Final Results

The 2023 edition of the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series at Marblehead Race Week will be remembered for its challenging light wind but more so for the time local skipper Carolyn Corbet and her teammates outsmarted and outsailed the venerable champions of Bill Widnall’s International One Design Javelin. On the fourth and final day of Marblehead Race Week, Corbet’s team on Elektra won two come-from-behind races to win the regatta and then its Overall Championship title.

“We started the day only 1 point out of first and we’d been going back and forth with Bill—who’s won this regatta for who knows how long,” Corbet says.

In Sunday’s first of two races, Elektra rounded the first mark third, and with the quick sail-handling skills and sharp execution of this team of twenty-somethings, Corbet quickly  jibed, “jumped the fleet,” and at the next mark Elektra took control of the race.

“Ten boat lengths out from the leeward mark we were able to jibe on to starboard, and then we were able to get them [Widnall’s Javelin] on starboard,” Corbet says. “So, we were able to send them off the layline. I have an amazing crew that can pull off that kind of jibing, get the spinnaker down, and then jibe around the mark. We barely missed a beat and that right there probably won us the regatta.”

Corbet, of Marblehead, has been sailing the loaner International One Design for three summers and her team has proven to be a quick study of a boat that can take a lifetime to master, but Corbet says she’s had plenty of help from Widnall and others, and their success this weekend truly comedowns to the collective talent of her teammates.

As winners of their class, but Corbet, Rob Brower, Becker Ewing, Elizabeth Lonergan and Sandra Nygren were selected to represent Marblehead at the Helly Hansen Sailing World Caribbean Championship in the British Virgin Islands in October, where they will race against other overall winners from previous stops of the Regatta Series, as well as the 2022 regatta’s champion.

On the same circle as the IODs, a similar battle was playing out in the J/105 class where Charlie Garrard’s Merlin and Rick Dexter’s Brouhaha set off from their respective moorings in Marblehead Harbor with only 1 point between them. The goal of the day was a simple one for Garrard and his experienced crew: keep Brouhaha close and use their boatspeed to finish the job.

When the seabreeze finally filled after a long morning postponement, the two teams got right to work, tailing each other in the prestart and striking the starting line overlapped. Merlin had the advantage and Brouhaha tacked away. The race from there was all Merlin’s to lose.

“We just had to keep them close and we had to finish ahead of them,” Garrard says. “Even though they tacked away, we felt comfortable going left where there was more wind.”

The pair finished 2-4 and Merlin’s lead grew to 3 points, but in the final race, after leading off the start again, Garrard says they were on the downwind leg and crash jibed to avoid another boat, which lost them one place in the race, but fortunately nothing more—the final winning margin was 2 point and Merlin’s winning streak remains intact.

“I think we got off the line clean every day and the boat is going great upwind,” Garrard says. “As always, it helps to have a great crew.”

The return of the Lightning fleet was marked as another notable moment in Race Week history. According to class leader Bob Shapiro, it has been nearly 40 years since the International Lightning Class has competed at Race Week, and fittingly it was the two “old-timers” of the fleet that took second and first places after five races. At the top of the standings with two race wins was local legend Charles “CH” Ritt with Shapiro as runner up and winner of the weekend’s final race.

The Rhodes 19 Class sailed another competitive regatta with 22 boats providing plenty of action-packed mark roundings, and always ahead of the melee were Matt Hooks and teammate Rob Pascal, who won four of eight races to close with an impressive 25-point winning margin, earning Hooks the coveted Norm Cressy Trophy, which has been awarded to the regatta’s best-performing skipper since 1998.

On the same race circle, the Town Class sailed its New England Championship and after five races, Nick Cann and Andrea Dodgeon on Tonic emerged as the winners, scoring two race wins to finish 10 points ahead of Bill Heffernan and Larry Brown on Sweep.

ILCA sailors were particularly challenged with their first races canceled on Saturday due to weather. The race committee started them early on Sunday and completed one shortened race before the wind died. Once they got going again, it was strong current that caused numerous general recall starts, but at the end of the day, three races were sailed with Bill Rothwell winning the ILCA 7 division and Jeremiah McCarthy winning the ILCA 6 fleet.

Marblehead’s re-emerging Etchells class featured the area’s top sailors as well as experienced teams from outside the region, but none were as fast as Tomas Hornos and his teammates on Bob, which won two of six races and ended the series with a comfortable 10-point win. As the top fleet champion, Hornos also earned the Dave Curtis Perpetual Trophy, awarded by the Sailing Hall of Famer himself.

Henry and Barb Amthor, along with teammate Parker Moore, were the top Viper 640 team after winning the regatta’s final race for a 2-point New England Championship win over Marek Zaleski’s Team Z. Brian Keane and his teammates on the J/70 Savasana eked out a hard-fought win to secure the class’s New England Championship, another title for the team as they head toward the World Championship later this year.

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Hoping to complete additional races before the forecasted arrival of afternoon thunderstorms, the race committees of Marblehead’s Corinthian, Eastern and Boston yacht clubs set out this morning onto a placid Massachusetts Bay with the best intentions. Mother Nature, however, had other plans and kept sailors of the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series in perpetual postponement until racing was ultimately abandoned in the early afternoon.

With no additional races to count, the Marblehead regatta’s results remain unchanged with one day remaining, and with the two ILCA fleets yet to complete any races, organizers announced plans for an early Sunday morning start, to take advantage of a short window of a promising wind forecast.

With three important New England Championship titles to be decided for the Viper 640, J/70 and Town classes, each currently close in points, sailors were eager to have their respective series play out. Nick Cann and his partner Andrea Dodge, on Tonic, leaders of the competitive local Town class, said on this way to the racecourse this morning that they were looking forward to more racing and a bit of the same luck they enjoyed the previous day in a pair of races noted for the tricky conditions.

