLIKED Design sophistication Build quality Performance REQUIRED CREW Eight to 10 to race; boat captain/engineer required PRICE AS TESTED $4 million The performance is really there with this boat. It’s not just a step beyond what we’ve sailed in the past; it’s steps ahead.TOM RICH With the HH66 catamaran’s sharp reversed bows pointing into a light northerly, the electric halyard winch winds a square-headed mainsail swiftly skyward. A single crew member assists while standing atop the carbon boom while the rest of the sailing team stands elbow to elbow in the pit, observing the thick halyard tail snaking into its rope well beneath the mast. At their backs, watching through the catamaran’s large glass windshield,…

• It’s early on a Saturday morning in October, and the parking lot is already jam-packed at Lake Somerset within the gated community of Sun City, in Beaufort, South Carolina. From trucks and SUVs, men and women unload boats and lay sails neatly on the grass. It has the bustle of any other regatta, but in this case, the boats are small. Really small. It’s the Sun City Model Yacht Club Regatta, and the sailors are here to practice for the upcoming East Coast 12 Meter National Championship, hosted by Turtle Pond Model YC in Peachtree City, Georgia, on the outskirts of Atlanta. Fran DiTommaso, the regatta coordinator and a competitor himself, says competitors have traveled from the Carolinas, Florida and Georgia for the two-day gathering. The EC 12 Meter…

• Foiling expert Gino Morrelli wants to apologize to anyone developing tooling for foils. There is so much learning going on, he says, that the best designs we have today will be obsolete in eight months. And if design and engineering are moving that fast, so too is the foiling scene. Blink and you’ll find that while you were away, open-ocean “flying” became almost normal. Routing strategies are changing with the arrival of a new generation of long-distance record hunters, Gitana 17 being a prime example, the first 100-foot Ultime designed from the get-go as a full-foiling boat for the ocean. While mortals marvel at what a few of our brethren, mostly French, accomplish with their gigantic, volatile, wind-carving
contraptions, the ante is raised again. Forget about tacticians looking for more…

With the push of a tiller, Greg Stewart can easily force His Majesty over the starting line early. But Stewart, the kind-eyed skipper standing at the helm of his baby-blue 6 Metre, Sprig, isn’t the type to stick it to the 79-yearold former King of Spain. Juan Carlos Alfonso Victor María de Borbón y Borbón, on Bribón Gallant, is exposed and vulnerable, and as the seconds wind down before the start, his sails are flapping and his crew is jawing in terse Spanish commands. “Go ahead, King. Go across,” Stewart shouts, waving the king across his bow and allowing the Spaniards to dip below the starting line to get away clean to the racecourse’s favored left side. It’s good to be king, of course, but on this particular day at…

• World Sailing held its annual conference in Mexico in November 2017 with a week of meetings involving several hundred delegates from all prominent sailing countries. There were many proposals to modify the racing rules discussed and voted upon, and for the most part, proposals that were accepted will not take effect until January 1, 2021, when the next revision of The Racing Rules of Sailing is published. However, there is a process for making “urgent” changes effective at an earlier date, and this year that process resulted in urgent changes to one definition and three rules. All of these changes become effective January 1, 2018. The primary reason for the changes was to provide a fair method for handling incidents in which a coach, parent or other support person…