Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2021 från Sailing World

The ol’ J/24 Crack of Noon doesn’t leave home often. Its longtime caretaker, Ian Scott, is a busy guy in the summertime, bottling and delivering crisp, clean natural spring water to thirsty and demanding customers. Come June, the rest of his aging crew are busy too, yours truly included, with all the usual excuses. But we show up to race on Thursday nights, as we have for decades, because by 5 o’clock our skipper has the rig tuned, the beer on ice, and the sails on deck. You could say we’re Pavlovian to the sound of ice cubes tumbling onto cans in a cooler. While the competition and fleet size here in Newport, Rhode Island, is a shadow of its former glory, 10 boats regularly show up, so it’s still…

Mixed-doublehanded distance racing was supposed to be the next great Olympic discipline. Sailing’s equivalent of the marathon, the International Olympic Committee recently nixed it. This, of course, was bad news for fledgling teams with dreams of Paris 2024. One such squad was that of American sailor Jesse Fielding and Francesca Clapcich, the 33-year-old two-time Olympian and Volvo Ocean Race veteran from Trieste, Italy. In the summer of 2020, Clapcich and Fielding had kick-started a campaign with the backing of a private donor and State Street Bank. Their two-boat Beneteau Figaro 3 training was going full-speed when the Olympic rug got yanked, as did most of their funding. Now what? Their backers were still keen to support a mixed-gender offshore team, so off to France they went with one last handful…

My watch reads 1:58 a.m. as I step up through the hatch and into a darkness so complete that focusing on the horizon causes an instantaneous shift in perspective—all the angles are turned counterclockwise. At the helm, shadowy figures sway, illuminated by the green glow of the compass. Beyond the transom, whitecaps cut through the black sea before everything vanishes under storm clouds. It’s our second night in the Celtic Sea, and we are well past Land’s End, sailing north for the Fastnet Light. I climb up to the rail and sit between my pals Craig Nann and Adam Perlmutter. Clipping to the jackline, I peer over the side at waves, maybe 10 to 15 feet from peak to trough. Turning forward, the red digits of the mast display glow…

Ahead, through bleary eyes, the lights of the Mackinac Bridge float on the horizon like a mirage. The twinkling blob is a distant target in the pitch-black night, the next waypoint on our 280-mile race from boisterous Chicago to sleepy Mackinac Island. All around us are blinking lights: reds, greens and whites of channel markers and the slower boats we’re creaming past at what sure feels like 15 knots. My co-skipper and I are sleep-deprived, hungry and thirsty for beer, and while we can’t yet smell the horse piss, we’re closing in on the finish at a wicked pace. My concentration flicks between the bow, its angle to the waves, and the tightly curled luff of our bone-white masthead spinnaker. Standing so I can see better, my left foot is…

It’s good to have rules of thumb to help you sail the boat as fast as possible in all conditions. Such guidelines can help the skipper drive their best and give the crew a common purpose in how they react to changes in wind. One distinction that can help you increase speed is to identify if you should be telltale or heel-angle sailing. In lighter winds, telltale sailing is appropriate—the skipper works hard to stream the telltales at all times for maximum speed, and the crew moves around to create perfect heel. In overpowered heel-angle sailing conditions, the skipper can steer much more freely, focusing on a consistent heel angle while the crew hikes hard. In light air, it’s all about maintaining speed; in breeze, it’s all about the heel…

“TIMING IS EVERYTHING,” the old proverb says, advising that success is related to the trigger of a certain chain of events. Be that as it may, as this relates to sailing fast and tippy boats, “Timing,” I would add, “is patience.” All sailors know the importance of a clear and audible countdown before anyone makes a break for the other side. We can think of “three, two, one” as our “ready, set, go.” When someone blitzes at “ready,” however, the outcome will inevitably be bad, as our careening catamaran crew can now affrm. Any good racing sailor will relate—it’s easy to get amped up in the heat of the moment, but next time, wait for the “go” before you go over the falls. —Dr. Crash…

