Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2022 från Sailing World

OK, sit down, and don’t freak out. We’re no longer calling our NOOD, NOOD. But don’t worry, the regatta series is not going anywhere—except bigger and better as the shiny new Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series. Yes, that’s a mouthful of words for a regatta name, but so too is the National Offshore One-Design Regatta, which is what Sailing World’s smartypants editors and marketers who came before me decided on when they launched their bold regatta series in Newport, Rhode Island. Back then, in 1989, the big-boat one-designs of the time, loaded with rail meat, traded tacks on Rhode Island Sound—on the sacred waters of the America’s Cup. The nightly parties onshore, with hundreds of thirsty sailors saddled up to the bar for the bottomless rum pour, were raucous…

I’ve been asking myself this lately: As we emerge from our collective pandemic fog (hopefully sooner rather than later), will we go back to the good old days of regatta sailing? Or will some of us each go off in a new direction, following a path forced upon us by the isolation and caution that came with COVID-19? In my last column (“Rebuilding a Team,” Winter 2022), I suggested that now may be a good time to think about our own sailing teams—they’re makeup and how we can rebuild them to meet new goals. But the second part of this is about defining new goals. For myself, I used this winter to think deeply about my sailing projects and my aspirations. My recent seasons as a professional sailor have been…

Bobby Julien, of Delray Beach, Florida, declares himself a “total newbie” to sailboat racing, but by the looks of his team’s scores at the Southernmost Regatta, you’d say he’s pulling your leg. But no, it’s true, he says. The last time he skippered a boat with a tiller, he was 13 years old. Julien can thank his three young’uns for his latest obsession. “My kids started racing six years ago, and after watching them and thinking about it for a few years, I finally decided to do it myself,” he says. But how? And what boat? He asked around, and all recommendations pointed to the J/70. He eventually found one in Houston, and Dingbat’s first team hire was Alec Anderson, who solidified a squad with Chris Waters upfront and pro…

Every Sunday through the New England winter, Andrew Ward plunges into the Atlantic near his home on Shelter Island, New York. “My buddy from Sweden says it’s good for me,” he says. Invigorating as the cold shock may be, Ward is no fool. He knows the better place to take a dip in January is Key West, and that’s where he and his teammates on the J/111 Bravo found themselves scraping for every inch in the final race to win their division. With Bill Hardesty calling tactics, Bravo won the regatta’s first two races, but then fell into a daily pattern of scoring one good race and one stinker. The second-to-last race of the regatta was their worst—a DFL—which left them facing a complex scenario going into the final one-race…

American sailors excelled at the Youth Sailing World Championships this past December in Mussanah, Oman. The impressive performances inspired me to revisit our Jobson Junior All-Star recognitions, which we introduced in 2001. Our roster of 141 All-Star candidates (ranging from 13 to 18 years of age) reads like a Who’s Who of top sailors over the past two decades. In 2001, Andrew Campbell, Molly Carapiet, Clay Johnson, Paige Railey and her brother Zach were on the list. Since that first year, many others continued on to amazing careers, including Olympic sailors Caleb Paine, Charlie Buckingham, Stephanie Roble, Thomas Barrows, Joe Morris, Annie Haeger, Briana Provancha and Graham Biehl. Others have won national championships, including Harry Melges IV, Vincent Porter and Taylor Canfield. Two-thirds of the sailors were selected as All-Americans…

On the truck to Seattle, BO-PEEP II’s tender had suffered split planks in both bilge turns. The planks were also checked and had long gaps, rendering the tender unseaworthy. I made a uniform cut in each long split to clean out the damaged wood and inserted double overlapping graving pieces (sometimes called a Dutchman) with WEST SYSTEM 105 ResinR/205 Fast HardenerR thickened with 404 High-Density Filler. The original iron bolt in the oak stem had corroded and rotted the wood causing more small checks in the area. I carefully cut out the bad wood with a drill and chisel. Only a small amount of good wood remained, leaving the mortise in an irregular in shape. I used several small blocks of wood like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle to fill this…

