Innehållsförteckning för Fall 2025 från Sailing World

FOR those who have forgotten the Admiral’s Cup, a quick history lesson: The Royal Ocean Racing Club created the regatta back in 1957 and it was the stuff of legends until the event was canned in 2005 after participation waned. In its heyday it was a legendary big-boat showdown with three-boat national teams battling through grueling inshore races before tackling the epic Fastnet Race. As a young reader of Sailing World in the 1980s, I remember well the stories and images of this faraway circus of custom race-boats and sponsored teams. There was nothing like it. When American sailor Ron O’Hanley, who has checked off virtually every major offshore race with his 20-year-old canting-keel Cookson 50, first heard about the Admiral’s Cup revival, his decision to participate seemed straightforward. “At…

IN the cutthroat world of Rolex TP52 World Championship sailing, where every point is hard earned and every mistake amplified, American Magic Quantum Racing clinched its eighth world title by the narrowest of margins. The elite 52 circuit demands a meticulous and disciplined approach, and for Terry Hutchinson, the team’s longtime skipper, success came through both human capital and a continuous evolution of the team’s boat and sails. On the waters off Cascais, there was a measurable but delicate balance of aggression and control that reflects the team’s ongoing transition to a younger, dynamic squad. There’s a “meat and potatoes” philosophy that underpins their success, even when the “red mist” descends. The boss shares his thoughts. How do you approach this series every year to make sure you have the…

THE start of the Blakely Rock Race is delayed due to fog and light wind. On our 44-foot racer/cruiser Dark Star we are milling around as the fog swirls around the Seattle-based racing fleet. Boats appear, then disappear. There’s Terramoto with its new taller rig, then they’re gone. There’s Pippa with its graceful curving sheer line, before it too evaporates. There’s the Riptide 41 Blue with its new owner, which vanishes into the fogbank. As we’re yacht spotting, it occurs to me that a good percentage of the fleet are Paul Bieker-designed custom boats. How had this come to pass? Thirty years earlier, my wife Libby and I had launched the first Riptide, a light and nimble 35-footer named Ripple (in still water). Now there were nine custom racer/cruisers in…

The Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, hadn’t experienced a summer invasion of this scale or caliber in more than two decades. The arrival of 30 grand-prix race yachts, and the onslaught of owners, shore crew, grand-prix veterans and eager sailing teams, was indeed a moment to behold. Everyone was hyped for the revival of the Royal Ocean Racing Club’s iconic regatta, and here in the busy seaport of Cowes, the Admiral’s Cup—once old, was new again. Before we turn our attention to the current affairs in the UK’s cradle of sailing, however, a brief history of the Admiral’s Cup is necessary. The RORC founded the regatta in 1957 with a simple but compelling concept: a nation-against-nation series raced by teams of offshore yachts. At the time,…

ONE of my favorite people was once a high school kid who loved to sail and lived to sail but worried that there was no place for him in sailing. I had no idea, until he came out gay in college and hit me with the word that, all through our good times, he had been terrified of rejection. He hid himself from our scary world. There is nothing unique in that story—except that soon after he came out, he was elected captain of his college sailing team. What does a story like that mean in 2025? One of my convictions is that, if our sport remains as white a generation from now as it is today, the sport will be in trouble. Is help on the way? One of…

AT the West River Sailing Club in Galesville, Maryland, there are plenty of options when it comes to racing classes, but the one that has held high court since the early 1930s is the homegrown Chesapeake 20. There is no equal to it anywhere in the world, but that’s because—with the exception of a few runaways—they don’t exist anywhere else. It’s a West River thing. This summer’s Chesapeake 20 “World Championship,” contested on the same skinny waters for which the tippy 20-footers were originally designed and built by Ernest H. Hartge, had seven compete. Some were fiberglass, some wooden, and there was plenty of color and colorful local characters, with a few sailors as old as their boats. There were a few days of river racing, and after it was…

THE Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series at Marblehead Race Week, the final U.S. event of the 2025 series, delivered everything a sailor could want—and perhaps a few things they didn’t. From four days of consistent winds to a fierce squall, competitive local fleets to nail-biting finishes, the summertime classic showcased both the beauty and unpredictability of competitive sailing off the iconic East Coast harbor. The regatta began, as per Race Week tradition, with the Rhodes 19s and International One-Designs getting an extra day of racing on Thursday. The perennial champions on Bill Widnall’s Javelin established early dominance with two race wins, setting the tone for what would be another fierce battle with Carolyn Corbet’s Elektra throughout the weekend. The father-son duo of Nat and Jim Taylor did the same…

AFTER an especially hot and humid weekend in Tampa, Florida, during the 2024 Buccaneer North American Championship in 2024, the sailors were ready to consider holding their next big regatta somewhere cooler, somewhere in the polar opposite direction. But where to? Avid Buccaneer sailor Bruce Lee floated the idea of holding the 2025 version 5,000 miles away, a remote flyer to the more temperate and midnight-sun environs of Alaska. The regatta organizer would be the Alaska Sailing Club on Big Lake, an hour’s drive north of Anchorage. There were, however, a few obvious challenges with this scheme. Competitors were not likely to hitch their boats and tow them all the way to America’s 49th state, but maybe they would fly there and use local boats. It just happens that Alaska…

