It’s hard to believe that Stan Honey, the Hall of Famer and navigational wizard of globe-girdling race boats big and fast, had never sailed the Newport Bermuda Race on his vessel. He’d completed the course plenty of times on boats built for line honors and setting records (check and check). But there he was on a late June morning backing the family Cal 40 Illusion into a slip at the Royal Bermuda YC not long after the big boats had arrived. In a few days, Stan and his teammates would be confirmed as Class 10 winners and the next engraving on the St. David’s Lighthouse Trophy. It would be the last time Stan and his Hall of Fame bride, Sally, would race their Illusion as its caretakers. Fittingly, it was, in Stan’s own words, “a terrific experience.”

“Our race was all about preparation,” says the 67-year-old navigator, whose team sailed the 635-mile course in 87 hours. “We had an unimaginably good crew, perfect sails, a perfect bottom, and we were lucky that we were the right-size boat.”

There’s a lot of truth to the saying that one makes one’s own luck, and it’s equally true that this team of five friends from the West Coast did indeed craft their own good fortune—and then some.

The Honeys have owned their Cal 40 Illusion for 33 years, with their first ocean race for the boat being the 1990 Pacific Cup from San Francisco to Kaneohe, Hawaii, sailing doublehanded, finishing second, and beating most of the fully crewed boats. “That was fun,” Sally says. Stan raced the next edition singlehanded, and they followed that up by winning the Pacific Cup’s doublehanded division in 1996.

“When we bought the boat, it took longer than we thought to pull it back out of the state that it was in, which wasn’t very good,” Sally says. “There were bullet holes, fleas and homeless people living in her.”

The boat had been sitting in a Northern California boatyard for seven years, and to say it was in tough shape would be understatement. “We thought we would have her in the water within six months,” Sally says. But reality bit one rainy December day in Santa Cruz, she says. “We were sitting down below going through our lists, and we noticed there were waterfalls coming along inside the hull. We said, ‘Well, I guess we have more to do.’”

The refit that followed included ­removing and replacing all of the deck hardware, and replacing the hull-to-deck joint, an ongoing effort that has resulted in there being “almost nothing original on the boat,” Sally says. They’d originally bought the boat to go cruising after racing 505s for decades, but in 2014, after dozens of coastal races, they finally committed to “cruising her.”

They spent the next five years linking passages on and off, sailing down the West Coast, through the Panama Canal, and then up the Eastern Seaboard. “We got to know the boat in a different way—as a cruising boat,” she says. But at some point, Stan had the itch and the urge to enter Illusion in the 2020 edition of the Cruising Club of America’s Newport Bermuda Race.

“Stan had to talk me into it,” Sally says. “I was enjoying the cruising, and he said we had to do one more Bermuda Race.”

Of course, like everything Stan Honey does, this was calculated and carefully considered. “We’d bought the boat when I was 33, and we’ve sailed it very hard in both ­single- and doublehanded races, including five Hawaii races, and dozens and dozens of inshore races,” he says. “But as we’ve gotten older, it’s been hard to sail the boat as hard, so I thought it would be fun to do one more race where we could sail the boat really well.”

If they could get the best possible ­amateur crew for the race, who would it be? Stan asked Sally, to which she responded: Don Jesberg, Carl Buchan and Jonathan Livingston, all West Coast friends and sailing legends themselves. “But I said they’ll never agree to go with us.”

On that one and only point, she was wrong. Within 10 to 15 minutes of Stan sending an email to the three of them, the universal response was, “I’m in.”

“When they immediately responded, it was like, OK, I guess we’re going to do it,” Sally says.

With the COVID-19 pandemic ­eventually shuttering the 2020 running of the race, however, the Honeys resumed cruising in the Northeast, with two seasons in Maine. As the 2022 edition approached, they enquired once again of their crew, and Sally’s dream team remained committed.

Jesberg, she says, owns a Cal 40 on the West Coast and came with a quiver of sails, and Buchan came with his unique Olympic-medal-winning skillset. “He’s inhuman in his way of steering through anything,” Sally says. Stan says he’s an alien. “He gets into a zone, and he’s just amazing. Jonathan is a fabulous guy on the foredeck.”

With nearly 10,000 ocean miles ­having slid past the boat’s perfectly smooth bottom, Illusion was well-prepared and equipped to win when the Honeys and their mates set off with the Class 10 start on a sun-and-fog-kissed afternoon in Newport on June 17.

“Leaving the start, we were the leeward-most boat,” Stan says. “In fact, people were yelling at us for missing Mark 2A because they were confused about Mark 2 and Mark 2A, but we were the leeward-most boat in order to be able to get to the [Gulf] Stream easily and where we wanted to enter it. We knew we were going to get lifted and didn’t want to have to fight low to enter the top of the meander. We got within about 3 miles of my entry-point goal. We started out east and then went west to the Stream entry point, and then the Stream took us east again. We only jibed twice in the Stream to stay centered up in the eddy.”

The eddy that Honey had targeted proved to be the magic carpet ride they needed to jet them down the racecourse, and you can bet your sextant the winning move was all very calculated.

“It played out as expected,” Stan says. “There is some stuff [in the models] that I set aside as being unpredictable—like the first set of eddies that are south of the Stream. That whole area down there… All the models show stuff, but I have learned to have so very little confidence in it that I won’t invest in miles to optimize for it. If I’m confident in a model, I’ll trust it for the Stream, for eddies north of the Stream and for the single eddy south of the Stream, but nothing south of that. So, that part was just luck of the draw.”

With spinnakers and reaching gear ­getting all the action, their progress down the track was swift. “On a slower boat like the Cal 40, we can go 22 and we average 8 [knots], but we are often averaging something like 7, and if the Gulf Stream is going something like 4 [knots] it’s a huge deal, so you have to get the Gulf Stream exactly right.”

You heard that correct: Seven hours of fast sailing with a 4-knot turbo boost.

“[Stan] chose a good course,” Sally says with a chuckle. “The conditions were just what the boat loves—heavy air reaching—and it was perfect. When reaching with this boat, she just heels over, and the more wind you get, the faster she goes.”

With staggered four-hour watches, every two hours someone new would come on deck. Jesberg and Sally swapped with Livingston and Buchan, allowing Stan to do his thing on deck, in the nav station and in the galley, making coffee and serving up Sally’s fresh lasagna.

“Don was terrific on what was happening next, and plotting it out and keeping everything organized so that everyone knew what was going to happen,” Sally says. “Stan would call the jibe, and Don would do the details.”

And whenever Buchan was on the helm, they made haste toward Bermuda. “He has total confidence,” Sally says. “He doesn’t chatter at all—he’ll talk, but there are times where he’d say, ‘I’d love to talk to you now, but I can’t…’”

“During the race, you’re totally focused on doing everything you can and taking Advil when you need it. But all of a sudden, when you finish, you can appreciate what’s going on, let out a sigh that you’ve done it. We fulfilled what we wanted to do.”

It’s perhaps fitting that Buchan logged the team’s top speed—a burst of 22 knots, which Sally says was one of the true highlights of the race: “We were on starboard, and I was behind him playing the sheet. There was one wave that started to pick him up, and another wave behind that and then another—it was at night and I’m going, ‘Woo, woo, woo!’ Which woke everyone else up. Stan came up and asked what’s going on.”

“Cal 40 surfing is like surfing a brick off a curb,” Stan says. “It goes really fast for a short period of time.” For the record, it’s not the boat’s personal best, Sally says. That was 25 knots in the Pacific Cup, with the two of them under spinnaker outrunning a squall.

With an early jump on the fleet, the crew on Illusion were confident in the yellow brick road that Stan had laid out for them, and the final stage went according to plan as well.

“We knew the wind was going to shift to the north and northeast toward the finish,” he says, “so we worked our way west again to be inside that final shift and came into the finish on port. Overall, we went east, west, east and west over the course of the race.”

The early-morning finish was “magic,” Sally says. They were confident they’d done all the right things to give Illusion its Bermuda Race win. “It was beautiful seeing all the tall masts in front of us, and I thought, What are we doing with all the big boats? I’ve done two Bermuda Races in very different conditions, and it was pretty amazing. During the race, you’re totally focused on doing everything you can and taking Advil when you need it. But all of a sudden, when you finish, you can appreciate what’s going on, let out a sigh that you’ve done it. We fulfilled what we wanted to do. It’s a great way to end it, and we have done everything we can think of with her, so it’s the final chapter.”

It may be Stan and Sally’s final race with the boat (they’ve since bought a powerboat to cruise), but it’s certainly not the last we’ll see of her. They’ve sold Illusion to their nephew, so it remains in the family.

“She’s not out of our lives,” Sally says. “We brought her back to life as a full racer, and now we’re hoping our nephew and his soon-to-be wife will fill it up with little kids and turn it into a family boat and start another chapter.”

Whatever happens will happen, she ­concludes, before reflecting on the fact that her father sailed the Bermuda Race eight times back in the ’60s and ’70s, and that was her first race with him. “He loved it, and so it’s nice to know whatever happens, up there he’s smiling.” ν

Editor’s note: The Honeys’ account of their Bermuda Race experience was one of many competitor interviews recorded at the Royal Bermuda YC, which are viewable on the Newport Bermuda Race’s YouTube channel.

The post Illusion’s Last Call appeared first on Sailing World.

Triple-headed sail ­inventories are becoming more popular these days, but the question is, does this setup actually make your boat go faster or simply add more complexity? I remember not too many years ago during a race when someone suggested we hoist the staysail and see if we picked up half a knot of boatspeed. We did, and then after a while everyone was convinced we should take the staysail down. We did, and what do you know? We picked up half a knot. At the time, I guess we really didn’t have the right answer, but we sure had a lot of opinions. Fortunately, with today’s technology we have data to back up what sail ­selection is fastest.

Last year, the team on Andrew Clark’s J/122 Zig Zag wanted to develop a sail inventory specifically for the Newport Bermuda Race. Clark reached out to me, looking for a sail package that would give Zig Zag the best solution to win. Throwing a bunch of sails at the problem wasn’t the solution because there are many factors that can influence the decision on the ideal sail inventory—rating rules, anticipated wind conditions, number of sails and weight.