“One race, the left side was favored, and the other race, it was the right side,” Cann said, “and there was plenty of luck involved, especially in the last race when Chris Howes [on Believe It Or Not] forced me to tack away. We got second in that one and he ended up seventh, so that worked out for us.”

The Townies will have to wait another day to settle that score, as will the other 10 fleets, from which one individual winner will be selected as the overall winner and earn a berth at the Helly Hansen Sailing World Caribbean Championship in the British Virgin Islands in late October where they will compete against other individual Regatta Series winners as well as the 2022 Championship’s defending team.

Provisional Results

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Provisional Results

Musical artist Samual Jack’s Instagram-viral song “Feels Like Summer” would be the ideal track to set the tone for Friday’s racing at the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series in Marblehead. It was the second day of this New England summer tradition, and indeed, the sun was blazing, the sea breeze light and Massachusetts Bay as tame as can be. It all added up to one fine and smooth day of racing for sailors and race committees across three race circles and nine classes.

Picking up the series where the Rhodes 19 class left off yesterday—as one of only two classes that traditionally race on Thursday—Matt Hooks and teammate Rob Pascal on The Mighty Rhodes got right back to business after winning two of three races on the opening day and then and padding their lead today in the 22-boat class to an impressive 19 points.

Jeff Shoreman and Dave Reynolds’ McLovin were hot on their transom all day, looking to recover one race at a time from the pile of points they earned with a 12 in the series’ third race, but with an 11 in the day’s final race, team McLovin gave Peter Frisch’s Hall Pass the No. 2 spot on the scoresheet. With two days of races to come, there’s plenty of opportunity for fortunes to change, but Hooks and Pascal are local champions for good reason: they know these waters well and they just keep getting faster every year.

The same is true for Bill Widnall and his teammates on Javelin, the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series Marblehead overall winner in 2022. Widnall, master of the classic International One-Design, has a 1-point lead over Carolyn Corbet and her teammates on Elektra, which got ahead of Widnall more than once, but was simply unable to outsmart or out-sail the wise man and his experienced crew.

It is no surprise to locals either that top sailmaker and keelboat-racing specialist Tomas Hornos, helming Ed Moray’s Bob, sits atop the Etchells fleet, which began its regatta series today with three races. Hornos and his teammates went 2-3-1 on the day to put them 1 point ahead of Chris Lanza’s Vertigo 2, from Miami. A pair of race wins and a fourth for Hornos should be considered hard-fought finishes on a challenging day marked by wind shifts and meandering wind veins. Current, as always, was a factor across all three race circles, but the winning approach to the racing, several sailors noted, was finding and capitalizing on the slightly stronger wind bands.

With the International Lightning Class making its return to this regatta after nearly 40 years, it’s fitting to have Charles Ritt, one of the fleet’s original sailors from back in the day, out front in the standings after three light-air races on the regatta’s busy “Tinkers Line” racecourse. Ritt, with crew Shyah Miller and Charles Quigly, sailed a 1-2-1 to put themselves a mere point ahead of youngsters Owen Moore, Emma Hawko and Ed Coleman, beneficiaries of the Lightning Class’s loaner-boat program and a well-practiced team.

Three classes at the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series are sailing for their New England Championship titles: The Town class, the Viper 640s and the J/70s, and for the later, Brian Keane’s Savasana continued to demonstrate why they’re the top US team this year as they head into the upcoming J/70 World Championship. Savasana put up a 2-3-1 keeper of a day to past world champion Jud Smith’s 1-5-4. There’s only 4 points between these two top-ranked teams, and both know the battle is early yet.

For the Viper 640s, it’s Mike and Kai Deyett, and Jeffrey Hankins, of Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, tied on points with Henry Amthor’s Bob, Parker and Henry. But only one point in arrears is past regatta champion Mark Zaleski’s Team Z, winners of two races after finishing eighth in the tightly-bunched 22-boat fleet in the opening race.

The Town class series has Nick Cann’s Tonic out front. With crewmate Andrea Dodge, Cann won the first two races, handily, and then finished the day with a second to put 8 points between themselves and Bill Heffernan’s Sweep.

Four race wins for Charlie Garrard’s team on the J/105 Merlin—perennial winners of this regatta—finds them in familiar territory and fighting a familiar battle with Ric Dexter’s Brouhaha, which followed them across the line in three races, but claimed the series’ first-race win. Here, too, only a single point is the difference as the regatta picks again on Saturday with the addition of ILCA and ILCA 6 fleets rounding out the regatta’s 11 classes.

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Marblehead may be old, but in this hallowed New England sailing town, the big summertime regatta known as Race Week never gets old. It’s a regatta that started in 1889—the very same year Washington, Montana, and both Dakotas joined the statehood. Today, with three established yacht clubs working in lock step to support the local scene, sailing in Marblehead is thriving, as it should be, because there’s a new and young energy, a few of the old-timers say, and this coming next edition of the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series at Marblehead Race Week will demonstrate that Marblehead racing is hot.

The regatta gets underway on Thursday, July 27, and carries through the weekend, with upwards of 140 sailing teams competing in dinghy and keelboat classes. Among the fleets are the Marblehead Race Week regulars: The International One-Designs, the Towns and the Rhodes 19s. Ten J/105 teams will be present, as will a growing Etchells fleet and nearly 20 J/70s. Among the J/70s are several pro teams training their way to their pending World Championship. Closer to shore, will be ILCA singlehanded dinghies for youth and adults—a recent addition to the regatta, but a welcome one for the area’s small-boat sailors—and there’s the long overdue return of Lightnings at Race Week. The Viper 640 class will enjoy its biggest-fleet bragging rights with 24 registered for the Viper 640 New England Championship.