I frequently use WEST SYSTEMR Epoxy to make exterior repairs on our very old house, which is part stone and part wood. The stone sections date from 1842 and the “newer” wooden parts from 1908. The fir thresholds at the south and east entrances to the elevated kitchen were easily damaged and heavily worn. One day, I had the bright idea to apply a lick of WEST SYSTEM Epoxy to seal the kitchen thresholds and protect them from further wear. I also put a thick coat of pigmented epoxy on the front door threshold when we installed a replica period door. The front door threshold, made of tougher wood and, with its epoxy coat, endures the passage of bicycles several times a day, as well as occasional suitcases, clumsy and/or…

REGATTA DATES St Pete … … 2/18 - 2/20 San Diego … 3/25 - 3/27 Anna polis … 5/13 - 5/15 Chicago 6/10 - 6/12 Marble head … 7/28 - 7/31 BVIC hamps … 10/22 - 10/29…

Ernesto Bertarelli is back. It’s been more than a decade since the Swiss billionaire’s Alinghi sailing team was whitewashed by Larry Ellison’s gigantic trimaran of BMW Oracle Racing in the two-race 33rd America’s Cup (Deed of Gift) Match in 2010. Having often teased his interest in returning to Cup competition over the past few years, Bertarelli and his core sailing team have instead watched from the sidelines while remaining active in the high-performance foiling scene in Europe. But this time, Alinghi isn’t going it alone—they’ve got a powerful and technical partner in Red Bull Racing. While the modern-day Cup has been regularly compared with the high-stakes and hightech world of Formula 1, which is now more popular than ever, the merging of these two formidable sporting teams finally makes the…

ACROSS THE ENTIRE Gulf Yachting Association—Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida—there is one be-all, end-all bragging-rights regatta, and that is the Gulf Yachting Association’s Lipton Cup, born in the first roar of the Roaring Twenties. When a 21st century centennial approached, tradition dictated a schedule of three race days, which were good to go on Labor Day weekend in 2020. How perfect is that? Then came 2020. Strike one. Rescheduling for Labor Day 2021 was a natural, even if the ups and downs of reacting to a pandemic left doubt hanging in the air. Then Hurricane Ida, not COVID-19, blew away Labor Day 2021. Strike two. Will the third time be lucky? Late last fall, the sailors assembled in New Orleans on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, with the full body of…

Austin and Gwen Fragomen’s Interlodge sailing team rolled into Key West with not one, but two slick grand-prix boats: the GL52 for Austin and the Botin 44 for Gwen. The squad of top-shelf pros and their state-of-the-art hardware were no match for the rest of the smaller and much older ORC boats. Interlodge IV won nine of 10 races, losing the one by a mere 3 seconds on corrected time. Some would say it wasn’t fair, but for Olympic 49erFX sailor Stephanie Roble, the results didn’t really matter. It was the experience of a lifetime being part of a big program. Roble drove the 44-footer for the first day, and for the rest of the week she helmed the starts, passing the wheel to Gwen for the remainder of the…

Some people say the mainsail is the trickiest and most important source of power in the inventory, and be that as it may—depending on whom you ask—the headsail is incredibly dynamic and critical to everything that happens behind it with the mainsail. How the wind flows from over, around and behind dictates what happens when that flow reaches the main. Get the jib trim spot on, and the mainsail will do its thing. And with the jib, there are many influences—rig tension, halyard tension, sheet load and angle, to name a few. So, let’s break down the essentials to that flow working and getting the power where you want it. Headstay Tension Let’s start with headstay sag, which creates power in the headsail. In light air, a softer headstay powers…

When you need to repair your fiberglass boat’s balsa core but don’t have any replacement core material on hand, what can you use as an alternative? I tested some different replacement core options to see how they’d perform in flexibility and strength alongside original balsa core in a fiberglass laminate. One popular core material is vertical grain balsa but, if it stays wet for too long, it can start to rot. This may make a soft or spongy spot you can feel if you step on it. If the softened balsa core is near or under a winch, stopper, cleat, or stantion base, you may not notice a problem until the object shifts position when it is under a load. It can be scary to see movement in a part…

I received a call from a friend of mine who owns a 2004 Farrier F33RX folding trimaran, the 33' Nelda Ray. This sailboat is a frequent competitor in regattas on the Great Lakes. The aluminum mast step was compressing the deck and causing laminate failure. I told my friend I’d figure out what went wrong and then fix it so it would never happen again. I’ll outline the process I used to make this successful repair. Before I started the repair, I covered the boat inside and out with a layer of 5-mil plastic sheeting in order to keep things clean. I left exposed only the areas that needed surface preparation. I used painter’s tape to seal the plastic film along the edges. Working as neatly and cleanly as possible…