The first thing we did was look at the historical conditions of the Bermuda Race and determine the percentages we would spend sailing at each wind angle and wind strength. Typically, the Bermuda Race is slightly lighter, with a lot of conditions changing as you enter the Gulf Stream. This told us we had to make sure we had all our bases covered.

The second element we looked at was the number of sails and the total weight of the inventory. If we can reduce the number of sail changes during a race, the less time we can spend sailing below target speeds. Sail changes are costly, and if there is a chance to reduce the number of changes without giving up performance, that needs to be factored into the equation.

The third element is the rating rule. Every rule is different, and special attention needs to be taken to evaluate sail size and the type of sail entered for the certificate. Some rating rules allow you to submit a test certificate to see how the changes affect the rating.

The last element is the quiver of sails that will make up the inventory and be applied to the rating certificate. This step is where the project team looks at everything, weighs the pros and cons, and comes up with a solid inventory of sails that it can then use to build a polar chart specific to the J/122 and the selected set of sails.

After a sail-configuration analysis, the team at Evolution Sails recommended a triple-headed reaching setup that would increase reaching speeds based on the current sail configuration Zig Zag was already using. The triple-headed setup includes a J Zero, jib and gennaker staysail. The J Zero is designed to be a smaller and flatter sail than the traditional larger Code Zero. It’s flown off the bowsprit with a furler and is also referred to as a flying jib. The gennaker staysail is a flat and smaller sail that fits in between the jib and the mast. With the J Zero deployed on the bow pole, the jib can be flown off the forestay as it always is, and then the gennaker staysail is set up between the forestay and mast trimmed inside the jib.

This setup improves the performance better than the traditional inventory options. What we found in previous sail inventories is that tight-­reaching configurations consisted of a jib and a gennaker staysail. An additional sail that was historically designed for reaching was the Jib Top, which is a high-clew jib that can be trimmed easier on a reach than a standard jib.

Once the sails were designed, built and delivered, the hard work of sail testing began. The goal here was to build a polar table and sail chart that would guide us through which sail we should have up in specific ­conditions. Polars are calculated speed versus wind angles that take sail inventory into consideration and can be found from the manufacturer for most boats. What the manufactured polars don’t consider, however, is the sail inventory itself.

The best way to create polars, of course, is by sailing the boat with the sail configurations. Zig Zag uses Expedition software to log actual performance versus the calculated polars the design team compiled. We were able to correct the performance of each sail and configuration, and edit the tables in Expedition to help guide us through the race. We then updated the polars and created a sail chart that showed which sail should be used based on specific wind angles and windspeeds. This process takes time and practice. You need to sail the boat in many sail configurations at each wind angle to find the ideal setup. Zig Zag did several practice days with the triple-headed arrangement in order to log the speed performance versus other configurations.

Expedition software is one of the best sailing software tools on the market. It does an unbelievable job with navigating, but it also helps develop the polars and sail configurations. To have good data from Expedition, however, the electronics on the boat must be calibrated properly. This is the most difficult part of the equation because it is very complex to get accurate. If the data that feeds Expedition is not accurate, the sail and polar analysis will not be accurate. Having a dedicated person who knows the instruments and can calibrate them on an ongoing basis is a key element to have a successful program. With accurate data and a lot of sail testing, Expedition creates data files called strip files. These files contain the data to analyze and also can be sent to a third-party analyst to do the comparison.

Once we were ready to race with an Expedition update and the forecast in hand, we could see which sails we were projected to use throughout the race. This gave us an overall idea of when sail changes needed to happen and which sails we would be looking at using next based on the forecasted wind models.

How do we configure the foredeck to handle all these sails? The pole length is fixed and the forestay is fixed, so those two points are easy. The location for the gennaker staysail forestay is what we needed to figure out. When we looked at the J/122, we needed a mast attachment point and a deck point. We wanted to set the gennaker staysail forestay about two-thirds forward between the forestay and mast, which would allow it to fit between the jib and mainsail, with the leech of the sail just touching the lower shroud.

Once we found that point, we added a soft-shackle attachment point into the deck and an attachment point on the mast near the top set of spreaders.

With all three flying, the jib could be trimmed off a barber-hauler sheet and the primary jib sheet depending on the wind angle. The J Zero is trimmed to an outboard sheet, and the gennaker staysail is trimmed to a cabin-top attachment point that we installed on top of the turning blocks, which gave it the right trimming angle. For different types of boats, you will need to sit down with the sail design team and look at all these issues to be able to design the gennaker staysail and J Zero to fit and be trimmed properly.

Going to the triple-headed sail configuration helped the Zig Zag team improve the overall performance of the boat based on the data analysis. For future races and practices, we will continue to evaluate and tune the numbers to help improve the overall base-line polars. This is an iterative process, and it’s what makes sailboat racing so dynamic and a huge passion for many people. And as for the Bermuda Race results? Team Zig Zag finished first in its division and second overall.

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Garda is sailing’s amphitheater, a place with a sailing culture unlike any other. Centrally located in Europe and with clinical conditions, it is also the heartbeat of international wind sports. In the cradle of the Italian Alps, it is completely normal to run across boats from Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and everywhere else. With a whistling northerly Pelér in the morning and a warm Ora southerly in the afternoon, Garda is blessed with two distinct world-class sailing conditions for much of the year. And the scenery is the most stunning of any sailing venue. All of this is to say there really is no finer place for one-design sailors, wingers, kiters and foilers to play, which is why Waszp sailors gather once a year for Foiling Week, and this year the official Waszp Games and World Championship.

While Garda is known for being a near-perfect spot and easily accessible to those in Europe, getting there from Hawaii is anything but a straight shot. But it is worth it. To get to Garda this past July, I negotiate through four canceled flights, 10 days of delayed baggage, and a bunch of other annoying hiccups until I finally reach my final terminal in Verona, Italy.

But this time, I arrive with no bags and no gear.

No worries. I’ll figure something out.

Running on four hours of sleep in 48 hours, bleary-eyed and buzzing, I hitch a ride to the yacht club in Malcesine with my coach, who is here on holiday. I find and set up my charter boat and accept that my bags might not show up for a long time. But I need to go sailing, so I plan to buy a pair of boardshorts and a life jacket using the small allowance from the airline. I also plan to check out everything Foiling Week has to offer, including its extensive collection of foiling craft. There isn’t any other event I know of where so many fleets and high-performance sailors, designers and fanatics come together to geek out on foiling.

At the club, I quickly experience the generosity of this foiling community. I, a relative stranger, am able to secure a sail and foils before the first race starts the following morning. I hit the pillow hard that night, sleep-deprived and jet-lagged.

Fortunately, sailing events in Garda have a relaxed schedule. Our briefing isn’t until midday, so I hop over to one of Garda’s many stocked sailing shops and lay down my precious euros for a pair of boardshorts and a life jacket for racing. On the water soon after my shopping spree, I can sense the jet lag. I’m not as sharp as I need to be, nor as smooth as I have to be.

For Foiling Week, the Waszp fleet is assigned to course racing. This means our races, which are normally 20 minutes everywhere else, will be more than 40 minutes long. At this point in the regatta, I’m focused on figuring out the quirks of my charter boat. In tricky and variable conditions, I move up in the standings with every race, which feels darn good at the end of the day. But for this regatta, it’s not the scores that matter to me; it’s the chance to meet new people, to train and have a good time while I’m still young. Everyone here is happy.

Once Foiling Week wraps up, there’s a week before the Waszp Games and World Championship officially start. While Foiling Week is a significant event with nearly 70 boats competing, this regatta has an absolutely insane number of entries: 160. Every day the boat park gets more packed as Waszps roll in on trailers and inside travel boxes, portaged by sailors from far-flung places like Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. This year there are 30 girls signed up to race, one of whom is New Zealander Elsie Beavis, who placed second in the pre-Worlds regatta (and would go on to win the women’s world title in Garda).

To my surprise, my bags arrive the day before the World Championship begins, so after some minor boat tweaks in the final afternoon training session, I’m on to the main event the following morning.

The Waszp Games, where all 160 sailors will be racing in well over 20 knots, is next-level stuff. The talent in the gold fleet has risen so rapidly over the past year that a winner of the last major event these days can hardly crack the top 10 at the next regatta. But there are plenty of beginners here too because new sailors can register for the green fleet, where they get coaching in tandem with the Games event happening nearby.

The first challenge of the Games is the slalom. This format is unique to the Waszp class, where groups careen down the racecourse from a reaching start, then sail downwind through a series of marks in rounds of knockout qualification, with a quarterfinal, a semifinal and a three-round final. For this insanity, Garda delivers. A clear sky and nonexistent wind in the morning get the afternoon’s Ora wind engine cranking early ahead of the noontime church bells. It comes on fast and hard, and with miles of fetch, the chop is something else.

The perfectly flat water of the past few weeks is now gone, which leaves everyone scrambling to change settings to deal with the added challenge of battling chop. Having left the ramp immediately after the wind started to fill, my boat is set for the wrong conditions. So, as it gets windier and choppier, I’m way out of tune and struggling. With little practice in the short chop with my flat-water settings, I limp through the slalom, barely making it to the quarterfinals.

Once I’m back on shore, though, I can appreciate the spectacle of the slalom. At such a high level, the slightest mistake anywhere on the course instantaneously shuffles places. And this is what eventually happens to the slalom’s overall leader, who wins the first two races of the finals but becomes airborne on one last jibe, stacking it within throwing distance of the starting line and coughing up the title to one of his fellow countrymen.

One great practice of the Waszp class is the daily fleet debrief, led by the person who did the best for the day. Discussions include the top-of-the-line starting strategy, body movement in the chop and higher sensitivity, all of which I will attempt to apply in the course races to come.

With the slalom portion out of the way, the championship racing gets underway. To manage the insane amount of boats, organizers split the fleet into gold and blue fleets, and there’s the green fleet, which goes out with coaches to practice and hone boathandling. For the first day, I’m in the blue fleet, racing on the western side of the race area, close to the lakeside village of Lemone. This racecourse is less windy and wavier than the other course off the shore of Malcesine.

Once racing starts, it’s clear the left side of the course is significantly windier and flatter. But the wind slowly clocks to the right throughout the day, leading to large gains on the right on the later races. Some interesting discussions are brought up in the briefing after racing, and the conclusion is that the people who are doing the best are the people who are actively adjusting their ride height while foiling. Changing ride height from tack to tack allows better control in the different areas of the racecourse, allowing for minimal drag in the flatter water and higher control as chop becomes more of a factor.