“This is a big turnout,” says local fleet skipper Fletcher Boland, who bears some responsibility for providing his classmates memorable regattas in the past and luring them to challenge for the New England Championship title. The class has a popular winter southern series that a core group travels to and many of these road warriors have been drawn to the quality of the racing and the good times to be expected when Viper sailors gather in Marblehead. “Maybe people heard about our party last year, which was certainly a good time,” Boland says. “We’re still figuring out how, or if, we can top that.”

Revel as they may after racing, on the water, it’s always good, fast and tactical racing with these little sportboats. Vipers demand full-effort hiking, knee pads and a preference for planning and that seems to be the attraction for twenty and thirty-something sailors. “There’s a wide mixture of skill and age across the US class,” Boland says, “but the composition locally is skewing to the younger side.”

Boland says this edition of the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta fleet is an excellent mix of Viper teams, including four from the Canadian side of the border who come for open-ocean racing experience they can’t get back home, so he expects a challenging series on what can often be a challenging racecourse.

It’s the same big-sea experience that appeals to Lightning sailor, Bob Shapiro, as well. Shapiro splits his time between Marblehead and New Hampshire’s Bow Lake (Strafford, New Hampshire) and is thrilled for the return of Lightnings to Marblehead Race Week. He figures it has been at least 40 years since these cult classics of one-design sailing played ball at Race Week. Shapiro and others have been leading a concerted new effort to host more open-water regattas in New England.

“Most of our Lighting regattas are on small lakes,” Shapiro says, “and when we go to the big championship regattas, they’re often done on open water.” 

A recent Lightning regatta out of nearby Duxbury, and this return to the waters off Marblehead Neck are significant growth milestones for the regional Lightning fleet, and especially for Shapiro and fellow skipper Charles Ritt. “We are the only two people [in the fleet] that used to sail in Marblehead back when there was a fleet, so it’s sort of a coming home for us.”

Among the skippers of this small-boat local revival will be Nathan Cunningham, son of a great sailor and another New Hampshire traveler, alongside Greg McGinnis of Squam Lake, up Lake Winnipesaukee way. There’s young Owen Moore and his teammates, enjoying life as beneficiaries of the International Lightning Class’s boat-grant loaner. They’ve been racing the boat all summer, Shapiro says, and they’ll come to Marblehead as an easy favorite. Laura Goldberg is coming from afar—Cleveland, Ohio—to race and reunite with college sailing friends. Bow Lake regular Rob Donie is another youngster, as is William Hall, son of a Lightning world champion from long ago.

“As you can see, it’s a pretty young crowd,” Shapiro says, “We’re working really hard to get younger people in this district and doing what we can to help areas of the sport that need a boost.”

Dave Curtis, the great, is plenty known around town. He’s a National Sailing Hall of Famer and Olympian and his name adorns the trophy for which the regatta’s Etchells sailors will vie. Curtis, 77, is still around the waterfront but not so much on the boats that earned him seven Etchells World titles. There’s something about Marblehead that has historically fed Local Fleet 4 sailors the upper echelons of the class; the likes of other greats and inductees, Robbie Doyle and Jud Smith.

For whatever reason—how the elegant hull presents itself to the local waters, or how knowledge is passed among newcomers and old-timers alike—the Etchells is right at home in Marblehead, says fleet captain Paul McLaughlin, “There’s a lot of old pride in the sailors that have come through the fleet, which has been around since 1971.”

If only space and moorings were easier to come by, McLaughlin says, Fleet 4 would be twice its size or better, but with the space limitations as they are, the fleet has been extending its event calendar ever deeper into the fall. In October, they’ve got their New England Championship, and they’re working toward hosting a North American and world championship soon.

But until then, this week’s assembly of 17 teams in Marblehead features local hotshot pro, Thomas Hornos, the perennial winner of late and the guy to chase around the course. Up from the Florida’s Etchells hot-bed is skipper Chris Lanza, assured to have a top crew. There’s Donald Brush, one of Vermont’s finest, Don Dowd from Connecticut, and Robert Hitchcock from the South Coast’s Buzzards Bay. And that’s to name just a few outsiders, joining several new local teams that have been progressing up the fleet thanks to clinics run by Hornos and others.

“My goal was to get 15 to 20 regularly sailing in Marblehead,” McLaughlin says. “We’re up to 12 and we’re all getting better. We’re building it and the improvements are evident.”

Where other clubs may look for flashy new designs to embrace over time, there’s no denying Marblehead favors its one-design history, and the renewed interest in the class of late, McLaughlin says, has been bolstered by Corinthian YC’s Sailing Committee.

“We’ve gotten a lot of support from them,” he says, “they love the idea of the Etchells and there’s an enthusiasm. It’s just one of those classes that, as a fleet, gets the attention because it’s still prestigious to host an Etchells event.”

And speaking of hosts, it is Corinthian YC’s turn to open its doors to the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series’ competitors, and they do so on Thursday with IODs and Rhodes 19 racing. The remaining fleets join Friday, with ILCAs racing Saturday and Sunday only.

Thursday evening at Corinthian is the enlightening Sailing World’s Speaker Series, an intimate and in-depth conversation with world-class yacht designer Britton Ward, who will share his experience leading the hull design team of the New York YC’s 37th America’s Cup Challenge with American Magic.

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FINAL RESULTS

Inside Chicago Harbor, the northerly wind blowing through the protected mooring field was deceiving. Conditions appeared benign enough to send the sailors out for the final day of the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series in Chicago, but out beyond the breakwater, whitecaps frothed and the weather stations reported the truth: it was gnarly out on Lake Michigan, just too much for safe racing. Ahead of the official 0900 morning signals, organizers made the preemptive call and hoisted signal flag N over signal flag A on the yardarm: Racing was abandoned and the previous day’s preliminary results were toggled to final. With two solid days of racing in the books, the regatta came to early close, but competitors were happy to have a complete series.

