Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2023 från Sailing World

ON the first day of the 2023 J/24 North American Championship on Lake George, New York, whitecaps cover the racecourse frothed by gusting winds tumbling down steep green mountainsides. My mates and I are sailing upwind before the start of the morning’s first race, and the mainsail flogs with each angry gust, the boat heeling and sliding sideways despite our crew being right at maximum weight. We’re at the blurry crossover between using the genoa or the jib, and obviously we’re struggling with the big sail. After we turn downwind and return to the starting area, we agree that we’re big boys and we’ve been sailing the boat for the better part of three decades, so we should be able to handle the genoa. Yet as we reach back and…

WHEN the Rolex International Women’s Keelboat Championship was the pinnacle regatta for every aspiring female, Betsy Alison and her team were annoyingly unbeatable. They won the inaugural event in 1985, and 12 years later, after winning four in a row, the original trophy was retired in Alison’s name. She is the only five-time winner of the Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year Award, and she is the first woman inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame, part of the first class in 2011. After years of racing both with and against her, I can tell you that she practices hard, races even harder, and never, ever gives up. And in an ironic twist of fate, Alison is proving this to be true once again. In 1998, Alison was hired to…

THERE’S a reason why Daniela Moroz, the six-time kiteboard world champion and four-time Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year, is always quick to flash a radiant smile. Happiness comes easy for the 22-year-old foiling phenom from San Francisco, which most certainly has something to do with her parents, her upbringing on, in and now above the water, and the fact that she actually enjoys her training as she pushes ever closer to the Formula Kite’s Olympic debut. “I love pushing myself, and I love seeing how far I can go and how well I can perform,” she says. At the moment, she is performing as expected: fast and faster. In Marseille, France, on the very waters of next year’s Olympic regatta, she won a bronze medal in July and locked in…

I'm kicking myself because I’m late for the first start—there’s a lot of current for 5 knots of breeze, and my timing to the line is way off. I’m last across the starting line. I’m “Deep 6.” But this is three-versus-three team racing, so I’m not alone. Ahead, my teammates are scheming how to advance me to the front. They round the first windward mark in second and third. They’ve done their job well, and my crewmates and I claw our way forward. Having practiced how to convert this losing combination, they immediately slow the pace of the race and consolidate against our opponents’ 4-5 positions as we round mark two of the boxshaped racecourse and turn downwind. If you’re unfamiliar with “3v3” team racing, pay attention because there’s a…

“AFTER our crash at the worlds, Freddie got bandaged up, 13 stitches, and we were able to sail the rest of the day and hold our lead,” Asher Beck relates now. “All in all, not too bad a day, except for Freddie’s stitches and using our drop.” He got that out with a straight face. Even with a driver who couldn’t bend one knee, the pair went on to win two more races and, finishing seventh, become the only boat with three firsts at the 420 Youth Worlds of 2023. Looking back at the 12-race series sailed out of the Spanish port of Alicante, Parkin says: “We finished up well, but there was an eighth that turned out to be a black flag. We had to eat 45 points.” There…

Taking the time to do quick, rough calculations at the beginning of a project can help you save on money and frustration in the long run. This can be especially helpful if you're new to working with epoxy and haven't quite developed the intuition yet for how far your epoxy will go. Here are some numbers we've collected over the years for estimating epoxy coverage when working with our WEST SYSTEM" Accessories. Spreading Epoxy with a 809 Notched Spreader The WEST SYSTEM 809 Notched Spreader is a great tool to know how thick you are applying epoxy. I use the 809 Notched Spreader for spreading neat epoxy on tabletops for an even film thickness or for spreading thickened epoxy when bonding and fairing. With neat (unthickened epoxy), the peaks will…

A couple of years ago, I noticed that the bottom member of the double-hung window in my office dormer had begun to rot. Knowing it would be difficult to buy a matching replacement, I decided to repair the window using WEST SYSTEM®. Epoxy and fiberglass. I removed the sash from the frame and took it to my shop. The first step was to remove the rotted wood. It turned out the damage was extensive, affecting the wood all the way through the bottom member and into the vertical member. Although the outside surface of the bottom member was flat, the inside surface incorporated a groove about a half-inch wide. Using thin aluminum sheet metal, I fashioned a mold that duplicated the shape of the groove and the bottom surface of…

