Skipper Charlie Enright’s smile was as bright as the early morning sun in Aarhus, Denmark on Monday morning as he led his 11th Hour Racing Team to a first-place finish in leg 5 of The Ocean Race. 

The win was doubly important; the transatlantic race is a double-points scoring leg and with the win, 11th Hour Racing Team has climbed to the top of the overall leaderboard for the first time. 

“It’s a good feeling to be at the top of the table,” admitted Enright when he finally stepped ashore. “It’s more important to be on top in July than it is now, but this is a step in the right direction. 

“We’ve been trying to make incremental improvements in every area of the campaign,” he said when asked how the team has won the last two legs. “We’ve done that on board the boat, we’ve done that on the technical side, and the logistics side as well as we set ourselves up for success everywhere in the team.”

“We went into this leg knowing that we needed to be aggressive and we needed to have a good result in this leg to stand a chance in the race,” added navigator Simon ‘SiFi’ Fisher. “So, we tried to sail aggressively and we sailed our own race. I am very happy to say it worked out nicely—everybody did a tremendous job.”

Nearly 4 hours after 11th Hour Racing Team won the leg, Team Holcim-PRB took a hard-earned second place finish, holding off Team Malizia who finished just five minutes behind. 

“I think we’ve been sailing fast and as well as the others,” Escoffier said. “We had a few issues – at the beginning we had to earn some trust in our (new) mast and then we broke the 24-hour record, but it wasn’t quite enough. 

“The new IMOCAs are quite extreme – fast but not very comfortable. I can tell you that doing 640 miles in 24-hours is definitely not comfortable!”

“But by finishing in second place, we still have it in our hands to win The Ocean Race.”

For Team Malizia, the third-place finish drops them further behind than they would like on the overall leaderboard, but co-skipper Will Harris was defiant and confident when asked if they could still win the race. 

“Of course we can. For sure, definitely. Anything can happen in this race. You have to keep believing all the way to the finish… there is plenty to fight for still,” he said.

“We came so close to catching up to Holcim-PRB at the end there. Unfortunately, we didn’t quite get the result that we wanted. We really wanted to get a few more points than that.”

Biotherm remains on the racecourse, sailing slowly, protecting its mast, and won’t be in Aarhus until the end of the week.

The post Leg 5 Hustle Advances 11th Hour To Top of Ocean Race Standings appeared first on Sailing World.

Sailboat racing, and the sailing industry at large, is anything but green despite being a sport powered by wind. Hulls, sails, cordage and most components are largely derived from fossil fuels, and sailors, as end users, ultimately consume a lot of petroleum. Industry resources, however, are now being devoted to reducing the sport’s footprint. One area that is seeing a shift toward sustainability is sail manufacturing. Typically built from petroleum-based fibers and film, these consumable items are an obvious place to start pushing for innovation.

As the world’s premier offshore racing environment, the IMOCA 60 Class, which is used in both the Vendée Globe and The Ocean Race—has taken charge by mandating sustainability into the sail inventories of these well-funded teams. Beginning in 2023 and 2024, each IMOCA team will be required by class rules to carry at least one “green sail.” With these 60-foot ocean foilers limited to carrying eight sails in a race, the new green sail rule is seen as a small but necessary step in the right direction. To qualify as a green sail, sailmakers must prove a reduction in waste consumed as well as deriving at least 25 percent of energy used in sail production from renewable sources and avoiding aviation travel in the sail’s production and implementation.

“The green sail rule came about because it was an ambition from the class members to start to reduce the impact of the sails for the IMOCA boats,” says Imogen Dunham-Price, Sustainability Manager for the class. “We didn’t know how to define a green sail, so we contacted the sailmakers and then followed with a life-cycle assessment of an IMOCA sail. The key areas we identified were waste, energy and transport in the sail manufacturing process. So, we said let’s go and tackle improvements in those areas first.”

11th Hour Racing’s IMOCA design and build report from 2021 revealed a staggering figure that underscores just how wasteful and dirty sail making and boatbuilding really is: for every kilogram of sail produced, there are at least 6 kilograms of raw and secondary materials consumed. Between fibers and resins used in creating a sail and consumable materials such as gloves, tape, paper, etc., there is significant waste that results from the manufacture of each new racing sail. Extrapolating these figures out for an entire sail inventory, with sails weighing somewhere around 1,100 to 1,300 pounds, there is approximately two to three tons of waste—in sails alone—for each and every boat in the IMOCA fleet. While this figure is a considerable amount of waste and byproduct, it also represents an opportunity to achieve a meaningful reduction in waste.

“As the awareness has grown around sustainability, we were five years ago talking about compromise and additional cost, but more and more the solutions out there provide not just better business practice but financial and operational gains as well,” says Damian Foxall, 11th Hour Racing’s Sustainability Manager. “Things begin to snowball and accelerate in the right direction. We’ve had some fun wins in regards to sustainability, some small, some big. We did an audit on everything and just one small way we improved was by stockpiling and sending cardboard and other supplies back to suppliers. Not only was there financial gain for both parties but there was a huge reduction in waste. When you get sustainability and finance doing the same thing, it’s a win-win.”

Another way is to get used carbon fiber out to recyclers, Foxall says. “In some ways, carbon is becoming harder and harder to get, so we need to get that carbon out to the right recyclers and for them to feed that carbon back to us in the right form.”

Transforming one product to another product, however, demands additional raw energy, Foxall says. “In our study, which was backed up to a previous life-cycle assessment, the first question to ask suppliers is where does your energy come from? It’s maybe not something you immediately think about for a green sail, but energy is the first thing you should be looking at. There are big gains to be had, and it’s oftentimes a cheaper and/or similar cost. One of the sail lofts which is doing quite good work and being leaders on alternative materials is OneSails. They have a nominally circular material process which is theoretically recyclable. Kudos to them. It’s important for the IMOCA class to get to a circular space in terms of materials. The complication when you go too quickly down that route, however, is you end up with issues of durability. So, what the green sail rule is…on one hand it’s intended to be pragmatic but also to incentivize teams to improve.”

Top-level racing yachts can go through sails very quickly, so anything that can significantly increase durability is a victory in terms of sustainability. If a mainsail that used to get replaced every two years or perhaps every four-year Vendée Globe cycle manages to go twice as long as before, then that is a measurable reduction in waste and energy consumed. With that in mind, 11th Hour Racing and other racing programs swear by the longevity of North Sails 3Di.

“The most sustainable sail is 3Di,” Foxall says. “They don’t change shape and they last forever, so we’re trying to beat something that is pretty good in terms of durability. The next step is to clean up the construction process.”

Part of the green sail rule is to incentivize teams to create a life-cycle assessment for each new sail, with the goal being sails that stay on the racetrack longer. Striking a balance between real sustainability gains and the unimpeded pursuit of performance at all costs is no trivial challenge. Alternative materials now exist to make a real and tangible impact in terms of sustainability, and they’re evolving rapidly. In the most recent Vendée Globe, Pip Hare and Ari Huusela each raced around the world with working sails that were ISO 14040 certified to be fully recyclable. With both sailors using sails built using OneSails’ “4T Forte” technology, they have proven that a recyclable, more sustainable sail can be built, one that offers good performance and enough reliability to make it around the world.

