Innehållsförteckning för March/April 2018 från Sailing World

• Seated in identical armchairs lined across a low stage, four men face an audience of a few hundred attendees of US Sailing’s Leadership Forum in February 2018. These gentlemen will soon explain how their America’s Cup team, Bella Mente Quantum Racing, will steer the Cup to its former, classier roots, bringing along with it a new culture of American sailing. Stage left is Malcolm Page, of Australia, a two-time Olympic 470 gold medalist now leading a scrappy US Sailing team toward Tokyo 2020. To his right is the senior and semiretired businessman John J. Fauth, who goes by Hap. Fauth has campaigned a line of grand-prix maxis named Bella Mente over the years — with a world championship win to his credit. To his right is Phil Lotz, New…

? For a one-design class, Sea Sprite owners are a pretty diverse group. Class rules prohibit extreme modifications but allow skippers to place anything anywhere on their boat. As a result, it’s common to see these 1960s Carl Alberg-designed hulls fitted with laminate sails, rigged with all sorts of control lines, and sporting premium topside and bottom paints, perhaps in contrast with its 5-knot hull speed. Having admired the Sea Sprite for a few years, I was able to pick up one in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod for a high schooler-friendly budget and sail it 70 miles or so to Bristol, Rhode Island. After the journey, I settled down with my new project for a winter of boatwork. With a limited budget and the usual time constraints of a…

• It’s been name-called the three-legged gecko, the freak and countless others, but designers and engineers tasked with delivering this first generation of the AC75 proposed by the America’s Cup defender and challenger of record use one word to describe it: freedom. “The platform is known,” says Adolfo Carrau, with the design firm Botin Partners. Botin is designing for the American challenger Bella Mente Quantum Racing. “The demands are similar to the multihull [used for the 34th America’s Cup], and at the end of the day, it’s a foiling boat. A lot of work was done by teams in the last campaign, work to improve the tools required to design foils, and most of the work these guys were doing continues. But still, there is not a lot of tradition…

• Did you really say your kid wants to teach sailing? Smart idea: sunshine, fresh air, responsibility. “It’s a great job, like nothing else you will ever do,” says young Cassidy Lynch, who has taught in five programs from Seattle to San Francisco. But there’s a conversation we have to launch now, not later, and it’s not about your kid, exactly. It’s about what is difficult when it comes to sail training in America. Getting ready to write, I spoke with a heap of people. Coaches, commodores, what have you. Pro forma, I contacted Gowrie Group, which offers insurance through US Sailing to clubs and community sailing. There I found myself engaged with the company’s Whitney Peterson, but what I took away was the moment when Peterson jumped topic to…

THE ROCKY COAST of Brittany, France, is breathtakingly beautiful but melancholy in winter, when the days are short and sunlight sparse. Yet, as the giant blue-and-white trimaran Macif sails into Brest in late December, a ray of sunshine pierces the clouds, turning the dull North Atlantic an electric blue. A burst of collective optimism, often in short supply in this corner of the world, is palpable as the craft’s young skipper thrusts his arms skyward in celebration. Cheers and shouts from hundreds of spectators that have arrived hours before sunrise are audible from far out across the water. Dozens of yachts position themselves for a closer glimpse of the lone 34-year-old Frenchman who has shattered the nonstop around-the-world solo record. The clock stops at 42 days, 16 hours, 40 minutes…

• Blame it on the margaritas that fueled the first brainstorming session, or the three decades that have blitzed past since a band of sailing-magazine personnel schemed the NOOD regatta in 1988. Memories are fuzzy today, but a few of the individuals involved with the impromptu think tank one night at Yellow Kittens Tavern on Block Island, and then again later on the ferry back to the Rhode Island mainland, do remember the gist of that boozy discussion. There was how to launch a one-of-a-kind regatta for the growing offshore one-design classes of the day, and then what to call it. “Offshore One-Design Regatta” had a good ring to it, but according to a firsthand accounts, it was Carolyn Brodsky, a young advertising type seated at the table, who pitched…

• Jackson Benvenutti is on a roll. In 2017, Benvenutti won the Rolex New York Yacht Club Invitational Cup with a talent-rich squad from Southern YC. As a tactician, he followed up by winning the Viper North American Championship, and before that won the Helly Hansen NOOD Regatta in Annapolis, Maryland, as a Viper skipper. Earlier in the year, Benvenutti won the St. Petersburg NOOD on the J/70 Tea Dance Snake as tactician, and as a trimm With an ever-expanding trophy haul, Benvenutti, a two-time All American at College of Charleston, brings a little New Orleans to every team on which he sails, with his recognizable Southern lilt and laid-back but excitable personality. As a sailmaker, what are your primary responsibilities at the loft? I’m in sail sales! I focus…

