Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2019 från Sailing World

On the exterior wall of the Santa Barbara YC is a notice board. Tacked to the cork is a flyer that reads in large letters: “Hitch Hiker Wet Wednesday.” If I’m looking to go sailing, I’m at the right place. It’s the middle of March, the air along California’s central coast is cool and the water cooler. The San Rafael Mountains are lush green and blooming after destructive wildfires and the rains that followed. It’s 3:30 in the afternoon, and like most California yacht clubs this time of year, the place is quiet, but the grills are set up and the yardarm is fluttering with burgees and signal flags Photographer Paul Todd and I follow instructions on the flyer, which explains that, if I’m interested in hitching a ride in…

A surreal emotion sweeps over me as I peel back the stiff canvas cover, exposing my Interlake to the warm July morning sun. The routine of rigging my boat before the day’s race will be the same as it’s always been, but this time, the experience will be different. Dad is no longer beside me, meticulously preparing the boat as he always did, checking control lines for chafe, inspecting every bit of hardware and gliding his hands over the foils to confirm their perfection. That’s how we would rig my Interlake together—until 2012, when cancer suddenly took him. It’s amazing how a simple sound can extract a memory from deep within. When I hear water slapping the Interlake’s flared bow, its hard chine sluicing through a choppy Sandusky Bay, just…

Sitting in the cockpit of Ron Zarella’s custom-built Taylor 49 Blackfish, the crew waits for a tender to take everyone ashore. We’ve just completed the first day of the 2019 St. Thomas International Regatta, and we’re ready for some shade and a round of Painkillers “You’re supposed to sound a horn three times to get the tender to come,” Zarella says. He’s standing behind the helm, relaxed, but growing impatient. His boat captain, David Abramski, descends through the companionway and returns with a foghorn, walks to the stern, and blows three sounds across Cowpet Bay toward St. Thomas YC. Soon after, a beat-up RIB comes skidding alongside us, its motor stalling as it nearly crashes into the boat’s gleaming black topside. “Can you send the other one?” Zarella asks, eyeing…

At 13, my world revolved around my bus pass, bike and life jacket. I had some great sailing options, but I lived 10 miles away. After school and on weekends, often I would take the bus to the yacht club for Laser sailing on Lake Washington. I earned my life jacket as payment for a summer job teaching younger kids how to sail. My mom bought me my diving wetsuit. I made my own weight jacket out of old sweatshirts—they were still legal back then, remember—and I found old bits of discarded rope on the dock and used them as my control lines. Going sailing was logistically challenging, but in my mind the rewards were always worth time spent on the bus and the trying sail through the narrow Montlake…

The glass sliding doors leading into the salon part and our bearded boat captain, who goes by the nickname “Burger,” steps in with a wall of moist hot air. With a big smile and a firm handshake, he gives us a warm welcome, then gets straight to business. “Today was a big day. Forklift day,” he says with an air of calm and determination. “We lifted 2 tons of racing sails on board and took 3 tons of charter equipment off. We have two more days to get everything ready before the rest of the race crew joins us.” This is not just any yacht we are about to race. At 213 feet overall, with a 23-story mast, the Perini Navi Perseus 3 is one of the largest sailing yachts…

You won’t hear the Cowles twins singing their way to the finish line of a close race. But if their last race took something out of them, you might hear a tune rising while they recharge. Or maybe they’re on top of the world, and they need to let it rip. Are they the only team that sings on the racecourse? “Oh no, but I’m not sure everybody will admit it.” Maybe that is Carmen speaking. She’s older and wiser by 2 minutes. Or is it Emma? When two people are as close as these two, does it matter? At 18, the Cowles twins are a success story, US Sailing’s 2018 Rolex Yachtswomen of the Year and quickly stepping up to new challenges in a new class. The first experience…

Jon Partridge plants his feet wide and firm on the asphalt, then leans into his cordless drill as its titanium bit gouges a hole into a blue metal mobile-storage rack. The bit screeches until it finally plunges into the frame’s hollow. One down, many more holes to go. He stands upright, arches his back to stretch, then pulls his cellphone from his pocket to take a call from the home office in England, many time zones away from San Diego. The skin on the back of his neck is flaking off in large pieces, seared from a week of assembling, shadowing and filming his brand-new fleet of keelboats. As one of three directors of powerhouse small-boat builder, RS Sailing, Partridge should be in a corner office back at HQ, but…

The future was looking grim for Whidbey Island Race Week. The annual July invasion of the quiet confines of the Washington island’s Oak Harbor and Penn Cove was waning. What once decades ago numbered 150 boats petered to 60-something. Small boats couldn’t get launched because the city wouldn’t fix the crane. Bigger boats couldn’t get into the marina because the channel wasn’t dredged. National sponsors took a pass. It appeared the wind-delay water fights, shoreside volleyball and golf tournaments, epic bowling nights and bacon-offs in the campground would evaporate, as so many race weeks have around the country. But the soggy sailors of the Salish Sea had pulled the “Adult Summer Camp” from the jaws of death before and weren’t ready to give up on it now. Race Week owner…

Like the Visa slogan, Jonny Goldsberry is “Everywhere you want to be.” Our paths crossed more than a decade ago as I watched him sail through our lee in the Atlantic Cup in Class 40s. Beneath the brim of his red, white and blue Pabst Blue Ribbon trucker’s hat beamed a big, toothy smile. He laughed aloud as he and a few other 20-something pro sailors schooled us in straight-line speed, as if to say “See ya!” Earlier this year, after returning stateside from the Sydney Hobart Race on Winning Appliances, he takes my call poolside, soaking up the Miami heat at the Coral Reef YC. He periodically excuses himself to assist teammates with setting up high-performance guru Steve Benjamin’s Etchells. Later, he’ll be Moth sailing with the best in…