Scarfing wood together dates back ages. Scarfing is the process of cutting corresponding angles (or sometimes shapes) on two similar pieces of wood and gluing them together to create a larger piece of lumber or plywood. The most common place scarfing is used is in building a stitch-and-glue canoe or kayak. I had plans to build two kayaks over the winter, with five scarfs on each hull. I’d only done a few scarf joints over the years, so this was an excellent opportunity to learn the pros and cons of the West System® 875 Scarffer. There are several different ways to join plywood but for stitch-and-glue construction, scarfing allows more of a natural bend to the wood that you can’t achieve with a butt block or a half lap joint.…

Begin with the Right Tool for the Job The application tool used to apply the epoxy coat will have a significant bearing on the outcome. I prefer our West System® 800 Roller Covers. Their 1/8"-thick foam provides excellent control over film thickness. They are less likely than thicker (paint) rollers to make the epoxy overheat, and they leave less stipple on the coated surface. The 800 Roller Covers are easy to cut into smaller sections for tipping off uncured epoxy coatings. After applying the epoxy coating with a foam roller, tip it off by dragging a cut section of foam roller over the surface. This smooths the coat of epoxy and lets you control how much epoxy stays on the surface. As an experiment, I decided to roll coats of…

I guess I’m one of those guys who finds retirement much busier than work. In fact, I wonder how I ever found time to work. One of the first projects I started after retiring was helping my brother Nelson build two Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC) stand-up paddleboards (SUPs). We were building them for the best kind of friend—the paying kind. Choosing a Model CLC offers various options to fit their customer’s pocket book, ambition, and skill level. (1) You can simply order the plans and cut all the parts from plywood in your own shop. I doubt many take that option because of the inner grid work. (2) The next option is ordering the kit with all the parts delivered pre-cut by CLC. This is the best option, in my…

Close your eyes and imagine a 2,200-mile ocean race where you start out going upwind in light air. Not very exciting—yet. But within a few hours, you transition to a few hundred miles of brisk and sometimes rough close reaching across a chilly ocean under gray skies. Not fun—yet. Then, over the course of half a day, you go through the boat’s entire reaching sail arsenal until the wind is aft and you are surfing downwind in 18-knot trade winds for days. Now it’s getting good. But wait—it gets better. The wind builds into the mid-20s, and the swells stack up neatly. You’re shredding toward the finish as a full moon reveals dramatic volcanic peaks of an island chain, which is your final destination. You open your eyes to behold…

“Our win is completely due to the team we had,” says Jack McGuire, a 37-year-old yacht broker from Annapolis, Maryland, who raced with a band of brothers and childhood friends to win the coveted Everett B. Morris Trophy. “The camaraderie was unmatched.” Trimming main and calling tactics was John Mollicone, McGuire’s coach while growing up at Rhode Island’s East Greenwich YC. His brother Josh and his brother-in-law, John von Schwarz, were the boat’s spinnaker and jib trimmers. Three longtime friends, Dave Jurkowski, Nick St. Jean and Doug Nisbet, manned the pit, mast and bow, respectively. His brother Todd helped deliver the boat and prepare it for racing. “It was definitely a family affair both on and off the water, but Block Island Race Week always has been,” McGuire says. “I…

Jim Brady had the kind of sailing career that ambitious young Optimist sailors dream about—world champion, Olympic medalist, America’s Cup tactician and Rolex Yachtsman of the Year. But these days, you’ll find him pottering with the family in his picnic boat on Portland’s Casco Bay. Brady grew up in Florida, son of an Air Force pilot and colonel. “We were fortunate enough to live on the water in Florida, so I always had an interest in being not just in the water, but on the water as well,” he says. It was his father that introduced the family to sailing with the purchase of a Hobie Cat when Brady was 8 years old. “One thing led to another, and I guess this was probably about 1978 when the J/24 came…