From among the winners of 17 individual classes and 162 teams, one overall winner was later selected to represent the Chicago regatta at the Helly Hansen Sailing World Caribbean Championship in October.

Jeffrey Davis, skipper and owner of the J/111 Shamrock, emerged as the challenger and while his team delivered the boat back to its homeport of Cleveland, Ohio, the veteran skipper shared his thoughts on the weekend’s races and the developing dynamics of his winning crew of Bob Knestrick, Danny Corrigan, Samantha Foulston, Stu Johnstone, Michael Lis and Travis Odenbach. Shamrock won five of six races.

Sometimes, winning a three-boat fleet can be just as difficult as a larger fleet, especially when everyone’s at the same level, like it was for the J/111s this weekend in Chicago.

Yes, we’ve raced against each other in the past, so they’re fairly well-matched boats. The J/111 class is fairly strict, so we’re very competitive, all of us. I think this weekend was really a function of the fact that we tend to be light-air sailors and inland like sailors, and so for us, we really thrive in these kinds of conditions.

Flat water, light air, shifty conditions are your strength then?

They really are. The boat is really set up for light air. I think the crew, we’ve all been sailing together probably for about 15 years. And since our base is in Cleveland, Ohio, for us, it’s a light-air lake. So, these conditions really fit our boat, our rig, our tune and ourselves. We set up the boat for light breeze. But as most sailors know, you gotta pick the shifts. And there’s a little bit of luck involved.

In the first and second race, we did a good job of really picking the right shifts and the right side of the course to be on and we had good starts. In the third race, we wound up second and it was really a function of us being on the wrong side of the course. And it’s really hard to come back from that. You know, when your competitor keeps picking the right shifts, you just never catch up.

Having only two boats to beat, how did that change the tactical approach to the weekend?

We tended to stay pretty close together, in part because we’re using this for North Americans, which will be here at the Chicago Yacht Club later in the year. So, we wanted to see what kind of conditions we would have and what kind of conditions that we would be competing in and what the setup of our boat was going to be like compared to others. There was a little bit of match racing going on and a little bit of that in terms of our tactics.

Speaking of tactics, you had a new crew calling the shots this weekend.

We did. We’ve been sailing for about 15 years with Wally Cross who was unable to sail this regatta, so we had a new tactician. Travis just did a great job. He built on what we have been working on with Wally at Quantum Sails, and Travis just expanded the base for us. He brought in some new ideas, but he amplified some of the things that we normally do.

What were some of his ideas that made a difference over the weekend?

We’ve spent a lot of time maybe over tweaking the rig. He was more inclined to just set the rig to the standards that we have developed and not make as many changes. His focus was a little bit more on tactics, especially the start.

Did you notice the change from the first day of racing into the second?

I think each day and each race we got better and the chemistry developed more. We did have one day of practice which helped us a lot. Then, what you gradually see is we’ve developed a language. After you’ve been sailing with somebody like Wally Cross and the same team for 15 years, you get accustomed to the communication style everybody has. Travis was new and he had to try to adapt to our communication style and we had to adapt to his. It made a huge difference once we started getting on the same language especially in the starts and the comfort in the corners. The corners are where you’re usually gonna mess up. And because we all spoke the same language and we got more comfortable with each other, it just got smoother and the crew work got better.

You’ve got a big event coming up later this summer.

We do have North Americans coming back here and it’s something that we’ve been working on for most of the year. Last year we had a very disappointing North Americans for us. It was based in Cleveland, but we were over early in the first two races and the fleet is so tight and so competitive. We wound up fourth, but this year, we’re really looking forward to coming back and we’ve got something to prove.

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Final Results

Four minutes. For Daniel Koules’ team on the Beneteau First 40 Badge, that was difference between finishing and not finishing after navigating a patience-testing 30-mile distance race on the second day of the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series in Chicago. Earlier this morning 35 teams set off from a starting line near the Chicago Harbor Lighthouse with one hard deadline: finish by 1600. Only 13 boats managed to do so and Badge was almost another casualty to the time limit.

“We knew that when we made the turn at Montrose [the final mark of the course near Montrose Harbor] we had to get to the finish, and somehow we were able to make up some time,” Koules says. “It was a good point of sail for us and we were comfortable with what we were doing, and the crew made every effort to get us across the line.

What exactly transpired over the nearly 30 miles, five hours, 10 sail changes and nine-mark roundings was a blur for helmsman Koules, but his navigator, Jim Gignac, plotted the course says the key to both finishing within the time limit and winning the ORC1 division was one easily identifiable point in the race. “The forecast called for the thermal to build in the afternoon, but it came early and that was where things changed. There was a battle between the thermal and the southeasterly and you had to find your way through. It was a matter of understanding where the thermal was and where it wasn’t and not going to where it was dying…you could see the light spots creeping across the course.”

At one point, Gignac says, they were making their way north under jib on port tack, and 100 yards east of them was a boat with flying a spinnaker. “We elected to just live with jib, fight through it, and wait for the shift. When it finally came, we popped the spinnaker and got away from rest of the fleet.”

Jeff and Jane Hoswell’s Nelson Marek 46 Skye was the only other boat in the 10-boat ORC1 division to finishing within the time limit, but in the ORC2 division, which sailed a shorter course, all but one completed the course on time, but even then, they were cutting it close.

“There was a huge park-up at the southern end of the course,” says Luke Wolbrink, who’s C&C35-3 Zella topped its fleet of seven. “We were stuck there for about 30 minutes trying to make any headway—1 knot at times,” Wolbrink says. “We were fortunate enough to get just enough separation from our fleet and get our kite up first.”