“We began using thermoplastic as a bonding agent rather than adhesives,” says Mark Washeim of OneSails. “There were a lot of advantages to this; the main one being that the bond was molecular rather than chemical. The sails weren’t glued together, they were unified. The thermoplastic would encapsulate the fibers, and the bundle of fibers would remain soft. It’s kind of like an extension cord where you have metal cables encapsulated in plastic, so that the bundles would not fracture. This allowed the use of lightweight, low-stretch membranes. An additional advantage of this method of sail construction was that the sail could be made to be recyclable.”

Another sustainability gain, Washeim says, is a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of other systems, including Dacron. “It does it without the use of pollutants such as glues, resins and solvents. It’s very clean and has all kinds of certifications and documentation for being green. And it is. Our technology was the first racing sail to be certified as being fully recyclable, but it’s not like you can take a sail and throw it into a recycling bin and turn it into another lower-grade plastic. The membrane has to be stripped of its additional components like Dacron edge tapes, batten pocket components, luff slides, corner rings, etc.”

While OneSails may be the first company to build a recyclable racing sail to go around the world in the Vendée Globe, their core goal of more sustainable sail production is shared by many industry leaders and is already trickling down. Challenge Sailcloth has recently introduced their “Palma” line of sailcloth which uses their new UPE material that is made entirely from recycled polyester fiber and films. UPE is Challenge’s acronym for their recycled variant of ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE), which is the same material as Spectra or Dyneema. From a sail-making perspective, it’s darn good stuff. It’s relatively light weight, super strong and resists chafe, tearing and stretching. In other words, it’s nearly bullet proof and holds its shape well. By making a UHMWPE cloth from recycled materials and then gluing it together with a proprietary adhesive that includes no volatile organic compounds (VOCs) nor harmful solvents, Challenge has innovated a new means of building sails that uses 100-percent recycled materials, reduces greenhouse gas emissions during construction and can be recycled. By supplying this cloth to a lot of the industry, consumers can now purchase sails built from sustainable cloth from sailmakers such as Quantum, OneSails, Elvstrøm and others.

The net gains of the IMOCA class’ new ‘Green Sail’ rule remains to be seen. But with IMOCA teams now forced to consider the carbon footprint, usable life cycle and waste generated from what will likely be the next sail purchased in their inventory, it is a start, and it does move the needle and the conversation in the right direction. With new materials and construction processes constantly being innovated and tested on what is the most demanding race track on earth, these sustainable practices should do more than just clean up IMOCA class’ sail programs. They stand to push an industry-wide shift that will spread to other racing classes and club racers. 

The post The Push to Sustainable Sailmaking appeared first on Sailing World.

“The marine environment is harsher than any other, even outer space; the salt, wind, sun, and incredible force of water work to corrode, break down, or tear apart everything onboard. It’s the reason why the marine industry is always chasing stronger and lighter materials and construction techniques. This has led to some very unsustainable solutions, and we must now start to rethink them. We have a design opportunity to make better design choices, choices that could echo or ripple out through other industries. This is a remarkable milestone as we work to change the narrative around sustainability in the marine and maritime industries,” says Jeremy Pochman, co-founder and CEO of 11th Hour Racing.

Pochman is talking about the launch of the brand new IMOCA 60 designed and built for 11th Hour Racing Team. Taking the lead for many of those choices were Charlie Enright on behalf of the sailing team and the naval architect, Guillaume Verdier. In this, the second of three articles, we’re going to look at the choices the team made as they worked to optimize the boat’s performance. Later in the series we will look at the approach the team took to its construction, and in particular, building the boat, and managing the team’s operations—as sustainably as possible.

More than a hull

What better place to start than the hull shape? Charlie Enright explaines the priorities for the design of the new boat as such: “In our experience, in The Ocean Race a lot of the leg starts and finishes are upwind, not something that Vendée Globe sailors typically experience. So, we really tried to make an all-around boat with no weaknesses, and once we felt like we had that we tried to enhance its ability to VMG [Velocity Made Good] downwind, basically, without taking away or detracting from the overall objective of an all-rounder.

“One of the priorities – and we learnt it a little bit with 11.1 [the team’s first boat, the 2016 Hugo Boss] – is to be able to quickly get on the foil,” said Verdier. “The quicker you go on the foil, the quicker you lift a big portion of the weight of the boat. So, you want a lot of heave [vertical] stability, so that has been quite a priority. The other priority was really just the safety of the boat. There is going to be a lot of water on the deck and you don’t want to put people at risk so I think that would be the ultimate priority.”

The result? “The bow shape section – the section and not the profile view – are quite different from anything you’ve seen before,” says Verdier.

The bow – along with the aerodynamic look of the hull shape – is one of the more striking elements when you first lay eyes on the boat.

“The hull shape itself is an evolution, I would say, of previous Guillaume designs, but with a lot more flair in the bow…” Enright says. “We didn’t really want to give up too much waterline because we are trying to make an all-around boat. One of the big things is VMG running, keeping the bow up and out of the water. So, we have these splashes in the bow that are very, very pronounced, and when the boat is just sitting there on its waterline, it’s skinny in the front, but the second the bow submerges [if it does], the shape gets really beamy and protective [adding buoyancy quickly], keeping the water off the deck and trying to keep the bow nice and buoyant.”

“When you design boats, it’s always a two-in-one,” Verdier says. “You always try to design a boat that is OK in light [winds] and during the transition [to foiling]. A boat that has a high righting moment when reaching and is very stable downwind; one that is not going to put the bow down in a wave trough or roll over every time you have a gust or a Southern Ocean squall… you need to have a very resilient boat in a gust.”

Foils full of tricks

The other big development area that the team had to get right to achieve these goals and create a resilient boat are the foils, the design of which is inextricably linked to the design of the hull. “You can make foils that ventilate [air being sucked onto the surface of the foil reducing lift], for example,” Verdier says, “so people always say, ‘Oh, look at the ventilation’ but ventilation is a smart way to self-regulate…It’s a damper. You can have foils that twist under the load, there’s plenty of tricks to play… we have made safe choices in order to avoid burying the nose… And you have to have a boat that if you have no foil is still really safe and really fast. I’d say good luck to the guys that take the option to make a boat that is actually useless once they break the foils or once they have an issue with the foils.”

The foils can be controlled in one of two ways, the rake can be changed through 5 degrees of rotation, and they can be extended in and out of the boat. “The way we made the foil shape is that when we extend the foil, we have different righting moments and different stability,” Verdier says—so both extension and rake will change the performance of the foils. Verdier was clear on their innovative direction. “The foil shape is very different from what we’ve seen before.”