On the final day of qualification, I’m somewhere in the mid-20s, well deep into the gold fleet, but there are 15 boats within 10 points. The wind is definitely lower, and I’m assigned to racecourse Alpha, off Malcesine, where the puffs are up to around 14 knots while some parts of the racecourse are below 5 knots. In these conditions, I have the best race of my event, where, with an advantage through maneuvers, I’m able to round the last upwind mark first.

My proud moment is short-lived, however. I sail into a windless hole, and the boat plummets to the water, allowing seven boats to soar past before I can get it back up and flying. I manage to get four of them back on the downwind leg, reclaiming valuable places.

Back on the Bravo course the next morning, ­conditions are similar to the previous day, except it is flatter and a bit less windy. It’s quite clear to everyone here which side of the course is best, which only makes it—and the fleet—more compressed.

My first day in the gold fleet is… How do I say it? Fierce. The wind is up from the previous day, and the starts are so hard-fought that the first three are general recalls. Even under a black flag, the racing is elbows-out. After every start, I find myself playing catch-up, and before one race I realize I’ve forgotten to put the plug in the boat. I’m able to make it back out for the final race and feel OK with my two results for the day. But I’m annoyed by my easily preventable mistake.

The last day is the windiest of the gold fleet racing, and with a 70-boat fleet racing around at 20 knots, the sailing area is manic. Starting again on course Alpha, the strategy play is deciding between dipping into Malcesine to score a puff or attempting a bunch of tacks up the narrow band of the best wind. With each leg of the course it seems different strategies pay off indiscriminately and the fleet gets turned on its head every time. Like getting to these Games, I remind myself nothing in Waszp sailing is easy at first. But once you get it wired, everything is not only fine, but some of the best experiences possible on water.

My final standing in the championship is 32nd, which is not bad in this competitive fleet, but it’s not quite how I wanted to finish. The experience, however, leaves me with the knowledge to compete stronger in next year’s event in Sorrento. It also motivates me to advance the level of Waszp sailing at my home club and elsewhere. Because when going to a world-level competition, it’s not only racing skills that get developed, but also the connections and friendships that allow sailing to grow and expand as it does in Garda.

The post Waszp Fun and Games appeared first on Sailing World.

Recent National Sailing Hall of Fame inductee Ed Adams has had more than his share of success, including a slew of championships in Lasers, Snipes, J/24s, Lightnings, Thistles and even Sea Dogs, as well as a Star World Championship and successful stints in a range of offshore boats, from the Chicago to Mackinac Race to the Volvo Ocean Race, and even in the PHRF fleet of his home in Newport, Rhode Island. But over the past several decades, his career has been redefined by coaching, and like his performance on the racecourse, he has been nothing short of stellar. We recently caught up with Adams to talk about his perspectives on coaching. As those who know him will readily attest, he calls it like he sees it.

It’s interesting that I’m talking to you about coaching when, in fact, you came from an era when there really wasn’t any coaching. Have you ever had a coach?

I had a coach for one regatta, when I was sailing Stars, but other than that, I’ve had no coaching whatsoever.

Do you regret not having a coach?

To be honest, learning to coach myself was an essential skill in my era. All the great sailors then were self-taught; they studied books, asked questions, took notes, thought about it really hard, and coached themselves. I think that process made me a better coach because I had to coach myself. I joke that when I drove to a regatta, I could carry on a conversation with myself, in my head, for hours on end, hashing out how to get better. And certainly, when I drove to regattas with crew, we would spend hours talking about how to be better. My philosophy in coaching is just that—helping people coach themselves, not just telling them what to do. The problem I have with some coaches now, like junior racing coaches who are pushed by parents demanding good results from their sailors, is that they’re not teaching them the sport; they’re just telling them what to do. And when the kids get to the Olympic level, they’re not as sharp. They don’t know how to solve problems by themselves.

Were we better off in the era where ­people were teaching themselves, as you did, rather than relying on coaches, as happens so often today?

That’s a good question. I think some of the skills we developed before we had coaches were perhaps a little better, but it obviously makes for a longer learning period. I have some strong opinions about junior coaching. I think our whole junior process, where the kids are parent-driven—parents are trying to get their kids into exclusive colleges and hire coaches who tell the kids what to do instead of how to do it, or how to figure things out for themselves—too often leaves us with kids who lack self-motivation.

And at the pro level, self-motivated people are the ones who succeed, not necessarily those who were parent-motivated. So, to answer your question another way, accepted junior coaching practices, when parent-driven, are not good for our Olympic and pro-sailing development. Coaches need to guide kids carefully, teach them how to problem-solve—it’s a tricky process, but this push to get kids into college rather than make them better problem-solvers is not helpful.

Also, kids who don’t come from much money don’t get as many opportunities as many of the kids who are parent-driven. There are a lot of stories of kids who didn’t come from wealthy backgrounds who are self-motivated and achieve great things. And I think there are more of them out there that we don’t know about because the results and subsequent opportunities are so dominated by parent-driven kids. Victor Diaz de Leon, from Venezuela, comes to mind. He went to St. Mary’s. He was a second-stringer on the team, had to learn to speak English, and when he graduated, spent his time crewing for good people. Over the last year, he’s become the top pro-level tactician in the keelboat fleet, just by working harder than everybody else.

Let’s talk big picture. Describe a typical coach’s role.

Time management is key. A coach tries to figure out what you should be spending time on. I would watch you race in a regatta to see what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. We obviously wouldn’t spend much time on practicing, talking about or doing drills for things you’re good at, but everybody has holes in their game. I do; everybody does. I want to identify the most productive thing to work on. It might be something very specific or very general, but it’s not going to be the whole package. Then you try and work on that particular problem, practice correcting that weakness, and do drills that give you more experience solving that problem. That’s the best use of time. Then we move on to the next weakness, and so on and so on.

On the water, we try to make the training compact and intense. I probably spend less time with straight-line tuning than other coaches because I believe in sharpening the whole package: starting, boathandling, drills, etc.—the way a typical collegiate practice would be run.

Typically, the people I work with have pro sailors or at least pro talent on board. Those pro sailors are essentially onboard coaches as well as sailors. Much of my job is to help the pro sailors improve their game. They’re coaching the driver, and I’m coaching them. If I can take five to 10 points off their score during a regatta, I’ve made a difference. If you’re a midfleet sailor, is it the best use of your money to hire a coach like me? No. You’re far better off hiring an onboard pro sailor to sail with you.

What’s your average coaching day like, and how has it changed over the years?

I started coaching before the Atlanta Olympics, in 1994, and then for a number of years after that, I mixed pro sailing with coaching. When I was around 50, I transitioned into full-time coaching. One difference is that the days now are much longer than they used to be. When I first started, I took my travel bike to each regatta, and I’d ride every day to stay in shape. Those were eight-hour days. We had primitive cameras, slow dial-up modems, no smartphones, and sailors didn’t travel with laptops; we relied on printed paper tools. Today, we have a lot more data to work with, which means that a coach has to do a lot more work. My workday has expanded from eight to 12 to 14 hours.

I typically start just before dawn, 4 to 5 a.m., to write a weather forecast for the team. I’m not saying my forecast is any better than what you might purchase from a real meteorologist, but when I work on it myself, I have a much better understanding of how the wind will behave that day, and I think I can, at least once in a regatta, come up with a strategic recommendation that makes a difference. We then have a morning meeting with the sailors, discuss the weather, and expand on lessons from the previous day. Then I’m on the water all day long. As soon as I come ashore, we try to have a debrief to review the day’s racing. Then we often have another post-race debrief shortly before dinner to review photos, etc. Or if we can’t get together, then I will post the data online. My day ends around 7:30. If you haven’t guessed by now, my bike stays home.

How do you get the most out of the sailors you work with?

I think there are coaches out there better at it than I am. First, I try to do no harm. I rarely push a particular rig tune or race strategy on people. I’ll only do it if I’m absolutely sure I’m right. Some people want coaches to take over everything—sail ­selection, tuning, tactics, strategy. It’s better to teach people how to make better decisions themselves. I think getting the most out of people is tough. I don’t see too many coaches in locker-room moments, inspiring sailors to do great things. You have to tell them that they’re good enough to win, but there’s a danger in being overconfident. Some coaches are always trying to boost confidence. I’m often trying to temper confidence. You need to know you’ve done everything you can to win, you have the tools to win, you have the skills to win, but as soon as you become overconfident, you rationalize bad decisions.

A perfect example is after you’ve had a really good day on the water. Let’s say you’ve had three races and scored a 1-1-2. The next day, you’ll almost invariably have a less-than-great performance. You’ll start the next race overconfident because you had such good races the day before. Then something will happen—you’ll miss a shift, you’ll be over early—and instead of making a rational decision to catch up incrementally, you feel like you deserve to be in first because you did so well the day before. But you’re now midfleet. Instead of slowing picking away and maybe getting a fifth, you’ll take risks and chances, and end up 15th or 20th. So, I think that if in trying to get the most out of people, you boost their confidence to unreasonable levels, you end up in trouble.

You now work with mostly Olympic-level sailors. How do you coach people who are already amazingly talented?

You have to realize that everybody puts their pants on one leg at a time. Everyone has good days and bad days, no matter how good a sailor they are. You’re going to have bad days. Olympic-level sailors are going to make mistakes, and they’re going to get angry and frustrated, like you and I might. The real difference is that an amateur sailor comes ashore and tries to forget about his mistakes. They might head to the post-race beer tent to socialize and try to forget about how the day went. Pro sailors sit down in a debrief, look at their good moments and admit their mistakes, their bad moments. They’ll take notes, try to visualize resailing the race perfectly, and they’ll sleep well because they’ve worked out their mistakes and they are not haunted by them. They haven’t drowned their mistakes in alcohol in the beer tent. Pro sailors also prioritize physical and mental fitness, and they’ll be rested for the next day when everyone else is tired. So, pro sailors are quite different animals altogether.

Goal-setting seems to be the current ­catchphrase in coaching. What does goal-setting mean to you?