As the slowest boat in its fleet, a heavy-displacement classic of the 1980s, Zella not only won its fleet but won boat-for-boat, which Wolbrink says, is “miraculous.” “Our boat is terrible in those conditions, but we sail in this area lot and we knew what the wind would likely do.”

The two PHRF Distance Race classes were not so fortunate: none of the PHRF 1 or 2 entrants finished in time, but the smallest boats of PHRF 3 did all managed to finish behind Bill Bartz’s Hunter 355 Ranger. For these unfortunate teams, redemption should come on Sunday for the final day of the regatta where the wind forecast is promising fresher breezes and a much rougher sea state from the north.

While the Distance Racers were battling farther out on the lake, the regatta’s one-design classes were enjoying shifty, but moderate conditions closer to shore once the sea breeze established itself later in the afternoon, allowing race committees on those circles to complete three more races to bring the series for most fleets to six races to date. Here, Gary Powell and Scott and Yvonne Rhulander’s Mojo continue to shine in the Beneteau First 40 fleet with a second and a pair of firsts to pad their lead to an impressive 8 points. Jeffrey Davis’ J/111 Shamrock went on a winning streak as well and now sits 5 points atop its three-boat fleet.

In the J/109 division, Team Northstar won two of three races to move into the overall lead by a single point over George Miz’s Smee Again.

Shawn O’Neill’s Eagle, with a four-legged crew onboard to sniff out the windshifts, padded its lead in the ORC division to 3 points with a run of seconds in the three races and in the PHRF 1 fleet, Tod Patten’s J/112e ran the table with three wins to put them solidly at the standings with one more race day to go.

Richard Witzel’s Rowdy, with tactician Carlos Robles calling the shots, remains the top J/70 with top-5 consistency in what is a fleet stacked with pro talent. Rowdy goes into the final day of racing with a 14-point lead over Fernando Perez Ontiveros’s Black Mamba, from Mexico. Bob Willis’ Rip Rullah is the top Corinthian, currently sitting seventh overall in the 24-boat fleet. William Howard and his junior sailing teammates on the Grom Squad are the top junior team, in 14th overall after six races.

The standings tightened in the 18-boat Tartan 10 fleet with Timothy Rathbun’s team on Winnebago winning back-to-back races after posting a sixth in the morning’s first race.

Brian Kaczor’s Erica is sitting on 3-point overall lead after putting up a pair of top-five finishes, setting up what will surely be a final-day battle for T10 bragging rights.

The Battle for the Beneteau 36.7 title a now a 4-point affair between helmsman Jim Clouser and his team on Joie de Vie, yesterday’s leader and Jarrett Altmin’s Soulshine, the defending champion. Clouser did himself no favors with a terrible start in the day’s first race in which he was “absolutely buried,” but they came back from the depths of the 12-boat fleet to salvage a sixth. After another bad start in the next race, they once again clawed back to finish third. At that point, frustrated with his performance, Clouser committed to winning the final race of the day. “I said we were going to win it, and I know I’m not supposed to because we’d jinx ourselves,” Clouser said. “But we able to get off the start, get right and a get a jump and do all we could to stay in front of Soulshine. They’re the team to beat and that’s not easy.”

With Sunday’s wind forecast to be a strong northerly with high seas and heavy rain, there’s a strong probability today’s results might stand, which would be fine for Clouser and Roman Plutanko who’s running away the regatta in the ILCA fleet. But for the top two teams in the J/88 and J/105s fleets, tied respectively, there’s hope for at least one race to shake out the standings without having to resort to a tie-break finale.

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Final Results

While Daniel Floberg was at work on a glorious summer Friday in Chicago, he turned the his J/88 Misty to his crew, which did their skipper proud on the opening day of the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series by not just winning the first race of the morning—by a Lake Michigan mile—but then winning the next one and finishing fourth in the third to close the day with a 1-point lead in the seven-boat class. This was, of course, easier said than done with flat water and an easy breeze that slowly built but often shifted dramatically, catching some teams off guard.

For the first day of this early-season Chicago summer classic, three races were scored across all four race circles and with winds on the tamer side, conditions were ideal for race teams new and old to re-acclimate with their boats and their positions after the long offseason. But for Tod Patton, the professional sailmaker and skipper of the J/122e Blondie, today was an opportunity to better understand a boat that is new to the team. “This is the first buoy race regatta we’ve done since we’ve gotten the boat,” Patton says, “and given that we’re happy with our results today—the crew work was great and that certainly helped.”

With a trio of second-place finishes in the six-boat PHRF division, Patton’s Blondie padded themselves a 3-point lead over Robert Smeeter’s Ohana, a Dehler 34c, but it’s not Ohana that Patton is most worried about. He says Joe Hummel’s C&C 115 Archimedes III, sitting in third, seemed to be the fast boat they’ll have to keep tabs on over the weekend. “They had good speed,” Patton says, “but for us, everything worked pretty smoothly, so that made for a good day to start with.”

Gary Powell and Scot and Yvonne Ruhlander’s Beneteau 40.7 Mojo, past overall champions of the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series in Chicago, got off to a good start with a second in the first race and race wins in the next two to establish a 2-point lead over Thomas Weber’s team on La Tempete, which won the day’s opening race. Jeffrey Davis’ team on the J/111 Shamrock also put a pair of wins on the scoreboard to lead its three-boat division.

In the J/109 fleet, George Miz’s team on Smee Again got off to rocky start with a fifth in the first race after seemingly getting caught out on the morning’s first big wind shift, but with that result behind them, they rallied with a 1-2 for the next races and closed the day tied at the top with Peter Priede and his team on Full Tilt, winners of the final race of the day.