Enright was also clear on the impact the foils were going to have. “When you see them roll out of the shed, they’re not really an evolution of what’s already out there. They’re definitely a revolution. We’ve had four different foils, not sets, but different foils on the boat [11.1] since we purchased it in 2019. They have allowed us to improve our construction method, the stiffness, the profile, the section shape: everything that goes into them.”

The aero package

If the hull and foils have been a powerful focus, then the aero package – sails, rig and aerodynamic treatment of the deck – has not been sidelined. “The aero package is not to be underestimated and we’ve invested a lot on it,” said Enright – something that’s clear from the boat’s aerodynamic look. “We did a lot of work on the aerodynamics of the hull itself… all our furlers are flush-deck, all the headsails will be perfectly end-plated. We have a big aero fairing on the bow that encompasses the base of the mast and hides a lot of the halyards and deck spreader terminations. It’s made of foam, which also helps with instability in the 180-degree righting test which has an effect on our bulb weight.”

It’s not just the headsails either, when I ask Verdier what would strike the casual observer as new and different, one of the things he says is, “The fact that the mainsail can be sealed [against the deck].” The whole sail plan will be end-plated for greater efficiency.

A great deal of work has also gone into the sail inventory, not just the sail designs and crossovers, but also the constructions. “We’re making sails that are probably lighter than any offshore sails that have been built to date, but still fit for purpose,” Enright says. “Any issues arise not from the loads, nor the modulus [lack of strength], it’s the continuous sail handling repetition that breaks down the strength.”

Control systems for the sails have also been a focus. “Another priority for me is that we can easily tune the sails,” Verdier says. “What you want for these boats is the ability to be accurate when you trim. You want to have fast trimming; you want to make sure the sailors are super strong so they are not going to slow down. You need more information and feedback to do that. You need more strain gauges and you need more hydraulics for responsiveness and things to move quite fast.”

A change in the rules has worked to the team’s advantage in this respect, as Enright explains. “We have a lot more hydraulics on the boat than traditional IMOCAs do…Once they opened up the rake in the boards [to allow movement] you needed to carry hydraulic oil to make that happen, so the marginal weight-cost to add other hydraulics throughout the boat came down astronomically. So, you already had the pump, you already had the reservoir and the oil, so to throw an 800-gram cunningham ram on or something like that, it became a no-brainer in some areas.”

There are other elements that will see a change in style from the traditional IMOCA culture. The team’s Build Manager, and the man responsible for coordinating between all the contractors and the team for the new boat is Wade Morgan, a sailor with three America’s Cups and a Volvo Ocean Race on his CV. “In terms of our trimming style, we’ve got jib tracks and a straight traveler for the mainsail, so we’re more of an ‘angle of attack’ style of sailing rather than a ‘twist’ style of sailing, which is how a lot of the French guys do it, so that’s a real difference with this boat. We’ve got huge visibility forward and [all] around for the trimming to exploit the fully-crewed nature [of the boat]. We’re not ‘set-and-forget’ because we have the manpower onboard to trim a lot more.

So, the ergonomics of the trim and then the visibility out to our sail-plan have been key decisions for us.”

Systems and handling

The other aspect of trim onboard a short-handed boat is the autopilot. The Ocean Race originally looked to a rule that would only allow heading-only pilots, and the cockpit was originally designed to allow hand-steering. Now there’s to be a more sophisticated one-design autopilot supplied for The Ocean Race.

“Autopilot design has come a long way, and in addition there are so many contributing factors to improving performance, from software to better measure our structures and systems, to hardware development in areas like the compass and other advanced sensors,” Enright says.

“The fact that hand-steering will probably no longer be necessary doesn’t really matter according to Morgan. “Our view has always been to use our on-deck systems and design them in such a way to exploit the extra people onboard to trim harder. If the autopilot comes in, which it has done, then that’s no problem. We’re still going to have the same ability to trim well and make our boat go quicker with the autopilot. So, it’s like an extra set of hands, I guess, but it won’t really affect anything we do too much. We’ll be setting the boat up for that style of sailing and probably that’s more what the crew’s used to from the tradition of our Ocean Race standard.”

One of the most striking visual aspects of the newly launched boat, and a departure from what has gone before, is the wide, low profile, covered cockpit with its big windows. It was, along with the interior layout, the result of a long and intensive process that started with a blank page.

“The boats are typically single-handed, short-handed machines, and we were just trying to figure out where to fit everyone,” Enright says. “The Ocean Race crew-configuration rule means we have to fit multiple people on the boat. While the IMOCA 60 Class rule incentivizes low freeboard and maximum water ballast, where are the people going to go? Where do the food and spares go? How’s everyone going to sleep? Eat? It’s hard. And being able to start from scratch with the new boat on some of those ideas has been helpful.”

The use of full-size mock-ups substantially helped with this aspect of the design. “The mock-up process was intensive,” Enright says. “It helped with the ergonomics of crewed sailing, where all the people were going to fit, how were we going to do maneuvers, where things were going to lead, where wheels would go, potentially tillers would go, pedestals would go, winches…There were center tunnels, two tunnels, a split pit, left and right, fore and aft. All these different permutations got addressed one way or another in the mock-up process. And then down below, where are the bunks going to fit? The whole IMOCA rule is governed by the 110- and the 180-degree righting test, so where, volumetrically, can you fit things for as little cost as possible? And when you have to create more volume, what does that mean for the bulb weight and everything else?

“There are an infinite number of loops that can get run on this rule. It is well known how complex it is. It’s not a mystery when you see boats so radically different, because once you change something, the knock-on effect of that one change takes you so far from where you’ve been, and potentially where you were trying to go… We have a whole playbook that we drafted from spending days in the mock-up. It’s different. You used to have a bow man, a mid-bow man, a pit man, a mast man. Now we just have position one through five, and you rotate around as space allows. Whatever winch you’re closest to in a particular maneuver, that’s your job. You don’t have a label. There’s not enough space.”

The mock-up was a potential hit to the boat’s carbon footprint, but some careful planning in advance took care of that. “The deck mock-up was built with FSC certified woods and was fitted together in an almost jigsaw-like way, without any adhesives or too much metal work,” says Amy Munro, the team’s Sustainability Officer. “You could actually just unclip it all at the end. And then the panels were used for container set-ups and fit-outs and some of the boat builders from CDK even took them home for shelving! The wood at the end of it was of high enough quality that it could have a nice reuse application. So, designing for disassembly, re-use and for end-of-life at the beginning really paid off.”

Next steps

Now that the boat has been launched, everyone I spoke to is clear on the next steps as the boat prepares for its first big test – the Transat Jacques Vabre in November 2021. Guillaume Verdier outlined the process: “Well, first things first, everybody’s job is to make things work… Having the electronics really well set up and having all the fiber optics delivering the data we need. Inspecting the boat, a lot. Pushing the boat in hard conditions to make sure there’s no damage. And then finding the good tuning set-ups and comparing those with the predicted ones… We then ask ourselves, what is the discrepancy? What are the foil strain gauges saying when we are pushing hard, are we comfortable with it? Inspecting the foils, inspecting the hull; all these things have to be done.”