At Olympic-level coaching, they talk a lot about having process goals instead of trophy goals. A lot of amateur sailors say, “My goal is to be third in the regatta.” That’s not a good goal. The goal should be to work with a coach and say, “I’m not very good at starting at the pin,” or “I’m not very good at picking the first shift.” And then your goal in the race should be to conquer those weaknesses. If you can do that, you’ll do better. The goal is to fix the things you didn’t do well in the last event.

Do you ever have to tell someone that they’ve really reached the limits of their potential?

I almost never have to tell that to ­someone who’s young. I’m typically working with people who are 20 to 35 years old. For them, success is dependent less on raw talent than it is on their drive, ambition and dedication to hard work. If you’re willing to work harder than the people you’re racing against, you’re going to have success against them. For a young sailor, the potential is almost unlimited. What’s hard is telling an older sailor, someone your age or my age, that they’ve really reached the limit of their performance.

We both know that as you get older, your eyesight is not as good, you’re not as strong, your reflexes are not as good, your flexibility certainly is not as good, and at a certain age, you just aren’t going to get any better because age is a limiting factor. And that’s hard. There are a lot of sailors out there who quit when faced with the reality of old age, and there are ones like me and probably like you who are willing to stick with it and maybe adjust expectations a bit. I think you have to do that when you’re in your 60s and 70s.

You’ve had some fantastic results over the years in a wide range of boats. How has your own sailing affected your coaching?

I think you need to be an active racer to stay sharp as a coach. I currently race my Thistle, a Shields, I have a Sea Dog for frostbiting, and my DN. I think I’ve owned boats from 13 different one-design classes and concluded that what I really enjoy is the challenge of getting into a new boat. I usually don’t stay with a class for more than five or 10 years or so because once I’ve figured it out and I’m able to win trophies, I get a little bored with it and say, “OK, let’s try something else.” When you get involved in a new class and you’re not fast, and you have to figure out why you’re not fast and what you’re doing wrong—that’s what makes sailing fun for me. It makes me a better coach as well.

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Winning the America’s Cup requires ­excellence in a number of areas, including management, financial resources, a leading design team, a fast boat, a top skipper and a smooth-operating crew. If any one of these vital areas is lacking, an America’s Cup effort is doomed. A successful campaign is managed by someone with cunning and integrity, who is pragmatic and calm during the heat of battle. Over the long history of the Cup, few individuals have excelled in this manner, and among them is Charles Oliver Iselin, who sailed in six winning defenses. Every one of his campaigns had unique and strange quirks that challenged one of the most dynamic managers in America’s Cup history.

Iselin’s final campaign was managing Reliance, the massive Herreshoff masterwork that easily defeated two potential defenders and Sir Thomas Lipton’s third challenge in 1903. Eight years earlier, Iselin had his integrity questioned by Windham Wyndham-Quin, the 4th Earl of Dunraven, who claimed he had cheated by secretly adding ballast to Defender in the middle of the night. Iselin had a good reputation and was outraged by the claims. After an exhaustive inquiry and hearings, Iselin was cleared of any wrongdoing. Following this potentially career-ending debacle, Iselin managed three more winning campaigns. In the process, he secured a legacy of excellence that deserves study and recognition.

Iselin was born with great wealth. His great-grandfather, Issac Iselin, emigrated to the United States in 1801 from Basel, Switzerland, and was a successful merchant, trading goods around the world. The Iselins became one of the wealthiest families in the United States at the time. Oliver Iselin grew up sailing at an early age, cutting his teeth on the Long Island Sound sandbaggers, which were raced by grizzled, aggressive professional sailors. The sandbaggers carried clouds of sail. The hulls were a scow shape and used centerboards to keep the wide-beamed boats on course. Crews shifted bags of sand to the windward side on every tack to give the boat stability. It was an arduous process that tested crews to their breaking point. The sandbaggers were unstable if the bags were not shifted promptly. Many a crew found themselves in the water after a capsize. The riskier the task, the better—that was the culture that Iselin learned to race.

In 1873, as a 19-year-old, he purchased a sandbagger named Mary Emma. Four years later, he was defeated in a race and acquired a new one named Dare Devil. He was earning a good reputation as a talented sailor and was elected as a member of the New York YC in 1877—at the age of 23. The club would benefit from his management prowess. In 1893, Iselin was named the managing owner of a new Herreshoff-designed and -built yacht named Vigilant. The America’s Cup had four defense candidates that year, including Jubilee, Pilgrim, Colonia (also a Herreshoff yacht) and Vigilant.

Iselin had a secret plan for Vigilant. The crews on Cup boats back then numbered about 40. Vigilant planned to race with a crew of 70. The idea was to place the crew on the windward rail to give the yacht extra stability. As one might imagine, the practice was controversial. Vigilant’s frame and topsides were made out of steel, while the hull below the waterline was made of a smooth bronze metal. Vigilant also sailed with more than 11,000 square feet of sail, which kept the crew busy.

Vigilant prevailed in the selection trials and faced Lord Dunraven’s Valkyrie II for the America’s Cup. The match was a best-of-five series. Vigilant easily won the first two races by wide margins of 10 minutes and 35 seconds, and five minutes and 48 seconds. The third race was close. Valkyrie II sailed to a two-minute lead at the end of two of the three legs. On the final leg, a reach, Valkyrie II ripped its spinnaker, and then ripped the replacement when it got tangled in the rigging while being hoisted. Vigilant was able to sail over the top of the disabled challenger and successfully defended the Cup by a 40-second margin. It was the closest race in America’s Cup history until that point in time.

There were good feelings around New York Harbor after the match, and Dunraven was encouraged by the close finish in the third race. After returning to Great Britain, Dunraven proposed another challenge, in 1897, which was accepted. Iselin went to work to build a new yacht for the defense as one of the owners and served as the team’s manager. Herreshoff experimented with some new composite materials. The deck of the new yacht, named Defender, was built of aluminum. Herreshoff and his design team did not know that aluminum and bronze, along with salt water, did not mix well. Defender was literally fizzling throughout the summer but easily earned its berth in the America’s Cup against its American rivals. The big question was whether the yacht would be fast enough to defeat Valkyrie III?

The match was big news in all the New York newspapers. Huge paying crowds turned out to watch the races on vessels of all sizes. Defender handily won the first race by seven minutes and 45 seconds. At the start of race two, there was a collision between the two yachts. Valkyrie III won the race on corrected time by the close margin of 47 seconds. After reviewing all the images and taking testimony from the crews on both boats, the race committee disqualified Valkyrie III.

The race committee and Iselin offered to resail the race, but Dunraven wanted no part of a second-chance race. He complained bitterly about the confused seas caused by the encroaching spectator boats, so the New York YC asked members to patrol the racecourse and push the armada of spectator boats away from the racing yachts. The effort was not successful. At the start of the final race, Dunraven had his yacht cross the line and withdraw from the race. Everyone was disappointed because people anticipated a close match based on Valkyrie II’s performance four years earlier. C. Sherman Hoyt, who defended the Cup in 1934 (Rainbow), was disgusted by the actions he witnessed: “I shall not forget the sight of Defender,” Hoyt wrote in his memoirs, “after sailing around the course alone, hoisting huge American yacht ensigns at [the] masthead and spreaders. To my youthful mind it appeared, and still does, bad taste after such an unsatisfactory series.”

The situation worsened two months later, when Dunraven wrote an article accusing the Americans of cheating. Iselin was outraged. He requested the New York YC set up a blue-ribbon panel to review the charges and the facts. Iselin believed the negative press was damaging his good reputation. A panel was appointed by the club’s commodore, Edward Marsh Brown, and every word of testimony was recorded. The committee published a 556-page book that contained the testimony of all the witnesses and the findings. In the end, Iselin was exonerated, and Dunraven was offered the opportunity to withdraw his charges. Dunraven ignored the request and never participated in the America’s Cup or any yachting again.

With his name cleared, however, Iselin signed on with J.P. Morgan to manage the next Cup defense in 1899 against Thomas Lipton. He commissioned Herreshoff to design and build a new yacht and recruited a rising star as skipper, Capt. Charlie Barr. As was his practice, Iselin sailed as a member of the crew and served as tactician. Although, because the term tactician was not used at that time, he was considered to be an “advisor.” When the new yacht, christened Columbia, was launched at the Herreshoff yard, its 19-foot draft was too deep for the site, and the vessel got stuck in the mud for nine hours. Once the boat was floating, the team got to work tuning Columbia.

In a race during the club’s Annual Cruise, Herreshoff experimented with a hollow steel mast with a telescoping topmast for Columbia. John Parkinson writes in his book, The History of the New York Yacht Club (1975): “The mast on Columbia collapsed on deck when she was leading Defender off Newport in a trial race, Mr. Iselin narrowly escaping injury.” Three formal trial races were raced in early September, with Columbia easily winning.

Iselin worked closely with the US government to provide patrol craft to keep the racecourse clear. It was a good thing because there were hundreds of boats out to watch Lipton’s Shamrock race against Columbia. Lipton arrived in New York like a breath of fresh air compared with the toxic atmosphere left behind by the Dunraven affair. Unfortunately, his first challenge was not strong. The match was a best-of-five series. The first race was a horizon job for Columbia, crossing the finish line 10 minutes and eight seconds ahead. In the second race, Shamrock’s topmast cracked and fell to the deck. Columbia sailed around the course alone to win the race. There was no talk of a resail, as had been proposed in previous Cups when one boat was unable to finish. The third race was slightly more competitive in a moderate-to-strong northerly breeze. Columbia won by six minutes and 34 seconds. And that was it. Lipton vowed he would challenge again.

Two years later, Lipton returned with a new Shamrock that was faster and better sailed. Unlike Dunraven, however, Lipton did not race aboard his yacht. He was content to watch and entertain on his motor vessel. Columbia and its skipper, Barr, returned to defend the Cup, but Iselin had moved away from managing and joined the New York YC’s America’s Cup Committee. Columbia faced two new defenders, a Herreshoff-designed and -built yacht named Constitution, and a scowlike yacht named Independence owned by Thomas Lawson.

The America’s Cup Committee watched Columbia and Constitution trade victories in a series of races on Long Island Sound and off Newport. After 18 races, the score was 9-9. Barr was more aggressive and fouled out of a few of the races. The big question for Iselin and other members of the committee was whether to select Constitution, which may have been slightly faster, or to select Columbia with the knowledge that Barr would be a reliable defender. In the final race, Barr was disqualified for a foul on the starting line. Even still, the committee decided Columbia was the better choice and selected Barr to defend the America’s Cup. Herreshoff was upset and declared he was retiring from the America’s Cup.