For Mark Fruin and his teammates on the J/105 Nyctosaur, today on Lake Michigan was a banner day and an even better start to their season. After winning the first-race wire-to-wire they finished second to Josh and Laura Lutton’s Kinship in the next. Their win in the third race, Fruin says, was all on account of a full-speed start. From there, however, he doesn’t remember much. He was doing his job concentrating on driving and letting the crew do the rest of the good work, including his tactician, Bob Bernstein, a local champion with plenty of experience on Lake Michigan.

“It was all about the right side today and Bob put us in some great places.”

For Saturday’s coming races, Fruin says the plan is to stick with what’s been working: “We’ll just listen to Bob, put ourselves in clear air and sail fast.”

On the regatta’s one-design circle, which features the two largest classes—the J/70 and the Tartan 10s—it was all Richard Witzel’s team on the J/70 Rowdy, which went undefeated to build a 9-point lead over Dick Kalow’s crew on Superior 1. For the Tartan 10s, last year’s winning team on Brian Kaczor’s Erica remains on form with 1-3-2 scoreline which puts them 3 points ahead of their rivals on Edward Mui and Craig Roehl’s Meat.

“We were expecting lighter winds all day and were happy to have the breeze we did,” Kaczor says. “For the first race, we had the boat set up for lighter winds and it was quick, but when the wind built for the scone we didn’t shift gears very and missed some shifts, but were happy to claw back from seventh to third in that race. Overall, we’re pretty happy with being a bit more consistent than the rest of the fleet. The crew did great and I think we are sitting in a good place but we know there are a lot more races to go.”

With a good forecast for Saturday’s races, the regatta’s Distance Race fleets, topping more than 30 boats, will join the action with longer courses across the lake. Once ashore, all competitors will gather at host Chicago Yacht Club’s Monroe Station for the weekend’s biggest party and the ultra-competitive remote control racing with the Dragon Force 65 fleet.

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At the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series in Annapolis in early May, American Magic’s skipper Terry Hutchinson held court at the Annapolis YC for the Sailing World Speaker Series to share an update on the team, their next AC75 and what it’ll take to get and win the big race in Barcelona.

Give us the lowdown of winding down operations in Pensacola ahead of the move to Barcelona.

In February we transitioned out of Patriot and into the AC40, which has been a reasonably good platform. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. We purchased two of them so that we can do in-house racing, but also use the platform for our foil development. We get four foils to develop, so the guys are designing what they think are the best AC75 foils and then they scale them down for the 40. We lose a little bit in the scalability, but as much as anything, we’re working on the process of developing the boat, we’re working on the communications between the entire team and we’re working on the idiosyncrasies of a new sailing team that’s very experienced, but new together. We had to navigate through that and a massive move to Spain. Our first sailing day is June 22, with two boats on the water in Barcelona, so there’s a lot to do before then. The team is 126 people, and we’re about 350 with our families, so it’s not something that just happens—it’s a pretty big machine. But on the positive side, we’re getting there early enough to set ourselves into life in Barcelona and be as streamlined as naturally as possible. 

You’ve said the design “sign-off” for your AC75 was May. Where are you at with the build?

By this time next year [late April], Boat 3 is going to be close. Its nickname is “Raven.” We’re building the boat inside of our own facility at the Safe Harbor New England Boatworks facility and when we get to max capacity there, there’ll be more than 50 builders and designers operating in that space and, hopefully, working on the boat that’s going to win the next America’s Cup. It’s unbelievably cool to see the evolution. Our team transformed a bit under the leadership of Scott Ferguson, who’s the design coordinator. We’ve got Britt Ward, who’s one of our principal hull designers, which is awesome. Britt’s a certifiable super genius. I think what makes our design team unique is there’s a combination of guys that have won the regatta, and then there’s guys that have not won the regatta—like Britt, who has been very close and is very successful in his own right but hasn’t gotten over the hump like a few of us—so we do see a unique motivation there. We brought in some of the guys that were within INEOS but that Scott had already worked with in the Oracle program, as well as some of the guys that were with Prada, and we’re sprinkling in from Pete Melvin’s office out on the West Coast. They’ve brought a unique skill set with their simulator and some of the scientific side there that they’ve helped develop. And so, it’s a different look—the process the guys have gotten through to execute on the hull is very thoughtful and thorough in how they approach the design of the boat. 

What are the primary design considerations, given what you know of the weather in Barcelona during the Cup’s long duration?

The average wind speed over the course of September and October has the ability to be anywhere from six to 11 knots. But the unique statistic inside that is that almost 50 percent of the days we don’t race. The bottom side of the wind range is 6.5 knots. The boat has to foil at 6.5 knots, measured at 5 meters. And then the top side of it is 21 knots at 5 meters. Everything we do to make the boat good in 8, 9, 10 or 11 knots, we take away from the light-air performance of the boat. And so, while 8 knots may sound like light air, at 8 knots the boat’s going 33 knots upwind. If October [in Barcelona] is 6 to 11, September is like 8 to 12. In actuality, your chances of 8 to 12 are much higher, because you’re missing a lot of days of racing in October. So that tells you it’s either really light, or it’s windy, because the average is still light. So, we have to contemplate how we design for that side of it.

The other side of the rules that are unique now is we only have one set of foils, and a spare, and the rule says the foil has to be from the same family. It has to look a certain part…it has to have 80 percent of the initial foil shape. If you muck around at all, it has to look the part and so when we make that first foil decision, that’s our only foil decision and we’re shooting a pretty big bullet. The hull is one thing, but as we learned in AC36, the hull is a very small component to the actual success. But what we do know is that we’re never going to make a slow foil fast. 