More than four years since work began on the largest-ever creation from Nautor’s Swan, the ClubSwan 125, Skorpios finally launched for its Russian owner, Dmitry Rybolovlev, and by the time you read this, the giant new craft will have competed in its first event, the Rolex Fastnet Race. The Italian-owned Finnish builder claims it to be the fastest monohull ever launched. This was further confirmed when the RORC Rating Office awarded the boat its highest-ever IRC TCC of 2.149. Seeing the yacht at first glance, aside from the striking yellow scorpion design that extends from its black carbon sails down to the black carbon hull (a trust associated with Rybolovlev owns the Greek island after which the yacht is named), Skorpios resembles an elongated VO70. It feels like one too,…

They don’t know it at the time, but Great Britain’s 49er all-stars, Dylan Fletcher-Scott and Stuart Bithell, cast themselves into the lead roles of the most captivating race of the Tokyo Olympic regatta. Before the start of the men’s skiff medal race in Enoshima, the British sailors had to not only win the race, but also find a way to put one boat between themselves and New Zealand’s superstar pair of Peter Burling and Blair Tuke. Let me repeat that: They had to beat nine other supremely talented skiff teams and the reigning Olympic champions—the two guys in the yellow jerseys who always sail faster when they’re under the gun. Enoshima’s capricious winds have been challenging and random throughout the Olympic regatta, and this day is no different, with windshifts,…

I purchased my 1953 Chevrolet 3100 pickup truck in 1975 from my best friend’s older brother. Years earlier, it had been the first vehicle I’d ever driven. For the next 29 years, it was stored outside and used sporadically. In 2004, I half-heartedly began restoring it and finally got serious about the project when I retired in 2018. After being exposed to Minnesota weather for many years, most of the truck’s wooden bed was rotten or missing. With a few sections that survived and the help of YouTube, I was able to reproduce the eight wooden boards close to the original ones. I used some black walnut that my dad—a woodworker for many years at a local grandfather clock company—obtained that wasn’t up to their standards. However, the truck’s original…

The Club 420 is a seaworthy and stable boat design that’s popular in youth sail training. It features a durable, reinforced hull, is simple to sail, and popular in North American youth sailing competitions. The “420” indicates the boat’s length in centimeters. Prep Crew to the Rescue Last September, we made a social media post requesting the donation of a Club 420 dinghy. This led to a road trip to Milwaukee Community Sailing Center (MCSC) to rescue two Club 420s whose next tack was towards the dumpster. We brought along three kids from the program’s prep crew. The mutual feeling of excitement for the boats’ future from our crew and MCSC was palpable. If boats have feelings, this pair of Club 420s were as excited for their next adventure as…

When I retired three years ago, I had plans to do a lot of camping. We have a small travel trailer that we love, yet there are times when camping alone that I prefer to keep things simple by leaving the trailer at home. Sleeping in the back of my small SUV works fine for me. There is even room to bring my canine pal along. One of the challenges with car camping is getting fresh air without allowing mosquitoes in for their blood-letting endeavors. I decided to devise a simple window screen that can be easily attached and removed. The screen panels that I came up with can be made in a weekend. The thing I like most about them (besides the fact that they keep the mosquitoes out)…

If Alex Caizergues succeeds at breaking the speed sailing world record in 2022, it will be his third time around using a kite, but otherwise completely different from his first two records. Those marks—50.57 knots in 2008 and 54.10 in 2010—were set when foiling boards were continually upping the 500-meter mark, sometimes more than once a year. Caizergues’ 2010 run added 3 knots to what the famed trimaran L’Hydroptere had shown us only a year before. But all those efforts ran into cavitation trouble at about 52 knots, that point when flow over the foils boils into vapor—the point at which control vanishes. For his early records, Caizergues used a hydrofoil to lift him above the water. Now, with his Syroco team based in Marseille, France, he intends to use…