CHARLES Higgins, head coach of Tulane University’s sailing team, has been coaching collegiate sailors for nearly two decades, and he knows what’s required to get his sailors to the top. “If you’re trying to win championships, you need a skipper in each position to at least get you close to the podium. But the crew is going to be the difference that gives you the win.” That difference was on full display when Tulane finished second at the 2025 Women’s Fleet Race National Championship, an achievement Higgins attributes to his team’s depth and versatility, especially when it comes to his crews. “We need crews who are excellent and amazing when it’s blowing 25 to 30,” he says. “Very few teams can compete at an elite level in those conditions, and we…

IT a glamour summer day on Rhode Island Sound with a 10-knot sea breeze pushing us upwind at 6.5 knots, an easy upwind target to lock in to. Water gurgling off the hard-chine corner of the ClubSwan 28’s transom is barely audible because, at 18 degrees of heel, there’s not a lot of hull dragging through the sea. The helm is light, the groove is good, the pickup crew is lazy hiking and chatting nonsense on the rail, and the boat is sailing itself upwind. It’s easy to zone out on angle of the forestay to the horizon and the telltales on the jib, and then suddenly, I’m at 6.2 knots. Federico Michetti snaps me back to attention. “No higher than this,” he says in his gruff Italian accent, a voice…

AS pressure was mounting on the America’s Cup Defender and Challenger of Record to deliver a final Protocol on time, would-be challengers for the 38th edition, including the New York YC’s American Magic, voiced frustrations aloud and whispered that the Cup was spiraling toward an undesirable Deed of Gift Match. Typical drama for the oldest trophy in international sport. But pens finally hit paper in mid-August with Emirates Team New Zealand (representing the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron), and the Challenger of Record, Athena Racing (representing the Royal Yacht Squadron Ltd.), releasing what both parties say is a groundbreaking agreement that establishes a new governance structure and delivers a comprehensive set of rules that will fundamentally reshape the regatta. At the core of the Protocol is the creation of the…

WE all know how critical sail shape is to performance and that the sheet controlling said airfoil is matched to the job, whether it’s a zero-stretch, minimum-diameter PBO sheet on a mini-maxi blade, or a fuzzy polyester jib sheet that grips the drum on a big cruiser’s primary. What, then, of the handshake between the two? Tying directly to the clew is the most basic — though not always lightest — method of attaching jib and spinnaker sheets, and these days, the humble knot still has the biggest cohort of followers overall—everything from Club 420s to beach cats to large cruising and race boats. But there are tradeoffs that come with simplicity. For instance, the simplest of sheet-to-clew connections is the luggage tag (or cow hitch) on a 1-to-1…

The denser the fiberglass ceiling, the more force is needed to demolish it. ¶ In the case of the biennial Transpacific Yacht Race (established 1906), this force had been gathering for 72 years before Alli Bell became the first woman skipper to win this 2,225-nautical-mile race aboard Restless, her Cal 40, this year. It began in 1953 when Willard Bell—Alli’s grandfather—first skippered Westward Ho, his Lyle Hess-designed 36-foot sloop, in Transpac. Bell returned in 1959 with Westward Ho and a crew that included his wife, Inez, before upgrading to Westward, his Lapworth 50, which he first raced in the 1965 Transpac alongside sons Charles (Alli’s dad) and Sam. Over the years, Willard Bell skippered all five of his children—three boys and two girls—to Transpac’s iconic finishing line off Diamond Head…

IT a foggy spring day and I’m off the coast of Connecticut on board Art Santry’s Judel/Vrolijk 66 Temptation, bucking sharp waves kicked up by a 22-knot westerly. The boat’s bow is punching through crumbling crests as we average 10.8 knots of boatspeed. It’s not a smooth ride by any means, and to avoid hard pounding, the helmsman must turn down a few degrees to get through the big ones. Over thousands of offshore racing miles, I’d been trained to feather the bow up slightly when climbing over a wave, to minimize shock loading on the sails, sheets and rig. But modern yachts call for modern techniques, and this different approach to driving Temptation through the waves is proving to be much faster—and a lot easier on gear and bodies. This…

The old children’s rhyme lamenting the fate of a certain famous egg named Humpty Dumpty has always been an effective means to remind brave children to be careful with heights. The higher you climb up the jungle gym, the harder you fall and the greater the boo-boos. These modern-day foiling sailors can certainly relate to ‘ol Dumpty’s fate, as greater speeds and higher altitudes do come with disastrous repercussions should there be a great fall. For all the league’s tools and all the tech team’s men could not put this crumpled multimillion-dollar craft together again.…