It’s early on December 13, 2017. We’re somewhere in the Southern Ocean, between Cape Town and the big frozen continent at the bottom of Earth, three days into the third leg of the Volvo Ocean Race. It’s been a fulltilt southerly blitz to the “Ice Gate,” a virtual boundary established by race organizers, a no-go zone to keep the fleet away from bergs and growlers. The boundary lies ahead, but to our west is a low-pressure system that will pack a punch. The smell of breakfast permeates the moist interior as the sailors who have just come off watch warm up and refuel with hot porridge. The conversation between skipper Xabi Fernández and navigator Juan Vila seems to carry more weight than usual. They weigh the pros and cons of…

• It’s easy to overlook small developments on the racecourse that can quickly lead to big trouble. We’ve all had our moments, but as an observer, I recently witnessed one team experience 60 seconds of pure meltdown, all of it perfectly avoidable — in hindsight, of course. Their troubles were the result of several, little compounding events that left them reeling, and there’s a lot w The team we’re watching is the white boat. In the first diagram, they look as if they’re making the mark on starboard tack and, at this point, they look to be leading. A port-tacker (the blue boat) ducks them. That same port boat also chooses to duck the next starboard boat, and then makes a nice tack on their stern. From there, the blue…

• On September 6, 2017, Hurricane Irma reached its peak intensity over the Virgin Islands, leaving a swath of destruction across the Caribbean. In St. Thomas, buildings were leveled, the island’s infrastructure was destroyed, and access to ferry and cargo service was impossible. Three months passed before power was restored to parts of the island, but by then, the St. Thomas Sailing Center was back up and sailing. “There were winds over 200 miles per hour in places,” says Dave Franzel, the Sailing Center’s director. “There were people who were in their houses when the roof was blown off. When it was over, people were shell-shocked; they couldn’t believe the destruction.” All the boats that were on stands had blown over, he says, including the fleet of IC24s, which the…

Sailors on the Georgia Institute of Technology sailing team saw a drone taking pictures at a regatta one weekend and thought it would be a great way to promote their team, learn from the footage, and help teach beginning sailors about racing. Team members Wheeler Sutton and Darby Reddaway took action. “We decided to start a GoFundMe page that day, and we were surprised how much money we raised in just a few weeks,” says Wheeler Sutton, the Georgia Tech team’s treasurer. “We’ve made a couple of videos and posted photos after regattas. It really helps our team get some recognition but, more important, helps us to promote SAISA.” Sutton and his teammates want to show their teams’ enthusiasm for the sport, but also the strength and prowess of the…

• Skiffs, foiling multihulls and monohulls, and supercharged sportboats are raced by motivated and skilled sailors creating a new game with the potential for regular incidents. Combine overstressed equipment used by competitors who push themselves and their boats to extremes, and no matter how hard you try to prevent them, accidents will and do happen. High speed inevitab Olympic 49er sailor Joe Morris, from Annapolis, Maryland, once dealt with a manoverboard situation in a 420 regatta when he was a teenage sailor. He found himself in a rare situation. “On a downwind leg, we passed a female sailor in the water. She was unconscious, her head was down, and she was not moving,” says Morris. “Instinct took over, and I grabbed her trapeze and hauled her into our boat. Apparently,…

It’s late Sunday morning, and I’m aboard Chris Craig’s S2 7.9 for the National Championship. The mainsail slats as we wait for wind. A few sailors swim, and one practices backflips off his boat’s bow pulpit while the race committee dispatches its mark-set boats in multiple directions to scout for breeze elsewhere on Lake Michigan. We soon hear their reports over the VHF radio: There’s not much out there. We’re wallowing in the middle of a large and stubborn highpressure system. It’s hot, and hardly September weather for Holland, Michigan, but we’re optimistic. This time of the year is usually a sure bet for wind, which is part of the reason the S2 7.9 class scheduled its 2017 championship here. Plus, our host, Macatawa YC, provides a great home base…

You might consider me a master of nautical mayhem, but I’ll have you note that I am also an expert in boat performance. The best coaches always state three positives before dishing out a negative, so I’ll honor this ratio. 1) Their spinnaker trim is perfect. Check out that curl. 2) The mainsail is twisted precisely for the conditions. 3) The driver’s hiking form is full extension — that’s fast. Now for the critique. Hmm. Nothing wrong here. Let’s hope they eject with synchronized backflips. That’s flash.…