Both Enright and Morgan are blunt with their assessments: “My ultimate focus between now and November is reliability,” Enright says. “I just want everything to work and the performance will come.”

Morgan agrees: “Short term, reliability. What’s most important to us right now is a reliable boat that can do the Transat Jacques Vabre and not limp in, that’s for sure.”

Given the care and attention that has gone into the build, this seems a very reasonable hope, and it’s the construction process that we will examine in the final part of this series.

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After 24 months of research, development, and construction, 11th Hour Racing Team has unveiled its new IMOCA 60, the first of a new era of boats designed to compete in fully crewed, short-handed and solo offshore sailboat races.

A product of Guillaume Verdier’s design studio and built at CDK Technologies in the home of offshore yacht racing in Brittany, France, the new IMOCA 60 blends sporting performance with sustainable construction practices, and state-of-the-art boat building technology.

The hull was rolled out of CDK Technologies’ build shed in Port-la-Fôret, France on Saturday August 7 and will head to MerConcept in Concarneau for its foils to be fitted along with other final touches. The boat’s colorful design, created in collaboration with two of Italy’s leading designers – Marco and Stefano Van Orton – and France’s Jean-Baptiste Epron – will be unveiled in full when the boat sails for the first time at the end of August.

Where IMOCA 60s are traditionally designed for the typical downwind course of the solo Vendée Globe, the 11th Hour Racing Team boat has been optimized for the broader range of conditions expected in The Ocean Race, which will cross the equator four times in the 2022-23 edition.

Featuring an entirely closed cockpit design, the new IMOCA 60 allows up to five sailors to live and work under the protection of its cover for the majority of time spent offshore. Thanks to its innovative shape, the cockpit provides nearly 360-degree visibility, further enhanced via a refined auto-pilot, navigation system, cameras, and marine mammal deterrence system.

Also to be revealed in the coming weeks will be the culmination of two years – and several iterations – of foil design, tested both in the simulator and on the team’s first IMOCA 60, known as 11.1.

Striving to inspire action within the marine industry and beyond, the new 11th Hour Racing Team IMOCA 60 is seeking to set a benchmark for boat building innovations by utilizing alternative materials like flax for hatches, interior and deck panels, and implementing sustainable practices including stakeholder working groups and supply chain engagement, along with a highly analytical life cycle approach while supporting the creation of new IMOCA Class sustainability rules.

Skipper Charlie Enright was excited about the launch: “We’ve designed a version of the IMOCA 60 that no one has ever built before. Our boat should be able to withstand the toughest conditions in the most remote corners of the world, but is also able to compete in various shorthanded configurations. To build an all-around-performer like this, we have worked with the best in the trade: Guillaume Verdier as the lead naval architect, the technical and performance experts at MerConcept, and the build team at CDK Technologies. Running this project during a global pandemic was definitely a challenge, however, one constant never changed: putting sustainability at the center of the whole process.”

Damian Foxall, Sustainability Program Manager at 11th Hour Racing Team, explained more about this sustainability-first approach: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure – and what you can’t measure, can’t be improved. This is why we have executed a full Life Cycle Assessment over the course of the build process, in order to determine the environmental impact of the different components and procedures. Based on this evidence, we can work out different ways to reduce our impact, such as substituting highly-polluting materials with new alternatives, reducing single-use elements, optimizing our supply chain and internal operations, and refining the boat’s actual shape to make it more energy-efficient.

“Sharing our findings with the rest of the industry, from boat builders to sailors to race organizers, is an essential part of our mission, in order to inform the future and push the paradigm shift we urgently need. We have only 8 years left to meet the requirements of the Paris Agreement to reduce our impact by 50-percent. Business as usual is no longer an option.”

Durability has been a crucial factor in reducing the IMOCA 60′s overall footprint without compromising on performance and safety. Adaptable to both short-handed and fully-crewed racing, the boat in its current setup has been optimized to race with up to five sailors. The boat’s race schedule includes the upcoming Défi Azimut (raced double-handed with a non-sailing onboard media crew member), the Transat Jacques Vabre (double-handed), and The Ocean Race 2022-23 (four sailors and one sailing onboard media crew member).

“Winning The Ocean Race is our ultimate goal,” said Mark Towill, CEO of 11th Hour Racing Team. “These past months have been a huge collaborative effort, connecting a multitude of different stakeholders across the globe to build a boat that is completely different from what this Class has known so far. We are challenging the status quo and aiming to do it as sustainably as possible and sharing these learnings with the wider marine community. We are all extremely proud to see the boat leave the shed and are incredibly grateful to everyone for their hard work.”

Supported by sponsor 11th Hour Racing, the Team is looking to inspire other teams, race organizers and marine businesses to take action by starting their own sustainability journey. “The marine environment is harsher than any other, even outer space; the salt, wind, sun, and incredible force of water work to corrode, break down, or tear apart everything onboard,” noted Jeremy Pochman, co-founder and CEO, 11th Hour Racing. “If the sustainable materials used in building the Team’s new IMOCA can survive these conditions, then it’s clear we can use such materials in less demanding boats, and the advances could ripple out through other industries that deal with far less harsh environments. This is a remarkable milestone as we work to change the narrative around sustainability in the marine and maritime industries, and in everyday life.”

The post Launch for 11th Hour Racing’s Latest IMOCA 60 appeared first on Sailing World.

I’m training in San Francisco in the 49erFX with my new teammate, Lucy Wilmot, when the phone rings. On the other end is Charlie Enright. Yeah, that Charlie Enright, and as if asking to pass the salt at the dinner table, he starts the conversation by casually asking me if I have any interest in coming to tryout with the 11th Hour Racing Team on their IMOCA 60, the one they’re using to train for the Ocean Race, which starts in 2022. My heart likely skipped a beat. Why me? An Olympic dinghy hopeful from Fort Lauderdale, someone who’s never been at sea past sunset.

Well, of course, I’m interested, I tell him. Tell me more.

Three weeks later, I board a flight to Newport, Rhode Island, excited to take on an opportunity of a lifetime.

Having never slept overnight on a boat, and knowing close to nothing about offshore racing, I did my research: pouring through videos and articles about the IMOCA 60. But what I read online does not do justice to the boat. When I step over the lifelines and onto the black-and-white honeycomb deck for the first time, I feel like I’m stepping onto a spacecraft. It must look like a ghost ship as foils across the ocean in the dead of night.

The cockpit is tiny and lines spill into the pit like a waterfall. Below is crammed with gear, sails, food, equipment and Fat Boy beanbags. It’s meant for a coed crew of four, plus an onboard reporter, to race around the world, with a few stops along the way.

After two days of getting to know the team and the boat’s systems, we set out for an overnight training session. With no clue what to bring, and having a dinghy sailor mentality, I’ve packed my wetsuit. When I confide in one of the crew, Kyle Langford, on my gear selection, he jokingly replies that I don’t need a wetsuit and hints that I should probably keep it to myself that I brought one. He grabs me a proper offshore kit from a plastic tub, and before I can find my bearings, we are flying downwind into the night.