The new Shamrock II closed the gap and came closer to winning, although it still lost in three straight races. The margins were one minute and 20 seconds, three minutes and 35 seconds, and the final race saw Shamrock II cross the finish line two seconds ahead of Columbia but lose by 41 seconds on corrected time.

The New York YC was getting weary of funding defenses in rapid succession. Lipton, however, was ready to challenge again. A syndicate comprised of Cornelius Vanderbilt, William Rockefeller and P.A.B. Widener had the funding to repel Lipton’s third challenge. Their first recruit was to bring Iselin back as the team’s manager, and he went to work convincing Barr to skipper another defense. With Barr, money always talked, and a suitable arrangement was agreed upon. The final piece of the puzzle was getting Herreshoff out of retirement. Herreshoff sealed the deal when he pronounced, “I will design a boat that is so fast, Lipton will never come back.”

That was music to the ears of the syndicate. Funding by New York YC members was more than adequate for Herreshoff’s latest creation. The result was Reliance, a 143-foot-long behemoth with 16,160 square feet of sail area. Lipton’s Shamrock III was no match for Reliance. The Americans won the first two races by comfortable margins. In the third and final race, Shamrock III got lost in the fog and didn’t finish the race.

The 1903 America’s Cup would be the last for Iselin, but he had left his mark. He was a person of upstanding character, a diligent manager and one tough competitor. These attributes were learned early in his life and served him well over 16 years and six successful America’s Cup defense efforts. Iselin, who passed away in 1932, was inducted into the America’s Cup Hall of Fame in 1994.

This profile is an excerpt from Gary Jobson’s upcoming book, Characters of the America’s Cup, in which he writes about America’s Cup sailors from 1851 through present day.

The post The Great Oliver Iselin appeared first on Sailing World.

The return of Switzerland’s two-time ­winning syndicate, Alinghi, to the America’s Cup has significantly upped the ante for the 37th edition of yacht racing’s oldest and most revered international competition scheduled to take place in Barcelona in the winter of 2024.

The Swiss outfit led by billionaire ­businessman and sailing fanatic Ernesto Bertarelli famously won the 31st edition in 2003 in Auckland against Team New Zealand. It went on to defend it successfully against the Kiwis in Valencia in 2007 before losing against the American BMW Oracle Racing in the notorious monster multihull Deed of Gift match in Valencia in 2010.

That loss saw Bertarelli step away from the America’s Cup for the next three editions—San Francisco, Bermuda and Auckland—but it was well-known in his circles that he had not lost interest and was keeping a close eye on how the Cup was evolving. Now, with the Cup entering its second go-around in the spectacularly high-tech AC75 class, he has decided the time is right for the popular syndicate to make a return as Alinghi Red Bull Racing.

From the outside at least, this latest Swiss America’s Cup challenge appears to differ significantly from the previous iterations of the team. Aside from a high-profile technology partnership with Red Bull Advanced Technology (a sister company to the current Formula 1 motorsport champions, Red Bull Racing) the syndicate is fielding an unashamedly Swiss-centric sailing team lineup. That’s a very different scenario to previous campaigns, when the sailing teams were made up largely of foreign sailors—including a significant ­contingent from New Zealand.

Prominent among those Kiwi sailors in the Alinghi afterguard back then was tactician and subsequently skipper Brad Butterworth, who also now plays an integral part in the burgeoning Alinghi Red Bull Racing campaign.

Butterworth—who now lives close to Bertarelli in Switzerland—confirms that the pair had discussed in earnest the merits of each of the last three America’s Cup cycles and says the Swiss syndicate was close to challenging for the 36th America’s Cup in Auckland.

“Ernesto has been looking to do the Cup for a few cycles now,” he says. “I live just down the road from him, and obviously we are friends, so each cycle I would do a little project for him in terms of how we might go about it.

“In Bermuda, he was pretty excited about it, but then they changed the boats, and everything got difficult with COVID. This time, he had had enough of waiting, and he wanted to have a go.”

With that decision made, Butterworth says filling the key management-team roles was the first priority.

After a stint with the New York Yacht Club American Magic syndicate in the last edition, Alinghi veteran Silvio Arrivabene was drafted back as technical director in charge of “all things relating to the boat,” Butterworth says.

Arrivabene shares overall ­management of the team with Pierre-Yves Jorand (sport, sailing team, performance) and Michel Hodara, an Alinghi and America’s Cup management veteran, who will look after everything else, including marketing, sponsors and administration. Meanwhile, Butterworth sits on an oversight board along with Bertarelli and two representatives of Red Bull.

“I am involved with the sailing-team side of it,” he says. “I look at how we are going to get ourselves organized and what we have to do to get to a level where we can actually have a shot at taking the title.

“I am involved in most of the decisions that happen and privy to everything, but there are a lot of really good people there, and so I don’t have to get involved with everything. There are a lot of guys in there that I have known for many years, and we are trying to create the same sort of team feel that we had in the past with this group.”

When it came to picking a designer, Butterworth says choosing Marcelino Botin was a no-brainer. Botin comes with plenty of America’s Cup experience, having been the principal designer for Team New Zealand from 2004 to 2011 and in the same role with American Magic in 2021.

“I have raced against his boats all through my career,” Butterworth says. “He brings a fantastic group of people with him too, so we now have a great setup with the design team, and we have tried to maintain the same concept as Alinghi of old, where the sailors and the designers are closely involved with each other and have a real close team ethic.”

Backing up that design effort is the extra resource available from Red Bull Advanced Technology, which Butterworth says he sees as an integral part of the campaign.

“They are an integral part of the team, and there is an open-door policy, so I really don’t see any difference between us and them,” he says. “We are all part of the same group, the same team, and we talk about things openly.

“The guys that we have been exposed to have been really good. Definitely, it’s another level that they are at in terms of the way they go about things. Obviously, their budgets are bigger, and they absolutely leave no stone unturned. They have shared everything that they possibly could,” he says. “For me, I think it is a huge positive. I like having them around.”

Alinghi Red Bull Racing’s 15-strong all‑Swiss sailing-team lineup will no doubt have won the team approval points with advocates of the America’s Cup nationality rules. Featuring longtime Alinghi GC32 helmsman Arnaud Psarofaghis, 33, the squad has an average age of 30, reportedly 11 years younger than the lineup Alinghi fielded when it last won the America’s Cup in Valencia.

As well as featuring the likes of ­professional cyclist Théry Schir and Olympic rowers Augustin Maillefer and Barnabé Delarze, the squad also includes an impressive array of young yacht-racing talent scouted from Switzerland’s myriad lakes.

Having spent several months with them, Butterworth is certain the young sailors have the attitude and talent to make their mark in their first America’s Cup.

“Even though Switzerland is landlocked, you would be amazed at the amount of sailboat technology that floats around the lakes here,” he says. “It has always blown me away how the Swiss sailors are so ­innovative and on to it.

“Arnaud himself is a good, keen, young and talented guy, and he has built an impressive little group around him. They are very good sailors, they have a great work ethic, and they are always thinking and working out how not to make the same ­mistake twice.

“Arnaud has probably been hoping for this sort of opportunity all his life. He has grown up in Switzerland and will have experienced the huge impact of the Alinghi successes in the country.”

Aside from his proven talent and string of successes on the GC32 and TF35 circuits, Butterworth believes Psarofaghis has enough steel in his temperament to stand up to the pressures of the America’s Cup.

“When push comes to shove and you get into the Cup itself, there is a lot of pressure on these guys, and they really have to rely on their training to get them through,” he says. “But Arnaud is a highly motivated guy, and I don’t think he is someone that they will be able to push over—he’s a bit of a quiet assassin.”

Butterworth is in no doubt that this new breed of Swiss America’s Cup campaigners are 100 percent up for the task.

“I am convinced of that,” he says. “It is really about how they spend their time between now and the racing in September 2024. We are going to try to help them and build them up, but I really do think they have the wherewithal to get the job done.”

Despite its previous successes, the Swiss syndicate has no track record when it comes to the AC75 class. With the 37th America’s Cup protocol allowing teams to build only one boat, the team made the decision to purchase Emirates Team New Zealand’s first AC75 to help drive them up the learning curve as quickly as possible.

“It is a crucial part of our program, and hopefully this at least puts us on the same stage as the teams that have already done one cycle in the AC75s,” Butterworth says.

Butterworth believes it is feasible for the Swiss syndicate to ultimately be competitive with the established teams.

“It’s just about the quality you put into it—the time and money we invest in the ­different areas,” he says.

One area in which Butterworth says the team has invested heavily is the use of a custom-built simulator, which fills a room at the team’s headquarters in Ecublens near Lausanne and has now been relocated to the team’s temporary base in Barcelona.

“These boats live in a 3D world of water and air,” he says. “There is no real full-size testing because you don’t have two boats, but it is still very much about how much data you can gather and how accurate you can make it.

“There are a few teams that are using the same simulator software, and we are one of those,” he says. “The simulator is right beside the design room. The designers are constantly asking the sailors to sail different modes and looking at ways to try to learn something new.

“The guys have been spending a lot of time in there, but Arnaud has got a mini setup in his house, so I think he has been burning the midnight oil too.”

Despite the simulator’s obvious ­benefits, Butterworth, who says he has tried it for himself and declared himself ‘useless,’ believes that, ultimately, there is still no substitute for time on the water.

“I would like to see us go sailing when we can, that’s for sure,” he says. “I think it is essential to get used to these boats because the way the protocol is structured, you just don’t get that much time in them.

“The simulator is great, but the simulator doesn’t break or capsize or get wet,” he says. “I will sign on for all that, but I’m just a bit old-fashioned, and I think that the more sailing you do, the better off you will be.”

As a new team this cycle, Alinghi Red Bull Racing has been allowed an extra 20-day window this year to sail its purchased AC75. Butterworth believes getting to grips with their new boat will be a steep learning curve.

“I would say we have got at least 18 months of trying to catch up,” he observes. “It’s critical that everyone gets some exposure to sailing those boats so that they get a true feeling for how much goes into them because they are so complicated.”

