Innehållsförteckning för November - December 2016 från Sailing World

THE WASZP’S PORT wing bar rests on the RIB’s tube, holding the boat steady like a kickstand while I slide in and kneel in the middle of its narrow hull. I reach back for the tiller with my right hand and lean forward to take the mainsheet in my left. I exhale and then swallow my pride. Lord, don’t make me look like a fool in front of these guys. I turn to the gentleman in charge of the Waszp demo, a mop-headed Australian who makes foil sailing look oh so easy and effortless. “Listen,” I say. “I’ve never — ever — foiled. What do I do?” “No worries,” he responds with a grin. “Just pull on the mainsheet, and once you’re up on the foils, use that to balance…

ARRIVING AT MY first mountain-lake regatta was nothing out of the ordinary: the hustle and bustle of boat launching and rigging, friends reconnecting, and competitors scoping out venue conditions. What was out of the ordinary, however, were the 14,000-foot peaks looming above the lake, creating some of the most challenging sailing conditions these traveling sailors had experienced. They’d made the pilgrimage into the mountains of Colorado for the Lake Dillon Open, an annual mountain-lake sailing institution. The Lake Dillon YC, in Dillon, Colorado, 70 miles west of Denver, is the highest operating yacht club in the United States, at 9,017 feet above sea level. The 50-square-mile reservoir lake was formed in the 1960s as a water source for Denver. “Lake sailing is challenging, and it’s dangerous because things happen so…

LASSIE CAME HOME, and now, so has Merlin. It took a while, but who doesn’t love a warm and fuzzy reunion story? When Bill Lee and his classic ultralight displacement boat hit the starting line of the 2017 Transpac, together again, it will be 40 years on from Merlin’s record- setting race that rocked West Coast ocean racing. If you weren’t around in 1977, you can’t imagine the controversy. The bar talk. The arguments. Smaller, light-for-the-time Bill Lee designs had won the Transpac, from Los Angeles to Honolulu, in 1973 and 1975, and now the Transpacific YC’s handicappers were trying to hold the line. The “establishment” took it for granted that the ULDBs were not weatherly and might even be unsafe. Lee was a lightning rod, and his mechanical engineering…

AN INTERESTING question came up in a recent email from my longtime sailing friend Bill Van Winkle, of New Jersey. “I’m wondering how many other sailing or yacht clubs have an active and influential past commodores group like we have at the Shrewsbury Sailing & Yacht Club,” he asked rhetorically. The question made me think about the ongoing contributions of past commodores at yacht clubs around the country. At many clubs, immediate past commodores continue to serve on the board of directors for another year or move on to a nominating committee. I was inspired to learn more about Van Winkle’s group, so a few days later I made the 190-mile drive from my home in Annapolis up to Oceanport, New Jersey. There I met eight former commodores on a…

It’s impossible to appreciate the marvel of a superyacht until you see one up close. It’s breathtaking to watch one charge by under full sails that are spoken of in acres rather than square feet. These sail packages, and the highly engineered hardware that controls them, are truly the engines that are turning these multimillion-dollar ocean liners into grand-prix machines. Composites, carbon rigs, 70-ton captive winches the size of small automobiles, and hydraulic advances have all contributed to the acceleration of superyacht racing. In lockstep have been the wardrobes, blends of best-available aramids and carbon. But when it comes to the sail inventories, there is one limiting factor: sailhandling. Sure, you can make the sails bigger, but there’s only so much a boat and its crew can handle. What is…

AFTER A STINT AT the Chicago Match Race Center and winning the Congressional Cup with Ian Williams, I had my eyes opened to using match-race tactics in fleet racing to shave points from my scorecard. The beauty of match-race tactics is that they don’t have to be used against one boat; you can target a group of boats or the entire fleet. Here are a few plays I use. ATTACK ON THE FINAL RUN Bill Hardesty taught me the value of passing boats on the way to the finish, especially downwind. Hardesty is always in attack mode. If a boat (or a small group of them) is close ahead, you can bet he has his sights on it. One on one, attackmode tactics are best on the final run, when…

We have all sailed with skippers who occasionally lose the plot and rage at their crew for a perceived botched call. High-speed tactics are tough and no one gets every shift right, but this helmsman is taking his hissy fit too far. — Dr. Crash KB1 RACER High performance racing demands high performance kit. Kit that helps you move. Helps you breathe. Helps you win. The KB1 is engineered to perform. Tough. Versatile. Lightweight. Waterproof. Everything needed to take your performance to the next level. Next generation waterproof protection for the performance racer. Our new 4 Dot™ 3 layer fabric is the perfect blend of waterproof barrier, breathable comfort and durability. GILLNA.COM…

I HAD THE HONOR of coaching our American Nacra 17 team of Bora Gulari and Louisa Chafee at the Rio Olympics. It was a great experience on many levels, but I came away feeling that the coaching aspect of the Olympics is too dominant. Today, at a typical Olympic-class event, you’ll find that each sailor competing has his or her own coach boat, typically a 16-foot RIB with a 60 hp engine. I’m not against coaching per se, especially if it helps the sailors improve, but I’m not convinced that hands-on coaching at major events such as the Olympics is necessary or warranted. It’s gotten to the point where having so many support boats on the water detracts from the sailors’ experience. Once upon a time, sailors had to get…