In AC36, Team New Zealand had the smallest foils in the fleet and they had the highest percentage of VMG through all the maneuvering. It’s a perpetuating circle where, if for example, you’re going into a maneuver, if you have to, your bottom speed can only be 27 knots in the maneuver, or you fall off the foil. Then when you go into the maneuver you speed build to 35 knots, you tack, you land at 30 and then you keep going. But what that shows in a performance world is the boat being that much more maneuverable. And then downwind, it’s the same thing—in 12 knots of breeze the boat is sailing at 150 true downwind and just like a symmetric boat you jibe through 60 degrees or so. In that way, the sailing is very similar. Upwind, you’re sailing at 45 true—anywhere from 40 to 45—and your tacking angle is 90 degrees.

How have you integrated cyclors into the platform now that they’re allowed?

The difference in the rule from AC36 to AC37 is we’ve gone from 11 sailors down to eight. And we’ve maintained the same amount of hydraulic power to actuate the sails, and all the systems inside the boat. One of the things that’s different between AC36 and AC37, outside of the reduction of sailors, is the system has a 2-second delay, whereas in AC36, you could have no logic running the boat. You turn the boat on, programmers program the boat, you go out and you go sailing and you have presets, but you can’t, in essence, develop an autopilot. So, it’s not completely an autopilot, and the waves really change the dynamic of how the boat sails. In flat water, a 2-second delay is actually not very much, but when you put the boat into a sea state, a 2-second delay is a big impact to the performance of the boat. 

We’ve been developing cyclors, and what you’re basically looking for is the athlete to produce 5 watts per kilo over 25 minutes. If you think about a Tour de France cyclist, they’re 60 kilos and they’re consistently producing about 315 watts over a stage in a Tour race. We’re looking for these athletes to produce just over 500 watts with their legs for 25 minutes, which is a big ask. We have one professional cyclist, and then we have rowers and swimmers who are proving to be the best athletes. They’re very much like sailors. They’re very twisted. One guy showed up and said, “I wasn’t sure if this was my friends punking me or if this was actually real?” And I said, “And you still showed up? I mean, you actually thought it was a good idea? He was like, “Yeah, I just didn’t know if I was going to be leaving without a kidney or what was going to happen.”

So, not only do we have that quality of an athlete, they’re also very smart. A couple of the guys are engineers, a couple of them work for Apple and have just come out of school. And so, on top of being incredible specimens, they’re integrating into developing the systems in the boat. One of our athletes has broken a world record on the stationary bike—Colton Hall from Massachusetts—for fun last year, he did a ride around New England where he rode 501 miles in just over 25 hours without stopping, for fun, just because, but he did a 3-hour ride on the stationary bike where he averaged 402 watts for 3 hours. And he broke a world record at the 2-hour mark at 428. When he gets on the bike, he doesn’t produce lactic acid, up to about 300 watts. If we just fed him and hydrated him, he’d just keep rolling.

What are you learning from all the shared recon available to you?

When we look over the fences at some of the test boats, Luna Rossa is doing a really nice job. That boat is a direct result of their debrief. If you look at the hull form and you look at team New Zealand’s hull form from AC36, that boat is a knock on, but with some very good systems and a sail program that’s very good. Team New Zealand is on the pathway; they’ve launched their AC75 and they have a couple of features that we picked up in the recon; the mainsheet and the jib and everything are all linked together, so when one moves, everything moves. We can see them working on the proportions there. INEOS—their little test boat is not going to win a beauty contest, but we see a lot of clever thinking in the boat. They have a Mercedes-style foil, which science says is the right thing to do. It has anhedral and then it goes flat to a straight wing, and what that gives is the benefit of less drag but also the idea that a straight foil across is you’re not carrying as much in the water and you still get the benefits of the T foil. 

So, we see that, and we can see the bustle they’ve put on their boat. One of the features of these boats is you really want to seal the boat to the water. All the boats will have some type of bustle, but that bustle is bad for hitting waves and changes the apparent wind angles around. These are all the things that when we go out into the Gulf of Mexico or we sail in Pensacola Bay, we learn the differences and all the tradeoffs that we have to have in our minds. One thing we know for certain is if we come up against a perfect flat-water boat in flat water, they’re going to be faster because the averages are telling us all to design to be more forgiving…so we might actually see a wider scale of performance in the boats. If you land in your sweet spot of conditions, then you’re going to be pretty slippery. 

So many people ask me: “Who’s your biggest competition?” Well, our biggest competition is us. We have everything we need to win the regatta, but I’m a bit tainted and jaded because we had everything we needed to win the regatta in AC36 and we floundered. The people that we are racing against are very good and they have everything they need too, but we have a couple of X factors. We have very good sailors and a very good team camaraderie. We maintained over 50 percent of our team from AC36. We all know the improvement in performance that comes out of consistency with a team. And so, through that lens, I look at it and think we’re the team to beat, but if you asked Team New Zealand or INEOS you’re probably going to get the same answer. We’re fortunate to have Andrew Campbell and Tom Slingsby and Paul Goodison and Riley Gibbs, Lucas Calabrese and Michael Menninger. These guys are all great sailors and there’s enough experience there—from Olympic gold medalists, to somebody who, on paper, doesn’t look to be the most qualified, but is an awesome team member and does really good work at integrating into the team. So, that side of it is probably the most exciting because I think we, as a team, have the most to gain from it. We have three guys that actually raced Lasers against each other, two of them have swapped gold medals. Goodison, to his credit, has three Moth world championships and is doing a phenomenal job of leading the team day in and day out.

Can you give us a hint of what the final race boat will look like?