The crew shifts are four hours on and four hours off for 48 hours. To my surprise, the shifts are not so bad. It reminds me of the workouts I’ve done during my Olympic campaign where the work time and rest time are equivalent, always allowing adequate recovery time. When I’m on watch, I try my best to soak in everything, learn, and work efficiently. I also take time to sleep and eat when I’m off. Each crew member will cycle through this schedule like clockwork to constantly keep the boat ripping along on its foils.

My shift is 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., and when I wake up, I’m sprawled out over the bean bag. I put on my foul weather gear, and make myself instant coffee in the galley. Sticking my head out into the cockpit, I feel like a deer in the headlights. The sky is immaculate with stars shining clearer to my naked eye. I’ve never seen anything like it. The moon is beaming, the water kissing the hull, the wind rushing across our sails. There’s not another boat, or a hint of land, in sight.

Up until this point, our practice and my experience is glamour. Everything seems too good to be true. Just too perfect. It’s around 1 a.m. and Charlie and I are on watch. Charlie climbs down into the galley to put on a few more layers, leaving me at the tiller. Trying to find my mug for a few more sips of coffee, I put the boat on autopilot for a brief moment while I reach into a sheet pocket in the cockpit. When I grab the tiller again and disengage the autopilot, the tiller feels light. I look out the window above me and up at the sail. Sure enough, the boat is in irons. Totally embarrassed, I try sculling the rudder to one side, as if it were a dinghy, and to try to get the boat back onto a close-hauled course.

My efforts fail.

“Uh…Charlie…”

The two of us try to the boat out of irons, but even we can’t do it alone. Charlie has to wake-up the rest of the crew. I am mortified. Here I am, a decent sailor, and I drive the IMOCA 60 into irons in the middle of the night. After the incident, I learn the autopilot can get “lost” when the hull gets a little too flat because it gauges its steering angle off the load in the keel. When the load goes light, the boat can spin up into irons. Knowing this, of course, makes me feel a bit better, but I still can’t remember the last time I was stuck in irons. All I could think was “tiller towards trouble.”

Over the next two weeks, we continue offshore training sessions and a few day sailing sessions. I am well past my comfort zone now and amazed at all the things I didn’t know about the sport. Every day, I’m eager to be more involved on the boat. I want to put my hands on everything so I could learn faster and help the team where I can. Often, I find my hands gripping the grinding pedestal because I know—physically—I can push hard and I’m unwilling to quit.

Our “off days” consists primarily of team meetings. At one, ideas bounce back and forth between the sailors and the engineers about hull manufacturing and foil shape. The language is so foreign to me, and not just because of all the different accents in the room. But sitting in on these meetings, I’m eager to understand foil designs and why one shape would outplay another. Each night, I type up pages of notes to absorb the material and follow up with questions. Surrounded by such experience and talent, I’d be crazy to waste a second of schooling. Sure enough, my learning curve accelerates upward at a rapid rate.

The experience and the exposure to offshore sailing opens my eyes to the greater areas of sailboat racing that I have been missing. Sailing the Laser Radial for 11 years of my life, I have forgotten what it feels like to reach higher levels of comprehension in the sport. I’m reminded that the feeling is exhilarating, the same rush that made me fall in love with sailing.

Thank you for the call Charlie. Sign me up.

Ed.’s Note: US Sailing Team member Erika Reineke recently launched an 49erFX campaign with skipper Lucy Wilmot; follow their campaign at www.wilmotreinekefx.com and on their social channels.

The post Foiling Into a New Comfort Zone appeared first on Sailing World.

It might be the first time I’ve laughed from absurdity, with uncontrollable amusement at my surroundings and the general state of things.

The instruments have us consistently zooming at 30-something knots, but it’s blowing only 20-something outside our vomit comet. We’re not surfing waves. The Atlantic is flat, and our performance is 100 percent by design. We are foiling through a dark, moonless night at optimal speed in optimal conditions somewhere off the coast of Brazil, bound for France.

It’s 2 a.m., and I’m lying on top of a pile of unclaimed gear bags and a thin foam pad that is supposed to be used on a bunk. But there is no bunk on this vessel, and there is nowhere else to go inside this 60-footer designed for one sailor. There are six of us, caged in a loud and crowded space not much bigger than a cargo van. For the past seven days, we’ve all tried every nook. This is where I’ve landed, sliding around on the top of a ballast tank like a puck on ice. Sleep is impossible. I start giggling. I can’t help it. The absurdity of it all is laughable.

Charlie Enright—lying next to me in the leeward bilge, nestled into a beanbag—is awake too, staring at the coachroof.

I’ve been through a lot with Charlie, but this is entirely new. The high-pitched whine of the foil next to my head echoes around the boat. It’s turbulent, like a jet engine, the hull violently slamming around as if driving on a potholed road back in Rhode Island. I wonder what exactly we are doing, how offshore sailing has evolved so quickly and so aggressively that we are now foiling across oceans. Only a few years ago, we were doing 19 knots in a Volvo 65 in these same conditions. And that felt fast.

Charlie, who had previously raced the boat doublehanded to Brazil during the Transat Jacques Vabre—for 14 days—must have heard my laughter because he grins, presumably familiar with my disorientation.

“The polars for the new set of foils show us in the 40s,” he says nonchalantly.

I stop laughing and shake my head, ­wondering what that actually means.

The new foils Charlie referred to will be fitted to the team’s current training boat, while the new boat that he and five other teammates will enter into the 2021 Ocean Race is being built. This edition of the round-the-world race will be contested with two fleets: Volvo 65s and IMOCA 60s. Charlie and his co-skipper, Mark Towill, twice sailed the Volvo Ocean Race with the 65—once with Alvimedica and once with Vestas 11th Hour Racing. This time, they’re gunning for the win with a state-of-the art IMOCA 60.

We’re on 11th Hour Racing’s 11.1, an older-generation IMOCA 60 purchased from singlehander Alex Thomson. Other than learning how to sleep, everyone on board is here to soak in the experience for the first time—to learn how to survive, how to push and how to exist.

This is a new style of boat requiring a new set of skills. Each of us, regardless of how many high-speed sea miles we have or don’t have, must now contemplate the foiling part of the equation: Angles and speeds are vastly different. Shorthanded sailing requires a new set of talents; everyone has to learn a lot about a lot—there are no traditional roles. We serve a new title sponsor requiring new priorities, and everyone feels an obligation to the larger global implications of sea and sustainability. We have an opportunity to make a difference in this world.

Besides the faces of my teammates, nothing feels familiar. We were in the midst of significant change, and the curve is rapidly shifting beneath us. Outside of a handful of French solo sailors, few people have come to terms with the sheer audacity of foiling across oceans. It is understandably difficult to comprehend—and even harder to achieve. But we have to start somewhere. We’re on a delivery of discovery.