Additionally, the team has ordered two of the new one-design AC40 foiling monohulls, which Butterworth says he expects will be used predominantly for training purposes. Although, he did not rule out some foil-development experiments.

Ultimately, though, Butterworth believes the Swiss team will not be playing catch-up forever.

“It’s more difficult because we are starting from behind,” he says. “But I think we have the right tools and the people, and now it is just a matter of using the time correctly.”

It would be easy to imagine a scenario in which expectations within Alinghi Red Bull Racing might be set low for the team’s return to America’s Cup action, with the goal being to acquit themselves credibly this time, build vital experience, and then come on strong in the 38th edition.

Butterworth, however, dismisses any such idea out of hand.

“I think that’s a cop-out to do that,” he says. “You are either in to try to win, or you shouldn’t bother.”

Many might question if it is realistic to expect the Swiss to be able to lift the America’s Cup for a third time with a brand-new sailing team, zero experience in the AC75 class, and after a hiatus of 12 years. But, perhaps, should the other teams be in fear of the new-look Alinghi?

“I don’t know—but I would be,” Butterworth says. “I look at the group we have got, and I think we can be a force to be reckoned with. I think it’s a big ask, but I don’t think it’s unattainable, and I absolutely think we can get there with the group we have.”

The post Alinghi Awakens appeared first on Sailing World.

[Editor’s Update: Novotná went on to win the GWA Wingfoil World Tour Freestyle title in November in Tarifa, Spain.]

It’s a Wednesday afternoon in July, and Paula Novotná has just finished another training session, refining her skills in the “super-strong wind and nice waves” off the south coast of Rhodes, Greece. She’s on “holiday,” having just finished second in the women’s division of the Wingfoil World Tour’s European Racing Championship. For this 29-year-old professional kiteboarder-turned-wingfoiler from the Czech Republic, there’s precious little time to rest and recover, but she must. Over a hectic summer, she’s won two of three World Tour Surf-Freestyle Championships—one in Switzerland and one in the Canary Islands—and now has her heart and mind set on winning the next regatta to become the first Women’s Wingfoil Surf-Freestyle World Champion. Let that sink in for a moment. The first-ever in a sport growing faster than any other today, a sport that’s evolving and progressing faster than even she can herself.

Before shifting her focus to wingfoiling two years ago, Novotná spent 10 years traveling the globe with the Global Kitesports Association Kite World Tour as a surf-freestyle specialist. Turning the clock back much further, Novotná was a 10-year-old trekking through Europe to windy hotspots with her parents, both kiteboarders. They taught her the strings at 14; at the age of 19 and full of wanderlust, she turned pro and jumped on the tour.

Related: Sailing World Expeditions is the go-to place for sailing adventures that fit your on-water lifestyle.

Today’s focus on wing­foiling came to her by chance; she still kites plenty for fun, but when it comes to competing, the hand-held wing is giving her a new creative outlet. “After so many years of kiteboard freestyle, I was trying similar tricks and getting bored with it because it was kind of the same,” Novotná says. “I was approached by DuoTone (one of her gear sponsors, along with Fanatic) when they started making wings, and I was like, ‘What is this?’ I did it and got hooked right into it.”

She was invited to Brazil for the first wingfoil competition ever held “because there were only two girls at the time, and they needed three to make the competition happen. I did not want to go and embarrass myself, but they insisted. I went and I saw so many people winging, and that motivated me. I spent four weeks in Brazil and got much better—jumping, riding waves. And from that moment, I committed to it. Life is about change, and this has been a fun change, exploring new places that are great for wingfoiling but not for kiteboard.”

This nascent sport of high-performance hand-held wings, boards and foils is rapidly evolving from curious water play to real competition, with the current formats on the Global Wingsports Association’s World Tour being surf-freestyle, ­surf-slalom and race. Depending on the venue or the conditions, athletes like Novotná must bring a diverse skillset. If there’s waves at the location, the focus is on wave riding and tricks, much like surfing. “We can ride three or four waves in the duration of 15- or 20-minute heats,” she says. “If the venue is flat or choppy water, we focus on freestyle, where we are in the water from seven to nine minutes. We have about 12 attempts, and four tricks count.”

What the judges are ­looking for are speed into the trick, technical difficulty, height and amplitude, the quality of the landing and the innovation of the trick. “If you have a ­little butt check (in the GWA’s 86-page rulebook as ‘Wet Landing’) or unstable landing, the points go down a lot,” she says, “so all the tricks we have to do consistently.”

The other discipline, similar to Olympic kiteboarding racing, is race, which focuses on windward/leeward course racing, speed, turns, tactics and foil development. Novotná is still feeling her way into this discipline, enjoying the high speeds and the challenge, but her experience as a trickster with kites has given her a head start as a pioneer of sorts in the surf-­freestyle discipline. It’s her jam.

She knows, however, that her best shot at the world title is now. “The sport is so new, and the tricks are coming very fast because of the young-­generation kids coming into the competitions now,” she says. “Every competition we have, the level rises a lot—it’s insane.”

Her male counterparts, especially, are pushing tricks into mind-blowing status. “They are already doing front flips and backflips and double flips and loops,” Novotná says. “When I look at the guys, I see there are so many tricks I had no idea existed, so now I have two months to train harder for the next competition. I have to win the next one because there are so many young girls coming into the sport, and even though I’m learning very fast, there are many girls that are learning faster.”

At the moment, her challenge is sticking the landing on her backflip, which is difficult because the wing and board must flow through the rotation, and the “pop” has to be just right. “I find it easier than kiteboarding when it comes to the tricks,” she says. “It does look hard, but also I’m a little scared of the foil—this knife that I’m jumping with. For some people, it can be very scary, but it’s not that bad because [the foil] is always behind you.”

Ahead of each competition, Novotná focuses on perfecting six or seven tricks that she knows she can do in most conditions. Repetition and video analysis are important, but so too is taking the right equipment into the water. There are many different foil types, shapes and sizes, which is true of the boards as well. With a larger, high-­volume board, tricks are easier to land. With a smaller board, Novotná can fly higher, but the landings are more difficult. Then, of course, there’s wing choice, which can range from 2 to 7 meters in span. “You have to choose the right-size equipment,” she says, “but it is the experience of competing that helps you win as well.”

Novotná’s observations of the past year are that while kiteboarding continues to grow in popularity—so much so that equipment manufacturers can’t keep up with demand or developments—there is a concurrent explosion in wingers too.

“It’s amazing, the growing number of wings on the water,” she says. “A lot of people want to wing, but there’s not a lot of new equipment available. The wing-race discipline is especially cool for the audience because we are holding the sail. I hope it becomes [an] Olympic [sport] because it is attractive, and we can wing in quite light wind.”

While the travel and destinations are certainly amazing, and the lifestyle even more so, there’s much more to it than the glamour portrayed on Novotná’s social media channels. (To date, she has 148,000 followers on Instagram.) For every hour in the water, there’s two in the gym and creating social content, and as a sponsored athlete, the content demands are significant.

“I have managed to pay my travels and live this life for 10 years,” Novotná says. “What helped me is that I was lucky that back in the day, North Kiteboarding called me when I was 19. When I got my first podium, I got on the international team and basically got independent from my family, and I could finance my travels. But our sport is not so big that we can just do it, get results and live from it. What sponsors are looking for is marketing and social media exposure. Whoever wants to become pro kite- or wingfoiler has to know that you have to be very good in the sport, but you also have to manage your media and be seen online because that’s what sponsors are looking for. It’s a full-time job.”

For those keen to try ­wingfoiling, Novotná suggests going straight to school. Her location of choice is Cabarete, on the north shore of the Dominican Republic, which has become her second home. The wind is good from January to August, and the reef not far off the beach serves up slow-­breaking waves, which are ideal for wingfoiling, carving and jumps.

“The reason I recommend taking a lesson at a school is because [it has] the equipment you need. You need quite a big board with a lot of volume. Your first lesson, even on a [stand-up paddleboard] with the wing is to get used to it. It’s best to start [with a board that’s] around 160 liters; something above your weight so you can learn to handle the board. When you start to learn, it’s better to have a bigger wing because you will manage to get up easier, and you will learn how to pump the wing and pump the foil to get flying. Once you’re up, you can be up for a long time.”

When you’re ready to buy your own equipment, she adds, get a board that’s equal to or slightly heavier than your body weight—maybe a bit more. Novotná’s competition board is 60 liters, and her preferred board for doing high jumps and learning tricks is 45 liters. Curved foils, she adds, are better for riding waves, while straighter, high-aspect foils are best for tricks. Racing foils require a different discussion, keeping in mind that it’s all about speed and high-velocity turns.

And speaking of turns, next on Novotná’s passport is the Republic of Mauritius, where she will post up for four months to train. The island has all she needs to prepare herself for the world title: There’s a break called “One Eye” that’s a legendary gem for kitesurfing, and another break nearby that churns out big but slow-grinding waves that are perfect for wingfoil surfing. More importantly, there is a massive lagoon to practice her freestyle tricks in both sports, where one can be sure there will be flips and loops added to her routine.

The post Winging Toward a World Title appeared first on Sailing World.

This is a story about a lake and a boy who loved the lake and how, when the lake disappeared, the boy made do. And how that leads to ­something big.

The boy was Glenn Ashby, growing up in the interior of Australia. Lake Eppalock, built as a reservoir, was his playground each year until it was annually drained to satisfy thirsty crops. What’s a sailor boy to do? Build a landsailer, of course.

Quietly, Ashby grew up improving his rides, year by year, and harboring a dream, never daring to really count on a day when he would, no fooling, convince his teammates in the America’s Cup defenders camp, Emirates Team New Zealand, to focus their might, main, expertise and dollars on something not the America’s Cup. While he was banging away in the garage, would mama Ashby ever have imagined an America’s Cup team designing and building a landsailer for her son to drive and attempt to beat 126.2 mph, the sailing speed record on land?

Think about it. The small-town kid from a Jet Ski lake made himself into a multitime world champion in catamarans, an Olympic medalist, and a critical player in multiple America’s Cup victories. Then came downtime between matches for the Cup, and today you can get a self-conscious crackup out of Ashby by suggesting that everything to this point was all about maneuvering to get Team New Zealand right where he wanted them. It might even be a little bit true.