I FIRST MET Mitch Booth, of Australia, when I was racing Tornadoes and he was winning Tornado Olympic medals. He’s also pretty good behind a drum kit, which I learned late one night at the 1991 Tornado Worlds. Anyway, we are about the same age, which now finds us nearly four decades removed from our teen years. Recently, Mitch and I were talking about what kept us connected to the sport. We agreed it wasn’t our successes (I’ve had some, he’s had more) but rather those early years of freedom to completely screw around and discover sailing for ourselves. We had absolutely unstructured adventures, dangerous at times, all of which would likely freak out most modern-day helicopter parents. For a teenage sailor in the 1970s and 1980s, this meant getting…

WHEN YOU SEE pictures of top pro teams hiking upwind, shoulder to shoulder, head to toes, know that they’re not doing it for the photographer. It’s fast. Setting up where your crew is positioned might seem straightforward, but if you look more closely at the differences in how your boat reacts by moving crew around and experimenting, you might find there’s a better setup for your crew weight placement to get maximum speed upwind. Here are a few tips I’ve used over the years to get the team’s weight oriented correctly. Use the widest part of the boat. It seems pretty basic, and maximum beam won’t necessarily be the exact spot to place crew, but situating the crew at the boat’s widest part will get their weight outboard the farthest,…

MIKE GORMAN walked into a clearing of loblolly pines in Centre ville, Maryland, on a warm October morning in 2014. With his 18-month-old daughter, Hazel, perched on his shoulders, he gazed into the summer’s lingering humidity, admiring three 26-foot trees that would become the newest Log Canoe, the only one built in the past 35 years. For the 33-year-old shipwright, Bufflehead wasn’t entirely a selfserving ploy to build a raceboat and have his employer foot the bill, although Tom Sawyer would have been proud. Part of Gorman’s intent was to add another racing Log Canoe to the Chesapeake Bay’s dwindling fleet, but the ultimate cause was to use the project as a training exercise for the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum’s staff and volunteers, who would later restore Edna E. Lockwood,…

STARTING LINE LOCAL FAVORITES BY PETER CRONIN IN THE DAYS before the Secor Volvo Fishers Island Sound Race, a oneday multileg distance youth race in Club 420s, we studied the weather as if it were our job. Connecticut’s Fishers Island Sound is notoriously calm in August, with the current often moving faster than the wind, but SailFlow was forecasting winds in the lower 20s with gusts to 30 — exactly the conditions my skipper and I prefer. Zach Champney and I had sailed the race’s first edition in 2015, so we had a sense of how it would go, but at the skippers meeting, the organizer, Brandon Flack, gave us a lot more detail, reviewing the specific course options for each leg and reminding us of the navigational hazards we…

IN THIS, THE SECOND in a series of articles covering important rule changes for 2017, we look at new wording in new Rule 18.2(d). This rule contains one important new statement, followed by two old, familiar statements that were in the last sentence of Rule 18.2(c) from 2009 through 2016. At first reading, the new statement seems simple, even obvious. When we dig into its implications, however, you will see it requires careful study. (Note that to make room for new Rule 18.2(d), current Rules 18.2(d) and 18.2(e) will be renumbered as 18.2(e) and 18.2(f) in 2017.) NEW RULE 18.2(D) (d) Rules 18.2(b) and (c) cease to apply when the boat entitled to mark-room has been given that mark-room, or if she passes head to wind or leaves the zone. When you enter…

I first saw outdoor ceiling fans while vacationing on Isla Mujeres, Mexico, just north of Cancun. These fans are ubiquitous and evidently inexpensive. Used both indoors and outdoors, they’re mounted on 3"x 3" concrete beams. Some of those beams also support sun shades, but usually the fans are completely open to the weather. We purchased a waterproof outdoor-rated ceiling fan and for many years used it under the shed roof over our patio. In the course of renovating a summer kitchen and open porch into an allseason summer room, we recently replaced the shed roof with a retractable awning. The outdoor fan makes the open or awning-covered patio very pleasant on beastly hot, airless days. Here is how I mounted the fan, using WEST SYSTEM Epoxy for laminating and coating.…

Adagio, our beloved trimaran, was designed and built by Meade and Jan Gougeon in 1969 and launched in the summer of 1970. After undergoing a minor refit this past winter, she still has what it takes to win. We’re extremely proud that Adagio placed first in the multihull division of 2016 Bell’s Beer Bayview Mackinac Race, which spans almost 300 miles of often treacherous Great Lakes. This year’s race was fast, with Adagio finishing in just over 29 hours. The fleet had a beautiful, mostly downwind run to the Cove Island buoy and then a thrilling reach most of the way to Mackinac Island. Of course, Lake Huron had to throw 35 knot winds, rapidly shifting direction, at us about 40 miles from the finish line, but Adagio continued strong.…