Food is fuel, it’s as simple as that, so while it might seem mundane, the question of how much to have is taken seriously. Offshore sailors burn through insane calories, and nutrition goes hand in hand with performance. As a “media man,” food and supplies fall under my jurisdiction. I pick, pack and prep the meals because it’s a job nobody else wants. Fine by me—it gives me a “watch partner,” something to keep me honest and invested. It holds me to a routine. But this IMOCA 60 has no galley, sink or cooler, just a spigot and a few small containers. All of my old quantity-planning spreadsheets from previous races are for crews of 11 or nine, accounting for a full galley. Six people and a minimalist setup is all new to me.

For this delivery, we use freeze-dried meals, remnants from a past campaign, and each sailor decants each meal for him- or herself. This, however, produces a lot of waste, and we can’t be wasteful, so we must try to find another way forward. By the end of the delivery, I will have a much better understanding of how much food six people consume and, more important, what this group of individuals likes and dislikes. We are aiming to work with brands to eliminate extraneous packaging or, even better, eliminate plastic entirely. In the future, we will be trialing reusable silicone bags that hold one meal for six.

Supplies are handled in a similar way. We’ve brought far more toilet paper, baby wipes, toothpaste, butane, etc., than we will need, but knowing how much we use in 15 days will allow me to understand how much of everything we will need come race day. It’s important to start building a food and supply list for a typical race leg.

Another great unknown is how much ­foul-weather gear we will need. Extra gear is slow, but so too is being cold, wet and tired. The Volvo 70s were light. The less you brought, the lighter the boat, the faster you could go. The Volvo 65s were heavy and needed righting moment. The more you brought, the more you could stack, the faster you could go. The IMOCA class is back to situation light. The foils provide so much righting moment, and flight is so essential, that being light could be everything. This means scrutinizing the necessity of things such as spare clothes and foul-weather gear. During this delivery, I put on my dry top only a few times, just to go out and take photos on deck. We can do most of the sailing from inside the cockpit, which is totally covered. Gone are the days of being pelted with water and slammed with waves. We seriously consider having communal gear, used in those possibly rare occasions where one or two of us has to venture outside our igloo. If we don’t absolutely need it, it stays off the boat.

Developing the ideal watch system is one of trial and error. We cheat a bit here. There are always two of us on deck, with four sailors running independent four-on/four-off watches and a single rotation every two hours. Charlie and I float. I obviously won’t be able to float when we get down to racing, so the number of available bodies actually drops to five. The watch system will need a lot of attention, but it feeds directly into the one burning question on everyone’s mind, especially after our Chinese jibe in the middle of the night: How much do we trust the autopilot?

It’s impossible to predict when the aged autopilot will decide to go on break, but it generally happens when you least expect it. Usually, by the time you figure out it’s not “doing its thing,” it’s already too late. This time, it’s a 2 a.m. carve-down that goes well past the point of no return. We jibe, the boom swings across, and the boat is on its side. The major problem is that the leeward rudder, which was our windward rudder, is in its raised position, and the windward rudder, which was in its down position, is useless. Standing in waist-deep water at the back of the boat, we struggle to wrestle the upright rudder to get it down; there are a lot of moving parts in the rudder system that make it difficult to move under load. Plus, we’ve never done this before, so it takes longer than it should. Eventually, Charlie is able to pull on the half-lowered rudder to bear away, it’s a quick reminder that we have lots to learn.

The autopilot is—for now—untrustworthy, at least to us.

Race organizers want to limit autopilot usage to maintain a clear point of differentiation with the rest of the offshore-racing world. The feasibility of that for five sailors is uncertain, however. We spent a lot of time under autopilot during our delivery sprint. Driving when you can’t see is really hard, and the IMOCA 60 is designed with autopilot in mind. Visibility is second. It gets more complicated too when we consider the race’s desire to attract existing Vendée Globe IMOCAs into the event. These boats are already fitted with autopilots, and asking teams to remove or nullify their ­systems—when they were fundamentally built around them—is difficult. There’s no question that the autopilot would be used, but there’s also no question the human hand would be faster, fatigue and visibility aside.

Fatigue is a big deal, by the way, and it comes with a lack of sleep. On this trip, we are scattered around inside like rolling pebbles. Every time I look, somebody is on the move, trying some other place, a different position—nothing works. Collectively, sleep is elusive, and it will be even more of an issue as the foils get bigger. The way the boat moves and the way it sounds when you’re foiling make sleep problematic. The singlehanded guys don’t use bunks, and there’s a decent chance we won’t either. That’s because berths take up a lot of space, and with the IMOCA 60, getting weight outboard is no longer a requirement. It’s more about fore-and-aft trim. I envision beanbag chairs and extreme exhaustion as the new norm, the price to pay for crossing oceans at 40 knots.

Remember, this is a fully crewed ­adventure on a boat made for one. The paradigm has shifted here. We are no longer defined by our position on the roster. We have to do practically everything. With so few people, one must be good at every position. Charlie, for example, can now repair a watermaker, navigate, and hoist a J3 from the pedestal or bow. Everyone needs to understand ­everything in a completely different way.

The IMOCAs might be 60 feet long, but in terms of usable interior, they are actually much smaller. With the high speeds these boats maintain and their unpredictable mannerisms, no one risks going forward on deck or down below. If you must do something out of the cockpit, we must either turn downwind or slow down. Things that were traditionally forward, such as the plumbed head, would be unusable at speed, so it simply doesn’t exist on the boat. Instead, we use a rubber bucket placed in the bilge. Private moments are always in close proximity to someone else. It’s uncomfortable to start, and uncomfortable to finish, but there is no better solution.

We’re uncertain how hard our boat can be pushed, and consequently, we’re just getting to know its potential. In the Vendée Globe, solo sailors spend most of their time throttling back and letting the autopilot lead because they are designed to be ultralight for the midlatitudes and reefed for the extremes. We, on the other hand, will inevitably spend most of our time throttling forward, with both hands on the helm. Class rules state that the rig and keel must be one-design, but their actual limits are largely unknown. We will add fiber optics to our mast and foils to start visualizing stresses in real time. With a full crew pushing the boat beyond known limits, we could be faster, but we also might be at risk of breaking the boat. We are cautious on our way north, but relative to other IMOCAs around us, also delivering to France, we feel fast.

We arrive after 14 days on board. Our bodies are wrecked, on account of little sleep and much discomfort. These boats will be difficult to race and endure, but we have started learning—and acclimating. For a collection of veterans used to having a lot of the answers, there is much uncertainty.

It’s this adventure into the unknown that attracts us to this next Ocean Race. We have a blank slate. What better way to begin than with a 15-day trans-Atlantic bringing us through almost every climate and every condition? Deep summer to deep winter. Sailing upwind, across the wind and downwind. Through the trade winds, the Doldrums and the Bay of Biscay.

As we debrief in Lorient, following the long and varied trip with an unfamiliar craft, it really feels like a wildly new chapter in a repetitive book. Exciting, revolutionary adventures are ahead.

The post IMOCA 60 School appeared first on Sailing World.