IT’S early evening on April 27. The waters are calm off Les Sable d’Olonne, France, and out from the fog emerges the 36-foot cutter Minnehaha. The one soul on board is 40-year-old South African Kirsten Neuschäfer—the Golden Globe Race’s heroine and, at this moment, the first woman to win a solo around-the-world race. Exactly 235 days earlier, as the lone female in a fleet of 16 seasoned singlehanded sailors, she’d set forth from France with a singular objective, and as she crossed the finish line, she may well have been the person least surprised by the outcome. After all, from the moment she’d entered the unique “retro” highseas, high-stakes contest, she was in it to win it—never mind that she’d never raced offshore in her entire life. “When I signed…

AT a recent coed Grandmasters Team Race Regatta, a teammate told me he didn’t understand why there were women-only sailboat races—as if to say, what’s the point? His comment was a brave one in today’s “woke” world, but it’s something that men and women alike probably think about a lot more than they talk about. Yet it raises a valid conundrum as our predominantly male sport pushes toward wider female inclusion: Why isolate women to their own sideshows when the longterm goal is organic integration across the sport? As I listened to his comments, many of which I’ve heard before, I thought about the fact that several signature women’s events, like the International Women’s Keelboat Regatta and the Santa Maria Cup, are either dead or not as popular as they…

WITH the 2023 Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series bidding farewell, and thanks to the sun-soaked action in St. Petersburg, Florida, in February, the series swapped coasts in March for the second stop in San Diego, birthplace of West Coast civilization and the California burrito, and a mecca of year-round sailing that churns out champions. Ninety-six boats across 13 fleets set out from the San Diego and Coronado yacht clubs each morning to the dual racecourses of San Diego Bay and the vast Pacific. On the ocean course, local Beneteau 36.7 sailors witnessed one of the greatest upsets in modern class history when Peter Cochran’s Rode Rage crew halted the 11-year regatta winning streak of Chick Pyle and his team on Kea. It was indeed a battle of the Bennies…

WHEN speed comes up in a debrief with your team, ask yourself: Did we put ourselves in a position to be fast on the racecourse? If the answer is no, do not waste your time on the topic. A few things have to be good enough before you leave the dock. Will your sails and hull allow you to be competitive? Is your team close to the overall target weight? The best sailors can make slow boats and old sails go fast, but for most of us mere mortals, it’s much harder with bad gear. There are a few more caveats on the racecourse. If your upwind lane is compromised, you cannot evaluate your boatspeed. Even the fastest sailors in the fleet cannot defy the physics of being on another…

At Gougeon Brothers, Inc. we are always measuring the ultimate strength of our epoxy products, their adhesive strength, and the strength of the resulting composite laminates (The values measured are often impressive, and the numbers for real-world applications may seem unbelievable). For example, the tensile strength on our Technical Datasheet (TDS) for 105 Epoxy Resin® and 205 Fast Hardener® is 7,900 psi. This means I could easily hang my Chevrolet® Silverado with a full payload using a 1" x 1" casting of epoxy! This is true in a perfect application, but our common sense tells us that it is risky. That common sense may be because we understand the need for a safety factor (Sr) in our calculations. A safety factor is the ratio of the strength of the material…

AS the high-noon sun blazes the waters of the Long Island Sound, there’s no wind or even a ripple in sight. Dozens of college sailing teams shelter in tents erected on the US Merchant Marine Academy pier. It’s the fourth and final day of the 2023 ICSA Open Dinghy National Championship as racers, PROs and spectators alike wait patiently for the breeze to fill. With a 5 o’clock cutoff time, the postponement flag hangs limp. A palpable tension and anticipation are building. Something incredible is about to happen. A gentle sea breeze finally emerges a few hours later, and the race committee scurries into action to run three races in each division. The winning sailors find a rhythm with the wind and the current, in tune with what is above…