Ashby says: “I began at age 9 or 10, reusing broken masts and cut-down windsurfing sails. Building landsailers was a great way to learn about balance and grip, and then to see how much faster you could go on land than on water—fast enough to scare yourself, but going really fast in a wind-powered craft is a childhood fascination that stayed with me. Before the last Cup, I began putting feelers out to see if the guys would be interested. They were. Fortunately, Grant Dalton is a speed freak who is always up for a challenge.”

So, late last summer, the most sophisticated landsailer ever built arrived ready for the salt surface of Lake Gairdner in South Australia. Horonuku—translated as “gliding swiftly over land”—represents all the engineering savvy Team New Zealand could muster, and we know that’s a far cry from repurposing broken masts and cut-down windsurfer sails. Their best computer models say the craft is capable of record-­breaking speeds. But having that potential is only step one.

As explained by current record holder Richard Jenkins: “I’m often asked if I would try to break the record again. My answer is that if I had unlimited funding and a new vehicle, it might take five years or more. You have to be in the right place at the right time, with certified observers, which is hard to put together. You then have to be technically perfect at just the right moment because the wind might come suddenly. It takes a great deal of time and experience. I have better things to do.”

Jenkins these days is more than busy running his ­autonomous-research vessel company, Saildrone, but he and Ashby are on close talking terms. There are no secrets here. Speed records build a fraternity, a very small fraternity. Jenkins began his quest during his college years in the UK, when he was handed someone’s broken dream: an abandoned record-attempt vehicle. That much came easy. Multiple vehicles and “only” 10 years later, in 2009, he had his record.

In 2022, on the runways of an air base in New Zealand—before shipping to Lake Gairdner—early test runs of Horonuku identified a need for structural changes, and those were easily accomplished. Alternate configurations had been designed in from the get-go by Team New Zealand’s engineers, the background heroes of this story. It wasn’t challenging to take 3 feet out of the rear of the craft, Ashby says, and the effect “was like moving a daggerboard farther aft in a boat, bringing the center of mass and the center of lateral resistance closer together. Now the rear wheels take more load and the front wheel has less. It feels totally different, and I like it.”

The team anticipates 1.5 to 1.7 tons of side force, which accounts for the one-sided wide stance. “The surface of a dry lake can change by the day or even by the hour,” Ashby says. “Any reduction in rolling resistance gives you more speed but less grip. We may have to try a lot of tire combinations, pressures, ­camber and ­suspension settings, and develop a package for each condition.”

To trim the tail plane and put power into the wing, Ashby pumps a foot pedal to build hydraulic pressure. Stored power is not allowed. Alongside the steering wheel is a paddle shift he can touch to depower the wing. The system works. A record run can be ratified only on a natural surface, not tarmac, but last summer’s testing on the air-base runway readied the team for their mission in the Australian outback. On the runway, Ashby topped out at 92 mph, but he was seeing a window of only about 10 seconds at speed, per run, before he had to stand on the brakes. The dry lake will afford a wide-open go.

“Maybe we’ll disconnect the brakes,” Ashby says to some gentle goading. “Dude, the Iron Duck didn’t have no brakes.”

And about that. The frankly agricultural Iron Duck—a replacement for a broken, short-lived Wood Duck—held the record from 1999 to 2009 at 116.7 mph. There was no carbon cockpit, no CAD, just a backyard fiberglass design of a streamlined cowling to cover go-kart seating and some old Volvo parts. The long steel frame showed rust speckles. A forward wheel offset to leeward countered the tipping force. Add copious quantities of duct tape, and the rest was about two buddies, Bob Dill and Bob Schumacher, spending years trying and trying again, and succeeding and growing a legend that endures. Eventually, after one last trip west from Vermont for one more attempt to up the number from 116.7, Dill sold Iron Duck to a junkyard on the tow home for $31.15. When Jenkins came along in his more aerodynamic, more engineered machines with the dramatically offset main wheel (copied for Horonuku), Dill pitched in, helping him at every turn as a fellow on-my-own-dime kind of guy. That is, helping Jenkins take away Iron Duck’s own record. Jenkins says, “He helped me tremendously, which includes two trips to Australia at his own expense.” If justice is served, Dill will one day be the first land sailor inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame. You read it here. And we might as well add that Jenkins thinks Ashby and company could be facing more obstacles than they know. He got skunked at Lake Gairdner.

But getting back to brakes, Horonuku shouldn’t need them on the expanse of Lake Gairdner. What it needs is distance to build speed. The craft is heavy to keep it from lifting off and landing badly, and the wing is smaller than the sail on a Finn dinghy. The speed build is necessarily slow, but the payoff for a small wing comes in lower resistance at high speeds.

Testing on tarmac, Ashby says, “I was sitting in an uninsulated carbon tunnel, so the ride was bumpy, noisy.”

Now comes the lake experience. “At about 50 kph (30 mph), the wing hooks up. You feel the flow attaching, and once you get to the 90 to 100 kph range, the power really comes on. You feel the acceleration.”

September and October, statistically, are the windiest time in South Australia, but the team is familiar with the wisdom of the saying, “No matter where you go in the world, it’s never like this.” That said, they are hoping for 25 knots or better and estimating that it might take a 4-mile run for our boy, a mature 46 on September 1, to pass 126.2 mph and become the fastest sailor in the world.

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Through six editions, the 750-mile Race to Alaska has become one of the premier adventure races in the world. It attracts paddlers, rowers, sailors and adventure-seekers with this simple mandate: Get from Port Townsend, Washington, to Ketchikan, Alaska, using human power only. There are few other rules. The traditional route through the inside passage of Vancouver Island and north through the wilds of northern British Columbia has been plied by an incredible variety of watercraft, from high-performance racing sailboats to humble rowboats, paddleboards, kayaks and ­combinations of all.

The competitors are equally varied: Some come for the adventure, the opportunity to prove their endurance and skills over many days of extended exertion. Some think sails are the answer, although you still have to propel your sailboat through portions of the course. So, even the sailors are paddlers at some point. There are professional adventure athletes in the race, as well as high-level sailors and Olympic rowers, but the vast majority of these trekkers are normal people yearning to test themselves in one the most rugged and beautiful ­environments on the planet.

The 2022 edition had one significant change: Organizers allowed racers to go outside Vancouver Island on the way to the checkpoint at Bella Bella. This open-water option adds more miles, has less favorable current, and normally requires upwind sailing across more than 300 miles of North Pacific Ocean—one of the roughest stretches of ocean anywhere on the planet.

This new route caught my attention, so I entered my Bieker 44 Dark Star into the race. I have always wanted to test my boat in the open ocean, and the course had an instinctive appeal to me, with the mix of offshore and inshore, and the pure challenge of just getting there. Could we sail our boat quickly and safely to Alaska? I really love the spirit of this race, with few rules and a unique blending of cultures, so ambitious yet witty and humble at the same time. I also wanted this challenge to have a larger purpose, so we partnered with SeaShare (seashare.org), a nonprofit that stocks food banks across the country with high-quality seafood, much of it from Alaska. In its honor, for the race, we renamed the boat Pure and Wild.

As for any distance race, our preparations were extensive, from sails and sailing systems, to removing the diesel engine, to creating a human propulsion system, a power-generation system, etc. My original thought was to sail doublehanded, but after further consideration, I decided to race with three crew: Matt Pistay, a Race to Alaska winner, and rising star Alyosha Strum-Palerm. Together, with technical director Erik Kristen, they set about preparing for the race.

The pre-race plan fell into place one milestone at a time, and we won the Proving Ground qualifier from Port Townsend to Victoria, British Columbia, in rough conditions as many of our competitors, mostly fast trimarans, struggled. That was easy relative to what was to come. For the real race, we had to choose whether to take the more ambitious route outside Vancouver Island, which I strongly preferred, or play it safe in the confined (but still rough) waters of the Inside Passage.

As we paddled out of Victoria Harbor to start the race, there was no doubt in my mind that Pure and Wild would be turning right, to the open Pacific. Only three other larger monohull sailboats made a go of it. All the fast multihulls set off for the inside track. The decision proved decisive, but not for the obvious reasons. After 48 hours of racing, three of the trimarans, including pre-race favorite Malolo, had catastrophic collisions with floating logs and withdrew. So, the yellow brick road was opened to Pure and Wild, but we had our own ­challenges to overcome. Halfway up the west coast of Vancouver Island, I logged the following passages.

Friday, 6/17/22, 10:52 p.m. So far to go. It is dark and getting darker. And it is getting windier, slowly but surely. Our day on board Pure and Wild has been reasonably pleasant off the wild west coast of Vancouver Island, with a northwester of 14 to 18 knots. But the sea state has been building, the wind is up over 20, and now the waves on ­starboard are getting pretty steep. Between Alyosha, Matt and I, we had been taking one-hour shifts at the helm, with the second person on standby and the third resting. But as it was getting rougher, everything is getting harder. Suddenly, we had a bit on, moving up the course in worsening conditions. This might be the toughest part of the whole R2AK right here tonight.

Saturday, 6/18/22, 12:04 a.m. Storm is worsening. Trying to keep my s— together. Now it is really dark. I tell myself to just keep concentrating on steering the bucking bronco through the waves, keeping some kind of even heel angle. Try as I might to keep going, I admit I am pretty tired, and my focus is waning. I can’t get at the watch on my wrist because I have too many layers of clothes on. Need ’em all because big waves sometimes break over the bow, despite our freeboard. North Pacific water is a sobering 50 degrees F. I try to focus my fuzzy head for another few minutes, then decide it is Alyosha’s turn. A soft cry is all that is needed for his head to appear in the companionway. Soon he is beside me in the back of the cockpit. “Maybe think about the second reef?” The logic is suddenly obvious.

Of course, tucking in the second reef makes sense right now. Except that I am super tired, it is pitch black, and the waves are crashing pretty hard. But other than that…

I give Alyosha the wheel and ease the jib a little. Talking to myself again: “OK, focus on doing this reef right. Lazy jacks on. Slack out of reef line. Halyard on the winch. Drop the halyard past the mark. Now the hard part.”