1 HOIST Hoist the sail with minimum halyard tension and then sheet the sail appropriately for the point of sail. Now tension the halyard just enough to remove any horizontal wrinkles emanating from the luff. You can leave a hint of wrinkles in light apparent wind velocity. In more wind, more tension is needed—and vice versa. 2 TUNE The lead position controls headsail leech tension and foot depth. Set the lead so that the sheet bisects the clew, thus applying equal tension to the leech and foot. To fine-tune the position, move the lead forward to add power (full foot, minimal twist) in light conditions and aft in bigger air to de-power (flat foot, more twist). When you’re reaching, the lead should follow the clew, moving outboard and somewhat forward…

AFTER hours of morning press interviews, coach’s briefings, and failed systems tests, the U.S. SailGP team is about to cut the towline for their first romp in the fresh breeze off San Francisco’s City Front when all support boats lose radio communication with each other. The team’s chase boat driver, Pete Balash, is livid. “You’d think, with a 7-milliondollar budget, we could afford some radios that worked,” he vents. Moments later, he receives a phone call from the SailGP base in Alameda. Sailing is halted, indefinitely “Unbelievable,” skipper Rome Kirby says as Balash’s RIB pulls alongside the team’s F50 catamaran. “They need to get their shit together. We don’t have time for this.” The day before, practice was halted for nearly three hours because of failed systems tests on a…

If you race near a major commercial port, you’ve probably encountered a Traffic Separation Scheme. A TSS is essentially a two-lane highway for maritime traffic. A TSS enhances safety and allows commercial shipping to function alongside recreational boating. A TSS is not delineated by buoys, but charts show its two lanes and the direction of travel within each. There is a separation zone, or sometimes just a separation line, between the lanes. Most TSSs are administered by a Vessel Traffic Service. The VTS serves a role for the TSS similar to that of air traffic control for an airport. The U.S. Coast Guard is usually responsible for organizing and staffing the VTS in domestic waters and use an Automatic Information System, which enables all vessels are equipped with AIS to…

Upper St. Regis Lake, New York, is an off-the-beaten-path destination where members of St. Regis YC savor their anonymity. For more than 100 years, summer residents of this eclectic Adirondack enclave have combined a “great camp” lifestyle with a passion for a summer-long regatta. But the big news about this fleet in the forest is the ancient 32-foot one-design sloop that remains the club’s focal point. My interest in Idem sloops grew out of a chance encounter at a Safety at Sea Seminar in Larchmont, New York. A seminar attendee approached me during a break and asked if I’d ever heard of an Idem sloop. The sailboat and its name weren’t familiar, so I asked for further details. Ogden Reid introduced himself as a lifelong Idem sailor and summer resident…

Dave Franzel looks out from beneath his faded ball cap at the gust coming down off Deck Point on the southeast side of St. Thomas, USVI. “It likes to go left up here,” he says, pulling on the backstay of his IC24 as we practice for the upcoming races of the St. Thomas International Regatta. Below deck, empty beer bottles roll and clink in the bilge. Up top, Franzel’s trimmed white beard ruffles in the wind; the skin on his knuckles is tan and leathery, and his eyes are as blue as the Caribbean waters he now calls home. He looks as though he’s been in the islands for a lifetime, but the truth is it took him 30 years of running Boston’s premier adult sailing program before he realized…

SPRING RANKINGS, NO. 4 COED 01 Stanford 01 Yale 03 Charleston 04 Dartmouth 05 Navy 06 Georgetown 07 Bowdoin 08 Hobart & Wm. Smith 09 Boston College 10 Brown WOMEN 01 Brown 02 MIT 03 Yale 04 Charleston 05 Boston College 06 Cornell 07 Dartmouth 08 Pennsylvania 09 Hobart & Wm. Smith 10 Harvard The University of Georgia Sailing Team hit a high point this spring when named Competitive Sports Club Sport of the Year at the university. For the sailors, such recognition is four years in the making. “We’ve been working tirelessly for the past four years to check all of the boxes, satisfy the club sports requirement, and most importantly—to be the best club we can be for our members,” says Allison Chenard, the race team captain. “It’s…

When I first started sailing sportboats more than a decade ago, I was sailing a Melges 24, and our coach, Vince Brun, said, “The big difference between this boat and other keelboats is the skinny keel.” I quickly discovered how right he was. Sportboats love speeding through the water to increase flow over the blades, and when turning, the blades can stall much easier. Having said that, the difference between sailing a skinny-keel sportboat and a more traditional keelboat, such as an Etchells, is not dramatic; it simply requires tweaking your style. For example, if you want to have a great start in either boat, you line up at a good build angle, hold straight until the boat is full speed and then smoothly carve up to a close-hauled angle…

IN THE GOOD OL’ DAYS of pirates and scallywags, the boarding party was a known commodity. Crews practiced it like sailors practice roll tacks today. Sadly, with changes in social norms, this skill has fallen from grace. Notice how unprepared both crews are for the opportunity presented. A few centuries ago, all the drinks and sandwiches in the enemy’s cooler—and maybe a winch handle or two—would have already been pillaged by the time this photo was taken. Change is not always for the better.…