What is she going to look like? She’s going to be long. She’s going to look a lot different than Patriot. In January of 2021, when we had the forecast that we had, we had a full team meeting saying, we’re not going to win any races on these two days, because we know the boat’s vulnerable. And to win the regatta, you inherently have to put yourself into a corner to be fast. We learned through that, and so I would say Boat 3 is going to look a lot different than Patriot did.

What do you think will be the breakthrough development in this Cup cycle? What is out there that you’ve seen that you think would make a big difference?

 That’s a really hard question to answer because if we reflect back to AC36, Team New Zealand made the biggest jump over the course of basically 10 weeks in their sail program. And they had a logical pathway of development to that. They started with an articulating boom, they built a little boomless mule and then they launched Boat 2, boomless. But the system in the boat really wasn’t all that good. And they had small foils. They were handicapped by that, and yet, they figured it all out. So, what’s going to win the regatta is a boat that’s fast enough that when you’re in your weak spot, you’re able to manage that, and to me, the weak spot isn’t downrange. The weak spots are going to be up range, because everybody’s got the same weather forecast. We all look at the same numbers statistically, so we’re gonna have to have a boat that’s very reliable, and is fast enough in 12 knots, or 13 or 14 knots when we come up against somebody who’s in their sweet spot that we can take races off of them.

Simulators and artificial intelligence were a big part of AC36; is it even more so today? Would it be accurate to say you’ve essentially already sailed the races?

Have we sailed all the races already? No. But I would say the simulation side of it—one of the things that Pete [Melvin] and his office brought to us was they have very good experience with that and running the program that’s actually developed by Dan Bernasconi, who is the design coordinator for Team New Zealand. In parallel, we’ve been developing our own simulation, and all those design tools. But when you talk about artificial intelligence, or machine-based learning, you have to remember it’s learning from the past, it’s not learning from the future. So, it’s trying to predict the future and trying to put you into a spot. But it’s learned from things that have already happened. When you throw it into sailing, there are a lot of variables that can skew data, based on the learnings from the past.

Our simulator is at a spot that Anderson [Reggio] and the team that’s evolved that we’ve been incredibly fortunate over the last three months that we received a grant from the Schoonmaker Foundation, specific to the simulation. That’s allowed us to accelerate the amount of hires, and so the data that comes off the boat gets put into the code, and into the physics model that goes into the simulation. And then the sailors get to a place where they can sit down in the simulator and it feels exactly like the boat. The cockpit feels just like the boat and what you look at with the VR feels like the boat. We chose not to do a motion platform because it’s expensive, and it’s lethargic. And you have to move all this stuff around the world. Ergonomically, it feels the same. All the buttons are in the same spot. The goggles—everywhere you look—you see the Westin Hotel in Barcelona, I mean, you see the whole thing, but each day we go sailing, the next day you go in the simulator, the simulator is better because of that sailing session.

We have a great artificial intelligence partner with Altair out of Detroit, Michigan, and they’re helping us develop this stuff. But again, it’s not something that just kind of pops out of thin air and you go well, here you go.

Between Slingsby and Goodison you’ve got two of the best at the helms, and Andrew Campbell has so much experience flying the AC75, but what do you do for backups should someone be unable to sail for any reason?

We have to have backups in case somebody gets smacked by a bus. We need to have flight controller backup, and we need to have trimmer backup. The nice thing about having Lucas and Riley [Gibbs] steering a lot is they’re both really good trimmers, so they develop a feel for the helm, and what the boat needs by sailing the boat. When you swap over and you start trimming, you should have a better feel for the boat. We were horrifically exposed in AC36, but we’ve changed our approach, partly because we’ve integrated the team with younger Americans. Harry Melges [IV], who’s over sailing the Quantum Racing [52] right now is coming in as one of our helmsmen, so he’ll be joining the team in July, which will be awesome. I mean, everybody knows how talented he is, and he’s younger than my oldest son. Michael Menninger has done an incredible job evolving into his role trimming on the boat, and of all the guys, he had the least amount of foiling experience, but he’s turning into an incredibly gifted trimmer on the boat. What makes all of these guys good is their abilities to think, and do things correctly at pace.

Match racing in AC75s in Barcelona; will there be much of it?

It’s going to be different. The sea state is going to be the big driver to the whole thing, especially if it’s light. The flat water we saw in Auckland, and in the racing that took place there…I mean, what we saw in the final in the match was Luna Rossa had come through and was really well prepared. Every day they came off the water even with Team New Zealand, it was a win for Team New Zealand because it was just getting them more time at racing. And their boat was getting faster and faster and faster. So, Luna Rossa did as good a job as they possibly could have done to get the match as far into it as they did. But again, they came up against a faster boat. And once the faster boat gets a sniff of bow out…It’s unlike the traditional IACC matches where everything was happening at 10.1 or 10.2 and the separation that we got between the boats. It was very tactical and very strategic. It was also about having a fast boat, but by the time we got to the match in AC32, the differences were minuscule. But still, the average delta, I think, was 19 seconds over seven races. And in the last race it was a minute.

Team New Zealand has always been hard to beat. And as Defender, this is their show. How beatable are they?

Well, they’re very good. They’ve got a great design team. They’ve got great sailors, they’ve got the whole thing right there in front of them. But they’ve made a couple interesting decisions. They started out right after the Cup with the hydrogen support vessel project, they designed that, and their design team was working on that, then they developed the AC40 and the system that goes inside the AC40. Even though they pawned that off to McConaghy to build, it’s still requiring oversight. And then Glenn [Ashby] broke the land speed record. All of that, to me, kind of takes your eye off of the America’s Cup ball. But, then they sold the venue to Barcelona. That’s a side of it that can’t be underestimated. For me, that’s probably the biggest equalizer. What makes the event winnable is that they’ve taken it out of their home town and they’ve put it in the middle of Europe, which is great for us because it’s easier to get to.

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