On an early September morning at the Newport Shipyard in Rhode Island, Charlie Enright is on the hunt for a pair of sailing shoes. Boat call is 1100, and while he’s capable of going barefoot, this particular day sail is with his boss, Wendy Schmidt, co-founder of 11th Hour Racing, title sponsor of the eponymous Ocean Race team.

In the department of dress to impress, it’s best not to show up for work without kicks. Enright—today at least—may be a cobbler’s kid without shoes, but he can be forgiven, for he has more pressing concerns as the co-skipper of a new (to him) IMOCA 60. He’s staring down a long, dark tunnel to the start of The Ocean Race in the autumn of 2021. The proverbial light is hardly visible, but three years out, he says, he has everything a young two-time round-the-world skipper could want: time and money.

“It’s no secret that in the first campaign [with Alvimedica] we didn’t know what we were doing,” Enright says. “We learned a ton from it and felt like we were in a good place in the last go around [with Vestas 11th Hour Racing]. Situations out of our control didn’t allow us to realize our goals, so it’s exciting to be in early, in a development class with a real leg up.”

The next edition of The Ocean Race will feature two different classes: foil-assisted IMOCA 60s and recycled Volvo 65s. Enright and Towill have chosen the IMOCA for obvious reasons: it’s faster, far more advanced, and demands half the crew of the 65. “The 65 allowed us to do what we’ve done,” Enright says. “We’re a product of it, but it’s a good time for us to take a big step forward.”

For their third attempt to win what was formerly the Volvo Ocean Race, Enright and his equal, Mark Towill, secured the early backing of 11th Hour Racing, allowing them to purchase the earlier-generation IMOCA 60 Hugo Boss from Alex Thompson in April. Their relationship with the organization goes back a decade when they raced across the Atlantic in 2011. “They supplied us with organic freeze-dried food,” says Enright with a chuckle. “It’s been an evolution from then on.”

After winning this summer’s Rolex Transatlantic Race onboard David and Peter Askew’s Wizard, Enright spent the entirety of the summer in France, acclimating to the IMOCA culture and apprenticing alongside Volvo Ocean Race-winning navigator and shorthanded racing legend, Pascal Bidégorry. “The only way to learn is by learning,” he says. “So I jumped into the deep end.”

More accustomed to calling the shots from the helm or the nav station, Enright has had full immersion in the art of doing things himself. “It’s been eye-opening for sure, the shorthanded bit,” he says. “It’s like being the bowman, the boat captain, the navigator, the medic and everything else.”

He now has a greater appreciation for the French sailing culture and says it’s no coincidence that Franco-led teams have dominated the last two editions of the round-the-world race: Frank Cammas-led Groupama and Charles Caudrelier’s Dongfeng. “They can talk to you about sails, how to rewire the boat, the navigation, whatever it is,” he says. “The days of the specialists are kind of over. They are well rounded sailors and you have to be for shorthanded racing. It’s been a lot of learning for me, but I’m having fun with it. It’s all new.”

What will also be new for Enright and 11th Hour Racing, eventually, is an IMOCA 60 for the next edition of the race. The team has retained the design services of Guillaume Verdier as well as the support of MerConcept, the French project management company founded by Vendée Globe winner and round-the-world record holder Francois Gabart. MerConcept’s army of experienced technicians and engineers, which oversee Gabart’s Ultime 100 projects, will certainly help propel the development of 11th Hour Racing’s 60-foot weapon.

“They just built a 60 [Apivia for Frenchman Charlie Dalin] and we’ll be piggy back off that in some ways,” Enright says. “It’s sort of like having a three-boat campaign; the boat they just launched, the boat we’re sailing on, and the one we’ll build. Having the relationship with them has certainly helped so far. Gabart is royalty over there. He’s an amazing, humble and hard-working guy.”

However, while Dalin’s Apivia is designed exclusively for the solo Vendée Globe in 2020, the steed of 11th Hour Racing must be designed and built around a crew of five, which Enright says invites a long list of considerations. “No one has ever done what we’re about to do,” he says of a fully-crewed IMOCA 60. “With the configurations, the deck layouts and what have you, what may work on the Vendee won’t work for the Ocean Race. In the development world you can win or lose the race before it starts. It doesn’t matter who’s sailing the boat.”

What could ultimately be different between the two breeds of IMOCA 60s is complicated, says Enright, followed by a long and calculated pause. For one, there will be more helming and less full-time reliance on the autopilot. There are the side foils, of course, and their infinite range adjustments, the sail inventory, the stacking of those sails, as well as the mechanics of getting them up and down with only five crew, likely divided into doublehanded watches. Then, there’s where everyone is going to fit, sleep, store food, spares and media equipment. The racecourse itself presents a different menu of design variables, too.

“The Vendée is basically a race to Cape Horn and back to Brest,” Enright says. The complete Ocean Race course, yet to be announced, is a much different beast with various ports of call and complex inshore segments.

Enright’s crash course in shorthanded sailing is ongoing and will continue this fall with a go at the doublehanded Transat Jaques Vabres, from France to Brazil, alongside Bidegorry. Enright says he’s good at looking at the routing and the weather and knowing what the next sail will be, but admits he’s gotten used to having a top-shelf crew to do the heavy lifting. “I’d be like, ‘OK guys, I think we should reef!’ And It would happen. Now I have to do it myself. And the autopilot…it feels weird to set it to a heading or true-wind-angle and then go to sleep at 30 knots. To have faith in it is crazy. I haven’t got used to that part yet.”

While the father of two young children gets his doublehanded miles in the Atlantic over the next few months, Towill, newlywed and living in Hawaii, will oversee the team’s budgetary work, its relationships with commercial partners and sponsorship liaison before joining Enright a full team for a post-race training run from Brazil to a destination unknown. “He’s instrumental,” says Enright. “There’s so much more to these campaigns than the sailing. It’s arguably harder to get to the start than the lap itself and he’s incredibly smart with all that. We divide and conquer and we’re efficient that way.”

For 11th Hour Racing’s part, this latest sponsorship is also a significant step in activating its platform on a more global scale. The intent is to fund grassroots sustainability projects wherever the race fleet pulls into port, says 11th Hour Racing president Rob MacMillan. As a partner of the race itself, they’re also launching several high-level ocean health summits at a few stopovers.

“We expect them to win the race,” MacMillan says. “Winning is the objective, but the team is really a billboard for what we’re doing with the race. Our short-term objective is to focus on the French market, which is super engaged in the sport and ocean health issues close to them. We’re going to use that to talk about how ocean health is the driver for climate change and invest in the non-profits there. Then we will engage on local issues everywhere we go. We’re committed beyond this campaign, to establishing a legacy, not talking about it, but getting our hands dirty around the world.”

In the meantime, there’s much work to be done. Starting with finding Enright a pair of sailing shoes. The boss is ready to go sailing.

The post Ahead of the Game appeared first on Sailing World.

The successful partnership first forged in 2015 between 52 SUPER SERIES and 11th Hour Racing will continue through the next two seasons of the world’s leading grand prix monohull racing circuit.

