Innehållsförteckning för Summer 2025 från Sailing World

St. Petersburg: February 14-16 Annapolis: May 2-4 Detroit: May 30-June 1 Chicago: June 6-8 Marblehead: July 24-27 British Virgin Islands: October 25-November 1 2025 FOLLOW THE REGATTA SERIES @SAILINGWORLDREGATTASERIES • SAILINGWORLD.COM/REGATTA-SERIES • YOUTUBE.COM/SAILINGWORLD…

THE enduring Sunfish, created by Alexander Bryan and Cortland Heyinger back in the early 1950s, remains the most iconic sailing dinghy. But nowadays, there’s more than one fish in the big pond. LaserPerformance (Velum Limited), which owns trademarks to the Laser and the Sunfish, was once the global Sunfish builder, but chronic supply issues forced the International Sunfish Class Association to seek an alternative source. Enter Zim Sailing, in Bristol, Rhode Island, which is now an official builder of the ISCA dinghy. To be clear: An ISCA is not a Sunfish, and only ISCAs are class legal. But then, what of the Sunfish? About 800 miles northwest of Zim’s shop is SERO Innovation, in Marine City, Michigan, which has been licensed by Velum to build the Sunfish (and Laser) for…

RACE for every point” is a phrase heard often at regattas, and that was certainly the case for many teams at the 2025 Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta in Annapolis in early May, the second stop of the series. Three days packed with races for 240 teams in 18 classes gave every sailor an opportunity to make good on the cliche, especially the team on Andy Graff’s J/88, Exile, which won in its fleet after a high-stress two-race final day. Their class win, on a tiebreaker, earned them the regatta’s overall title and a berth at the Caribbean Championship in the BVI in October. With a strong southerly on the final day, Exile was sitting on a marginally comfortable lead over John Bell’s Hiwassee, and Graff’s intent was to sail…

IF you’re looking for professional rigger Carl Merrill, poke your head into one of his several 40-foot metal shipping containers bearing the distinctive cross-stich logo of his company, Kingspoke. If Merrill or any of his fellow riggers aren’t at their workbenches fiddling with a high-tech splice or mocking up a complicated purchase system, check the local shipyards of Rhode Island’s Aquidneck Island. Chances are, wherever there’s a grand-prix machine on the dock or on the hard, you’ll likely find it getting the Kingspoke royal treatment. In the context of US grand-prix yacht racing, the island—and Newport, in particular—is the Tigris-Euphrates valley. The city hosted the America’s Cup for 53 years and, on any given weeknight on Narragansett Bay, you might see classic 12-Metres engaged in a tacking duel under the…

OVER the past three years, one father and his two 20-something daughters have consistently finished at the top of big fleets—on a doublehanded boat. You read that right: If two plus one is three, how is it possible for a trio of Haig family members to fit on board a two-person Melges 15? This was indeed a problem, until they solved it by buying a second boat. Now daughters Emily and Dana take turns racing, with their father, John, as permanent forward crew. Whenever one daughter creates the familial pairing, the other races with a friend. And obviously this interfamily rivalry has upped everyone’s game. Emily, for example, won the 2025 Melges 15 Winter Series overall, and Dana was third. Dad, the lowly crew, rarely gets mentioned in the press.…

We know how it goes with old dogs and new tricks—go ahead and try, but they just don’t work. Listen kids: I’m seeing more of you whippersnapper foiling hotshots throwing fans of spray and snickering at the old-timers trying their best to stay aloft in your newfangled foil-sailing games. But remember, the sailboarders of yore were cool before neon was, and they were definitely freestyling aerial tricks that you can only dream about. So, please, if you see a salty old dog with a neon sunblock nose flailing around the racecourse or, heaven forbid, trying to water-start their foil boards in the middle of the leeward gate, give ‘em a break, snap a shaka, and stay on your flight path.…

ON a recent archaeological dig through a stack of external hard drives for an elusive photo, I stumble upon an untitled folder dated 10 years ago. Opening an image in the preview window, I know exactly where I’m at: NOOD Regatta; Annapolis, Maryland; 2015. That and the rest of the photos look and feel like ages ago. Scrolling them, I expect to see boats that I haven’t seen in a long time, but with each tap of the down arrow key, I’m stuck in a time warp. One by one, they’re all the same boats I’d seen a week earlier at the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta in Annapolis. There’s that same dark blue J/30 Avita and Bebop, and dozens of the same J/70s, Alberg 30s (minus the tiedyes), J/22s…and…

I’VE overstood the windward mark by a few boatlengths, and as I bear away, the windward runner blade lifts a foot or so off the ice, then slams down hard. Still, the little DN iceboat slings me downwind like a proverbial bat out of hell. I’ve rounded third of 11 in my debut iceboat race, and I’m feeling pretty cocky. Until one boat passes me to windward as if I’m standing still. Then, another boat zooms past me to leeward. By the end of the leg, I’m dead last. Clearly, I have a lot to learn about how to sail an iceboat, especially downwind. As a Midwest teen, I caught the sailing bug early and spent most of my spare time racing dinghies and crewing on any racing boat that would…