Philippe Kahn started late, but in a few short years of going hard he won more races than most people manage in a lifetime. Then he declared, “I have to learn how to sail before I die.” If someone told you the man now sails only small boats—after 15 big-boat races from California to Hawaii, three of them doublehanded, two with doublehanded records—you might wonder if a spark had burned out. The way Kahn sees it, no. A light flashed on. But before we get to that, let’s make sure we know who we’re talking about. The short course on Kahn is that he invented the camera phone—and it wasn’t his only score in tech—and it’s been a journey, and now he does his sailing out of the tiny harbor…

When Marty Kullman finally got home after orchestrating his weeklong Southernmost Regatta in Key West, his phone was lighting up. Texts, emails and phone messages, he says, poured in from people thanking him for pulling off the regatta. “It was off the charts how many people actually took the time to reach out and thank me for bringing us back to the best sailing we’ve done in a long time,” Kullman says. “That and the conditions we had were the highlights for me.” The Southernmost got its start in 2021 as a getaway regatta for a small band of J/111 class owners. “That was a bit of a test run,” Kullman says. “There was a lot of connecting with city off icials, the Navy, the Coast Guard and all sorts…

What makes a great tack? It’s simple: whatever technique allows you to maintain the optimal combination of the best VMG during the tack and the fastest acceleration out of the tack. That’s easy to say but tough to do well. In my Interclub dinghy days, in light air, we often looked for opportunities to start a tacking duel with nearby competitors. It didn’t matter which way each boat was going; all we wanted to do was grind them down—keep tacking, gaining on every tack. Eventually, someone prevailed. That’s the power of being able to tack really well, and although you may seldom be in that type of tacking combat, tacking better than nearby boats can give you that extra couple of boat lengths that make the difference between rounding just…

IT’S OBVIOUS TO ME, your trusted Doctor of Nautical Calamities, that sailboat racing is one highly addictive pastime. You’ve got your chess-match-on-the-water element, the physicality of the windiest races, and the brain drain of your all-day drifters. There’s the teamwork, the strive for excellence, the continuing education and—more than anything else—the camaraderie with one’s teammates. It’s easy to get hooked, but not on that anchor rode.…

The motor yacht Bo-Peep II is a 55' bridge deck cruiser designed by Hacker-Fermann Navel Architects Co. of Detroit, Michigan. In 2001, BO-PEEP underwent a major refit with extensive use of WEST SYSTEMR Epoxy. Two decades later, the benefits of this approach are apparent in hull longevity and strength; dry bottom blanks, frames, and keel; a dry bilge; dry bronze thruhull fittings, hardware fasteners staying put; shorter shipyard haul-outs; and the propeller shaft remaining properly aligned. We no longer have rotted planks or loosened fasteners to replace, seams to caulk, or corrosions headaches. Built by Defoe Boat and Motor Works in Bay City, Michigan in 1926, Bo-Peep II has been in my wife Gene’s family since 1951. This mahogany boat was the second of four 55' motor yachts Defoe built…

My friend Chris bought a 33' fiberglass sailboat, a Cal 33, to use as his family cruiser. Because it was an older boat, he knew he had a few projects ahead—including drying out the rudder. Here in Michigan, we haul our boats out of the water for the winter and it gives us a chance to do repairs and inspect under the waterline. After hauling out the boat and storing it in the barn for the winter, Chris asked me to advise him on repairing the rudder. We found two smaller delaminated spots on one side of the rudder and a sizeable one on the other, along with a 6" crack near the rudder shaft. After drilling a few 3/8" drainage holes through the fiberglass skin and into the foam…

Every year we get questions regarding how to spray WEST SYSTEMR Epoxy. Some people want to know how to thin epoxy so it comes out of a spray gun better while others want to know what Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is required for spraying epoxy safely. We give them all the same answer: Don’t do it! In short, epoxy is extremely hazardous when sprayed. Why You Shouldn’t Spray Epoxy To spray epoxy it must be atomized. This means the tiny epoxy molecules will be airborne. You might be saying to yourself, “Of course the particles of epoxy have to be small enough to be airborne Rachael, that’s the definition of spraying it.” Consider other materials you are used to spraying: hairspray, sunscreen, bug spray, just to name a few. Yet,…