During 2016 and 2017 many new sustainable initiatives will be rolled out at each of the 52 SUPER SERIES venues, and a broader fan engagement campaign in order to raise awareness and promote a lasting legacy across sailing and the world of sport.

In 2015, the 52 SUPER SERIES and 11th Hour Racing worked closely together to create a robust sustainability plan and implement a series of initiatives to promote environmental responsibility, awareness and best practices, with the ultimate goal of protecting the health of our ocean.

“We have a great future ahead are really pleased with what we accomplished in the first year of our partnership with 11th Hour Racing. We were able to engage sailors, officials, personnel, supporters and spectators with a successful sustainability campaign, backed by a credible strategy and implementation plan,” reflects Lars Boecking, 52 SUPER SERIES Sustainability Officer.

“At 11th Hour Racing we select programs and events where we see the potential to have a long-term influence, where success is measured by the positive impact that we can track with specific metrics. The 52 SUPER SERIES has proven to be a very effective platform, where both the organizers and participants have embraced and endorsed our mission. This competitive series complements well our rich portfolio of sponsorships and grants, and we are thrilled to partner up for the next two racing seasons,” commented Rob MacMillan, 11th Hour Racing Co-Founder.

The 52 SUPER SERIES organizers have developed a pragmatic, sensible plan, which is progressively finding favour with everyone involved, as Lars Boeckingpoints out: “ We are not an advocacy group nor an environmental organisation, but a top level sporting circuit seeking to raise awareness on the importance of environmental responsibility. By embracing best practices, we can show the world of professional sport that this is a winning formula.”

The 52 SUPER SERIES sustainability plan in 2015 included many initiatives, with specific targets of improving and optimizing the following main areas of operation:

• Water usage
• Fuel usage
• Waste disposal and recycling
• Marketing and branding materials
• Cleaning and maintenance of boats and equipment
• Transport of equipment and personnel

Specific achievements included:

The adoption of water filtration systems at each venue, eliminating approximately 6,500 single-use (0.5 litre) plastic bottles over the entire season. This is a highly tangible item that sends a clear message, and was adopted by many of the competing teams. All the management team, race officials and volunteers were given a branded reusable water bottle from Laken, a Spanish company that specializes in environmentally friendly bottles and containers for drinks and food, to exceed FDA, EEC and other international standards.

All venues now have highly visible waste stations to enable easy recycling and proper disposal. These are provided by the 52 SUPER SERIES notwithstanding local provisions.

Food provisioning for all race officials and volunteers is now always supplied in environmentally friendly packaging, and procured locally. This practice has eliminated the use of approximately 3,200 plastic bags over the entire season.

Steps are being taken to reduce fuel consumption by all support boats wherever possible, encouraging shore teams to adopt responsible practices.

Each 52 SUPER SERIES team has appointed a Sustainability Ambassador to facilitate communication and implementation of the many initiatives, and to discuss and bring new ideas to the table.

The global PR effort of the 52 SUPER SERIES has delivered the sustainability messages across the event Social Media channels, and national and international press coverage, including broadcast such as Eurosport, Sports4EU and Nautical Channel.

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The post Water, Water Everywhere appeared first on Sailing World.

Locals are aware they need to preserve the area, so finding recycling bins, group housing, and filtered water centers was a cinch. Thanks to our online regatta documents, events manager Susan Winner commented, “this is the least amount of paper I’ve ever used for an event”.

For the Moth Class, sustainability means minimizing the economic, environmental and social costs of our sport and lifestyle, while maximizing positive contributions at our race venues and beyond through leadership, innovation, and action.

The class is committed to sustainability. Sustainable thinking and conduct is our obligation in exchange for getting to practice the sport at terrific venues around the world. The class will endeavor to conduct our events and our sailing with sustainability as a top priority.

Moth Class tenets for running Green Regattas

1. LOCATION: Try to situate regattas that will draw competitors from far away in locations near major travel hubs. Air travel is expensive — both with respect to money and carbon emissions. Direct flights are better for the environment — and usually cheaper! Likewise, picking venues with easy travel arrangements will help increase your entry list.

2. MINIMIZE POWER BOATS: As sailboats get faster and faster, coach/photo/support/spectator boats need to burn even more fuel to keep up. Discourage support boats from “chasing” the sailors up and down the beats. This will save gas, reduce emissions, and cut down on wakes that interfere with the racing. Instead, designate good static viewing spots for coach boats.

3. DOCUMENT AND PUBLICIZE: Moths in particular have problems with trash in the water. Where your fleet runs into problems with trash or pollution in the water, document the problem as part of your regatta media releases. This helps draw attention to the need to keep our harbors, bays, and oceans clean.

4. GROUND SHIPPING: Encourage competitors to ship their boats together, using surface freight whenever possible. This will cut down on carbon footprint. Likewise, try to make local charter boats available for competitors from far away. For local sailors, lending or sharing your boat with a ‘rock star’ from another part of the country or world is a great way to get your boat tuned up and up to speed.

5. NO SINGLE USE WATER BOTTLES: Insert language in the Notice of Race and Sailing Instructions that bans the use of single-use water bottles. Instead, competitors should use re-useable bottles. The organizers must do their part to make this easy. Set up “water boats” with large supplies on the course to fill up competitors’ bottles between races.

6. TRASH: Rule 55 of the Racing Rules of Sailing prohibits the discharge of trash on the race course. But the problem isn’t just on the water; trash in the dinghy parks and yacht clubs is just as bad — and often ends up in the water. Make trash disposal easy for competitors by keeping trash barrels easily accessible.

7. SHARE GEAR: Modern sails contain lots of plastic. Rather than letting old sails sit in your garage (or end up in the trash) hand them down to new sailors in the fleet who need practice sails. The more an item is used, the less its ultimate environmental footprint.

8. DITCH THE PAPER: Sailing instructions, notices of race, and results simply don’t need to be printed out in hundreds of copies of all competitors. Nearly everyone has smartphones and internet access. Electronic versions of these documents work better for everyone — they can be accessed more quickly, they save the organizers money, and they reduce paper waste.

9. ONE GREEN ACTIVITY: Find time at each regatta for a green activity. It might be a beach cleanup, a brainstorming session — or something else entirely. But make it part of the routine.

10. LEAD BY EXAMPLE: Make sure the best sailors in the fleet — the people who everyone else looks to for tuning and strategy advice — are on board with the green program. This shows the fleet that the green message is for real, and that the values of environmental conservation are truly the values of the sport.

11. STAY TOGETHER FOR HOUSING: Having many sailors stay together helps in many ways; hotel costs, travel costs and food costs. By staying together you can usually get a better deal, you can share a rental car and you can buy you food from a grocery store instead of eating out for each meal.

12. PICK A CLUB WITH A GOOD BAR AND RESTAURANT: After sailing, who doesn’t want a beer and some munchies. This is usually a good way to have some low impact post sailing food. Kegs and burgers are cheap and easy. Always use glasses rather than plastic cups, of course! Likewise, where possible, choose locally-grown or raised food products for the regatta meals.

The post 2015 Moth Nationals appeared first on Sailing World.