If you must know, it takes Marlene Plumley “about 5.3 minutes” to methodically clean the bottom of a J/70 in the water. She would know because she does every boat the same way every time, and as the diver of choice for many top teams in the class today, she could practically do it with her eyes closed. “Starboard stern first,” says Plumley, who travels around the country servicing J/70 and J/111 teams. “I start with the starboard side of the rudder, which is the first and last surface I clean. Then I go forward, take a breath, go down, and clean a 2-foot-wide swath from the middle of the boat. Come up, take a breath and go back down, rinse and repeat.” J/70 class rules prohibit bottom cleaning using…

When Scott Harestad describes sailing MC Scows, his eyes light up with the expectation of a kid on Christmas morning. You can almost feel the exuberance. “The acceleration in the puffs is just amazing!” he says gesturing outward, his face slightly reddening with excitement and eyes widening like he’s suddenly been transported onto a wild reach on some distant lake. His speech quickens, and he shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “And,” quickly catching a breath, “you’re constantly working the controls—cunningham, vang and mainsheet—to keep it there.” Then he’s suddenly on dry land again and just as quickly asks, “Have you sailed one?” I have, so he pivots to Jen Edney, our photographer, who is standing nearby. “How about you? Ever sail an MC?” And before Edney has…

To prevent future issues, it was important to investigate why the wood in the transom had rotted. The water intrusion appeared to be coming from the screws holding the rub rail onto the boat. To evaluate the extent of the damage to the transom, we needed to remove the inner fiberglass laminate. We pulled out the motor and removed the transom assembly to gain access to the inner laminate. This way, enough of the structure was left intact so the hull maintained its shape. The trailer was supporting the hull so additional blocking was not needed and we only worked on the transom. Our plan was to repair the plywood in the transom from the inside so we wouldn’t need to perform cosmetic repairs to the outside fiberglass laminate; it’s…

In 1947, my parents took me to Gatlinburg, Tennessee for my first vacation. I was fascinated by a wood turner and resolved that I would one day learn the craft. In the early 1970s, I found an ancient used lathe in a flea market. I bought a box set of chisels at Sears and set out to learn the craft. I didn’t have a teacher and I made a lot of mistakes. During my first 20 years of turning wood, I finished my work with Danish oil, lacquer, varnish, tung oil or polyurethane. In 2003, I switched to West System® Epoxy, and I have never looked back. I keep a careful record of my work: to date I have finished over 600 pieces with West System Epoxy. Here again, I…

The project, while simple in scope, posed a few complications: • The two original thru-hulls were quite close together• These thru-hulls were close to the centerline of the bow• From the inside, the thru-hulls were near some laminated stiffening for the bow as well as some tabbing to the inside liner We reached out to Gougeon Brothers, Inc. and were connected with Technical Advisor Don Gutzmer. We sent some pictures over and he assessed our situation. This was truly the best thing we could have done. Don’s technical expertise was evident throughout our discussions. He recommended we start by reinforcing the inside area with two layers of biaxial fiberglass cloth before making the repair from the outside. On the outside, to eliminate the obsolete thru-hull, we needed to taper the…

I’ve always wondered if LuLu wasn’t the largest trailerable sailboat on record. I’ve been sailing this 35', self-designed and homebuilt motor sailor since launching her out of Morro Bay, California in 2010. I laid the keel in 1993 after three years of testing on a half-scale model I’d built. Her construction consists of ¾" planks bent over bulkheads on strongback and closely fitted, layered joints held together with a lot of West System® Epoxy. I also used West System® when I sheathed her with fiberglass. Because LuLu is water-ballasted, she’s easily towed with my ¾-ton 2015 GMC pickup. We now sail her exclusively out of Marina Del Rey, California and will cruise to Catalina. Lulu’s flood hatches total 3'2" of bottom area, allowing her to morph into a 14,800 lb.…