MONICA Morgan has come a long way from working at a Subway in Chicago as a teenager to raise money to join the racing team at the Chicago YC at Belmont Harbor. Now, at age 39, she has become a highly sought-after dinghy and keelboat crew. Her name is on a lengthy and growing list of championships, including four J/24 North American titles, two J/24 National Championships, the J/24 Midwinters, a pair of Lightning Masters Championships, a Lightning North American Championship and the Bacardi Cup in the VX One. And those are only the ones she can remember. When not racing, you can find her deep in fiberglass work at Morgan Marine, a Florida speed shop she runs with her husband, Chris. On any given day, you might find her…

St. Petersburg Challenger Team Matros (S2 7.9) Tom and Mary Bryant, leaders of the Michigan-based Matros, have confidence they’ll be contenders in the BVI after winning the S2 7.9 class’s Midwinter Championship in St. Petersburg. The trick, they say, will be to “set up the boat each day for the conditions.” Little do they know, it’s the same every day in the BVI—trades are trades. San Diego Challenger Team Space Cadet (VX One) Emerging from the San Diego regatta as the top VX One team in the class’s regatta debut, skipper Charlie Welsh, of Newport Beach, California, will lead his teammates Liz Swain and Carolyn Smith to the BVI, with one big challenge: transitioning from their nimble sportboat to the cruisy charter boat they’ve earned. Not to worry, Welsh says,…

WHEN I tell people my husband and I race competitively together in a two-person dinghy, the usual response is something like, “No way! We’d be divorced,” or “That would be a marriage-ender for us.” While I completely understand this sentiment, for Jonathan and me, it’s been just the opposite—a marriage-builder. We came to sailing together as part of our courtship, and it’s a foundational piece of our life together. I sailed Lasers and 470s at the national and international levels in the 1980s and, of course, Jonathan was pretty accomplished himself. Our first regatta together was the US Tasar North Americans in 1988, which started a 35-year relationship with the class and racing as a team. Since then, in addition to many local regattas, we’ve sailed eight Tasar World Championships,…

THE Paris 2024 Olympic Games will be the first time there will be gender equity in the sailing competition determined by an equal number of male and female athletes, along with the number of medals that can be won, a momentous achievement that took 50 years of effort by sailing’s leadership and recognition by the International Olympic Committee. With the benefit of hindsight, one might wonder why gender equity in sailing wasn’t automatic when the modern Games were reestablished in 1896. A good question for historians, but we are in a better place now. The opportunities for women have grown substantially over the past few decades, and the performance of female sailors has improved as a direct result. The days when women had limited opportunities are behind us, which is…

When someone says "fiberglass", people may envision a shiny boat hull or even pink insulation, but a composite repair professional pictures a pure white fabric that could be woven in multiple ways and is available in multiple thicknesses. Specifically, fiberglass is the reinforcing fiber used in most marine composites. When epoxy encapsulates fiberglass, it becomes a Fiber Reinforced Plastic (FRP) material. Since you are reading this article in Epoxyworks-and are hopefully enjoying it-let’s assume that the plastic component of FRP materials will be WEST SYSTEM" Epoxy. This article will focus on the different fiberglass fabrics we offer to use with WEST SYSTEM Epoxy. The fabrics we offer are similar in strength (per unit thickness), but their differences are important to understand so that you can select the most appropriate fabric.…

As a beginner to intermediate epoxy user, we focus a lot of effort on learning techniques for mixing and applying epoxy. While these skills are important, there are other aspects to epoxy success that most of us only learn through experience. Luckily, or unluckily, depending on how you want to look at it, I've learned a lot about what not to do from working on my own projects. Through my experiences, and hours hanging around our GBI Technical Advisors and their projects, I've learned a few approaches to help make things go smoother. Hopefully, some of the knowledge I've gained can help you on your next project. Have a Well Developed Plan It’s easy to think to yourself, "This will be easy. I’ II just slap a little fiberglass on…