I trudge up to the mast to haul the luff down and secure the tack. I give it all my weight, and the flapping sail slowly succumbs. Now the fiddly part. I need to feed the reef strop through the webbing on the luff. My hands are not working well, and the motion of the boat doesn’t help. Finally, I clip the snap shackle directly to the sail. Screw it; it will be strong enough, maybe. Back to the cockpit to tension the luff and grind on the leech reef line. I am getting really winded now! I still have to trim on both mainsheet and jib sheet. Afterward, I stand in a puddle of sweat and mental haziness. Time to lie down.

Saturday, 3:56 a.m. We survived. When I wake up three hours later, I feel surprisingly OK. Dawn has arrived, and the wind is down to 12 knots. All is good with the world! And best of all, the dreaded Brooks Peninsula has been transited. I can see its looming mass in dark clouds 8 miles astern. Next stop, Cape Scott, the north tip of Vancouver Island. The elation I feel is such a contrast to my despair last night, such a short time ago. What a crazy activity we do, racing sailboats in the open ocean. My boat is well-founded, and I worked hard on the preparations for this trip. But even with a seasoned crew and a strong boat, there is a lot that can go wrong out here, especially sailing with a small crew like we are. But right now, everything seems great!

Saturday, 5:12 a.m. Battery trouble. Matt checks the battery level. Oh crap—22 percent. That is really bad news. Without an engine, we will have to charge the batteries with our EFOY fuel cell and our SunPower solar panels. But the fuel cell does not seem to be working, and it is too cloudy for the solar. Without power, this little adventure will get a lot harder. Matt decides to take it on, and he finds a way to rewire the fuel cell so it goes straight to the start battery. After an hour of fiddling, it is working, with 2 amps of positive charge. We are back in business.

Saturday, 10:34 a.m. Sailing again. The wind dies for a couple of hours, and we sort of regroup, have lunch and dry things out. Then a little breeze fills, and we hoist the A1.5 kite for the first time in the 250 miles sailed so far. Only 500 to go. After noon, the wind shifts to the right, and we swap the kite for the J1.5 jib, now heading straight for Cape Scott, the fabled graveyard of ships on the north tip of Vancouver Island, 30 miles away.

Saturday, 7:42 p.m. Cape Scott. As we approach the cape, things are getting kind of spooky. The wind dies, the current starts ripping against us, and the fog sets in. I can clearly hear the crashing waves as the North Pacific swell collides with the rocky and wild coast. We have no engine, so getting becalmed would probably not be good. Alyosha suggests we tack offshore, and Matt and I instantly agree.

This place emanates a feeling of danger and dread, like humans are not supposed to be here. The wind gradually fills and backs as we sail on starboard. After 20 minutes, we tack back in a perfect 12-knot nor’westerly, reaching straight for Bella Bella, our next landfall. By 10:30, darkness is complete and some fog persists. Plus, there is a lot of kelp and logs in the water, so night sailing in this part of the world is kind of fraught with peril. For now, all is good again on P&W. Soon we get around Cape Scott, the first big milestone in this crazy adventure. In any case, I am off watch for the next three hours, so down I go.

Sunday, 6/19/22, 3:16 a.m. Another world. The wind lifts enough to set the kite. As I go forward to rig it, I glance up at gaps in the clouds to see stars emerging. It is pleasant sailing as the eastern sky starts to lighten. The breeze keeps lifting, so we jibe to starboard to stay off the approaching shore, some of British Columbia’s wildest and most remote islands.

There are quite a few options for navigating to the Bella Bella checkpoint, which is nestled deep in the central British Columbian coastal islands. Since we will be arriving in daylight, and we expect light wind, we choose the shortest passage from offshore to Lama Pass to save distance and keep us in the ocean breeze longer. The only catch is that it is quite a narrow rock-strewn stretch of water, essentially short tacking between reefs in a dying breeze and adverse current.

We have been warned about this part of the race, and all of us have full focus as we drop the kite, round up through the first set of reefs, and head for the more open Lama Pass, which will take us to Bella Bella.

The breeze dies, but so does the swell. Suddenly, it is completely quiet. We are surrounded by small rocky islands and coves, with ancient fir, hemlock and spruce growing over the water’s edge. We hear the repeated blows of humpback whales spouting just to leeward. It is like a dream, a sort of maritime utopia.

Nobody says anything; we are in a trance. We are racing, but we are also doing something else right now. I don’t know what to call it, but it feels like we have been transported to an ethereal world of mist and kelp. Nobody says it, but we don’t really want to leave this nirvana; it feels magical and otherworldly.

Sunday, 8:43 p.m. Getting hairy again. After negotiating the Bella Bella checkpoint, we head back out to sea into the mighty Hecate Strait, the shallow but open stretch between the Queen Charlotte islands and British Columbia coast. It was nice downwind sailing all afternoon, but now the rain has arrived, and the southeast wind is rising. From a pleasant 12 knots, we now have 18 knots, a rising sea state and constant rain. Welcome to the gates of Alaska. With the forecast of increasing winds, all three of us know this could be a challenging night, but also our last one if we can get through it successfully.

Sunday, 11:21 p.m. Jibe time. Matt and Alyosha have been crushing it, surfing and planing in the 22 knots, confused sea and total darkness. But now it is time to jibe. I put on my foulies and harness, and climb on deck for the jibe. First, we move the stack of sails and other gear that we use to help our trim and stability (legal in this race with few rules). 

That is a lot of exertion, so we take a couple of minutes to cool down before executing the jibe. We get through it. Not pretty but adequate. Now we are heading straight for the finish at Ketchikan, only 100 miles away. Matt goes down to rest, and Alyosha and I take short spells at the helm to try to stay fresh.

Monday, 6/20/22, 1:08 a.m. Bump in the night. Bam! The boat shudders, and the sound of splintering wood tells us we have hit a large log head-on. Matt is on deck in a flash. I rush below to check the bow and the bilges. All seem OK. We are not sinking. But it seems like a warning. Caution to all ye who ply these waters; you are mere humans, and there are larger forces at work out here.

With the wind continuing to climb and fatigue becoming a factor, we drop the kite and sail the main only for a while. The letterbox drop is not as clean as some we’ve done in the past. The kite gets around the leach of the main and catches on the lazy jacks going over the boom. Matt puts his hand right through the sail in his enthusiasm to get the spinnaker under control, and we can see the sail has ripped in several places. Finally, we get it into the companionway. We switch to one person on deck to preserve energy until dawn arrives or the wind lightens.

Monday, 4:56 p.m. The finish (but not the end). After a light and sloppy transit of Dixon Entrance, then a beautiful downwind run into Ketchikan (shirts off), we finish the R2AK after four days and four hours of intense sailing. Yes, we’ve won the race, which was incredible. But as the three of us reflect in the rare Alaska sunshine, we agree we’ve all been changed by the experience.

I’ve found a renewed love of the ocean and the land that bounds it, the creatures within it, and the winds and currents that stir it so relentlessly. We have trusted each other completely and worked together in the way only shipmates can. And each of us found something within ourselves, a sense of peace and gratitude that only the sea can provide.

The post Race To Alaska The Hard Way appeared first on Sailing World.

It’s July 23, 2022, and I am in Marseille, France, at the Olympic sailing venue for Paris 2024. My crew, Maggie Shea, and I are getting ready for a day of training in our baptism in the Mistral conditions. Only one year ago, we were wide-eyed at the opening ceremony for the Tokyo Games, preparing our minds, bodies and equipment to deliver our best performance on the water. It’s crazy to think how fast time has passed, but it’s exciting to realize all the improvements we can make between now and this time in two years. We have two goals for Marseille: Learn the venue on and off the water, and get ready for the 49erFX World Championship in September.

The US Sailing Team has a base at Yachting Club Point Rouge, which allows us to set up camp with the two containers we had in Tokyo (donated by Jim Cunningham and the US Etchells class). These containers provide a workshop, debrief room, locker and storage space, refrigerators and, most importantly, shade and air conditioning.

As expected of a Mediterranean ­summer, air temperatures hover in the 90s and the water is a toasty 80 degrees. We’ve had great breeze every day, mainly from the west, which means big-time chop and waves. The Mistral kicks in when a low-­pressure ­system passes east and is followed by a high-pressure system to the ­northwest.

When we head out for training, it’s blowing 15 to 20 out of the northwest with a 6-foot swell and steep chop. The team’s meteorologist, Chelsea Carlson, of SeaTactics, is on-site and joins us for the day’s training. It’s important that we all talk about and log the weather and wind ­patterns while we are here.

We set out for a three-hour training ­session, with the first half focused on tuning and technique in the waves. One unique element of the 49erFX is that the crew has the mainsheet, so communication and coordination with the driving and trimming are critical. Today, we work on keeping a higher average speed in the waves and minimizing the extremes with our modes. I have to focus on more-precise driving over the waves and dial more into Maggie’s comms. She is talking to me about mainsheet range and the speed of the boat.

The range is my guide for any puff or lull; how much room she has to depower or power up the boat. With no instruments allowed in racing, speed is based on feel, which is a specific sensation in the 49erFX. When we have speed, we know we can take a little bit of height at the right moment. And with each puff, lull and wave sequence, these comms continue.

Soon it’s time to set the kite to rip downwind in these beautiful conditions. I love it when we are in full-send mode, with both of us in the foot straps hiking as hard and aft as we can to keep the bow tracking over the wave tops. Our plan is to do several jibes on this long run to work on quickly finding the right spot. Sometimes it’s tempting to wait for the perfect spot to go in these conditions, but we risk overspending the layline and getting slow. So, if we can be confident in our boathandling to jibe when the coach blows the whistle, or just shortly after, we can make huge gains in racing.

Next, we get into short-course racing with a few other teams and focus on executing starts (specifically, the go-time for these conditions), locking into speed off the line using what we’ve just learned in the tuning portion and boathandling now that other boats are in the picture. We acknowledge that small shifts are happening with this breeze direction, but given the large waves and chop, a wide lane is the key to speed off the starting line.

After three hours of a productive and fun session, ticking off a few goals we had set for the day, we return to the base. This is a fun part of the day because we have a few different classes and coaches around. While hosing off our boat or eating a post-sailing snack, we can share nuggets of knowledge with teammates, share stories of a good race, or laugh at our wipeouts. We complete our equipment checks, debrief in the cool air of the container, and slide the cover over the boat. We are tired but happy knowing that another day of Mission Marseille has been checked. One down. A lot more to go.

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