ECCOLI arrivare (here they come). In two years, seaside residents of Naples will bear witness to the arrival of the America’s Cup entourage to the Italian city of nearly 2 million people as, for the first time in Cup history, the Louis Vuitton Cup and Louis Vuitton America’s Cup Match will be sailed off the Italian shoreline in what’s promised to be “the most colorful and enthusiastic” edition ever. While Barcelona put on quite a show for the world’s oldest international sports trophy, the Italians certainly have a reputation for hosting first-class sailing events, and with Italian challenger Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli finally holding court, it does promise to have the expected flair. The announcement of Naples as host to the 38th edition followed months of silence from the defenders…

THE first twilight race of the year is a special time. After thinking about sailing and racing all winter long, we finally get to go evening racing again. My wife, Libby, has a J/70 that she races on Lake Washington, and sometimes I get to tag along. Our first Wednesday-night outing was the start of her season, and excitement was high. However, when we arrive at the boat and start rigging, we discover a major issue: There is no tail to the jib halyard. The thin rope used to hoist the jib is lost inside the mast and nowhere to be seen. There is only one approach to fixing this problem: We’ll have to pull out the halyard from the top of the rig, rerun it down inside the mast,…

Nothing else matters except oeating that one boat across the finish line. Which is why I’m maniacally trimming the sail even though it hurts like hell. Every time the winged-out jib folds back onto itself and refills with a violent snap, zingers of pain shoot into my right shoulder. It might be carnage to my rotator cuff, but screw it. I don’t care. Over my shoulder, straight off to starboard 100 feet away, is the pink boat with a crew in matching pink shirts. The two of us are battling it out at the tail end of the 21-boat fleet, as we have been for the past three days. There’s always one boat in every regatta that seems magnetic, right? Voila is that one, and right now we’re mathematically guaranteed…

MANY sailors believe that it’s best to avoid the port-tack layline whenever possible, simply because the rules are tricky. More often than not, the porttacker leaves the protest room disappointed. But that doesn’t mean the port-tack approach is off the table. Top tacticians use it as a way to get a quick jump at the top of the beat. It’s either gain or pain; what’s your preference? When I think back to all of my riskier weather-mark porttack approaches, I usually think of gaining nicely on the fleet (happy times), but I recently made a mistake, and the penalty was painful. I’ll also never forget when one of my skippers recently asking me why we don’t approach on the port-tack layline more often. He said that he had seen our…

AT US Sailing’s headquarters, tucked away on the outskirts of Roger Williams University’s campus in Bristol, Rhode Island, the executive director’s office has sat vacant since August 2024. The organization had been headhunting a replacement to lead American sailing’s national governing body, but the nationwide talent search ultimately landed right back where it started: Champion sailor, Rolex Yachtsman of the Year, Ocean Race winner and Bristol’s favorite sailor Charlie Enright was keen to lead the organization and officially took the helm on May 1. For Enright, a Brown University business economics major (’08), settling in behind the big desk at US Sailing HQ and leading an organization with a diverse constituency of nearly 36,000 members will take some serious personal adjustment. He’s been a pro sailor his entire adult life…

IF you’re looking for a boat that is fast, fun and stable, look no further than the good ol’ reliable beach catamarans, which gained popularity in the early 1970s because of one man, Hobart “Hobie” Laidlaw Alter. Alter invented the Hobie Cat and went on to revolutionize beach-cat sailing with nearly 30 different models during his lifetime. The Hobie name lives on as a moniker of the many twohulled sailboats still out there. But there are now many builders producing excellent alternatives: Nacra, Goodall, Cirrus, Topcat, RS and Topaz, to name a few. My path to cat sailing is the same as many others. I caught the bug watching my father sail off the beach in Central America in the 1970s in a Laser with his buddies. Soon I had…

THERE a magic that stirs when like-minded people come together to embrace a common passion—whatever, wherever and whenever that might be. For the disciples of team racing, the wherever is a small suburb of Liverpool, in northwestern England, specifically the West Kirby Sailing Club. The whenever is that meandering time between the first warning signal and the Sunday-night debrief, with nothing to do but talk, sing, dance and laugh until we cry, before doing it again a bit too early the next day. The whatever, of course, is the Wilson Trophy, justly hailed as “the world’s best team-racing event,” which offers refuge for one long and spectacular weekend where sailing is the most important thing in the world. In conversing, reminiscing, hypothesizing about this sport we love, we fill the space…

Ken Read is sticking to the plan—because it’s his plan, and he’s confident that his teammates on the 100-foot Maxi V are equally committed to the scheme. With V’s giant mainsail, jib, and staysail all trimmed and loaded for take-off, he calls for the BRO (a jiblike, blast reaching code zero) to be deployed, which will put the boat into its tripleheadsail setup. At his call, an additional 2,863 square feet of carbon cloth unfurls and fills as V’s owner and helmsman, Karel Komárek, steers the behemoth onto a 120-degree true-windangle reach. The boatspeed climbs to 10 knots, 15, and then 20 as the boat careens toward the start line of the Triple Head Sunday time trial at the North Sound Maxi Regatta in the British Virgin Islands. Back to…

RECENTLY I raced the American YC Spring Series on a Swan 42 with some childhood friends. This regatta was a three-day event, with a coastal race and windward-leeward races. There were 46 boats of a variety of shapes and sizes, and the format gave me plenty to think about when it comes to the fundamentals of handicap racing. As with any type of racing, success on the course starts with what we do before we leave the dock. The Swan 42 team is a well-organized program with good leadership and communication. We saw the fruits of that in the week before racing, with emails outlining the boat prep, the sails we would have on board, the weather and conditions we can expect, the relative handicaps in our fleet, and what…