It may never happen again.

What we’re talking about is The Ocean Race’s monster of a stage through the southern Indian and Pacific. What was originally a solution to the impossible challenge of trying to organize a round-the-world race with stops through Asia in the time of COVID-19 may have manifested itself as a new classic course—the new Everest peak for fully crewed ocean-racing teams, starting in Africa and ending in South America.

It was always going to be one hell of a ­challenge, this great distorting marathon sitting among six other standard-size Atlantic-based stages in the 50th anniversary edition of The Ocean Race, formerly the Volvo Ocean Race and the Whitbread. And it looked to have disaster written all over it because there were so many unknowns: Would the foil-assisted IMOCA 60s, with their delicate appendages and lightweight hulls, be able to cope with the violence of being pushed full-pelt for 35 days through the most inhospitable seas on the planet? How would their four-strong sailing crews survive in their spaceship-size capsules, on a platform with a ride quality ranging from uncomfortable to unbearable? And how would the race’s credibility survive this challenge, with only five boats on the starting line under Cape Town’s Table Mountain? What if three—or worse, none of them—failed to complete the course? This later concern weighed heavily on race organizers and fans alike.

In the end, we were treated to an epic sporting story too deep and expansive for this space. And it was one that proved that even if there were only four boats on the racecourse (Guyot Environnement-Team Europe dropped out with structural issues), if they are good boats, then it can be a compelling watch. And these were good boats sailed by some of the world’s best solo and fully crewed yachtsmen and -women.

Leg 3 had everything: big downwind racing in towering seas and storm-force winds, and long periods of atypical calm for the Southern Ocean, even in summer, and remarkably close racing. How close? While passing the most remote spot in the world’s oceans at Point Nemo, all four boats were within hailing range of each other. And there was some serious record-breaking pace at times, with the IMOCA 24-hour distance record smashed, jumping from 539 miles to 595 miles, courtesy of Kevin Escoffier and his crew on the Swiss-flagged Holcim-PRB.

The leg captivated a ­hungry social media audience with compelling stories of resilience, determination and resourcefulness by each and every crew as they battled rig and sail damage, hull and appendage structural failure, and personal injury in one case to keep their race on course. And all of it was vividly recorded and shared by the onboard reporters (OBRs) forbidden from taking part in crew work. What the OBRs gave us was a fascinating Big Brother’s-eye view of everything that went on for over more than a month at sea, plus compiling some of the most spectacular drone footage of foiling yachts in the Big South, the likes of which had never been captured in such high definition.

Of all the subplots that played out over 36 days, the most compelling was that of the eventual leg winner—and a surprise winner at that: Team Malizia, skippered by the charismatic German Boris Herrmann. Alongside him was the young British sailor Will Harris, the experienced French navigator Nico Lunven and the Dutch sailor Rosalin Kuiper. The team’s 2020-vintage VPLP-designed boat was tipped by many to come last in this race because it is big, heavy, and slow to get up on its foils in marginal conditions. Indeed, in Leg 2, from the Cape Verde islands to Cape Town, Malizia lost 200 miles to the fleet in just three days.

On Leg 3’s long eastbound highway, however, the hope for Herrmann and his crew was that their beast of an IMOCA would show its true pedigree in the South, and so it proved. But long before it could do that, their race almost came to an end after three days when the Code Zero halyard lock failed and the halyard carved a 30-centimeter trench in the front of the mast, 90 feet above deck.

At this point, the temptation to return to Cape Town was almost overwhelming, but the crew decided to try to repair it. “We thought about going back to Cape Town. That would be an easy reaction. But now we have all agreed to try and continue—it takes even more mental strength to do this than such an endeavor takes anyhow. The day we stand on the dockside in Itajai, I will be super proud,” Herrmann said at the time.

Little did he know.

With Harris and Kuiper taking turns at the top of the rig, they managed to complete a decent patch-up of the spar during a light spot in the weather and got their race back on track, albeit more than 300 miles behind the early leader, Holcim-PRB. The Swiss boat would extend its advantage to more than 600 miles before being reined back in—such is the nature of ocean racing, where being too far ahead can be a curse.

Alongside the US entry and pre-race favorite, 11th Hour Racing Team Mãlama skippered by Charlie Enright, and the French-flagged Biotherm skippered by Paul Meilhat, the game was now all about hunting Holcim down by diving south toward the ice exclusion zone, looking for stronger winds.

If times were tough on Malizia, they were arguably even worse on Mãlama, where Enright and his team, which included veteran British navigator Simon Fisher, British-Australian sailor Jack Bouttell and Swiss soloist Justine Mettraux, were contending with cracks in both their rudders. They repaired one and swapped the other for the spare and crossed their fingers.

The first goal for everyone was the midleg scoring gate under southeastern Australia, where Holcim added to its wins in Legs 1 and 2 by taking maximum points. But it was behind them that Malizia first started to show its qualities in this part of the world. On the way to the imaginary gate—situated at longitude 143 degrees east—Malizia simply sailed past Mãlama in sight of her, as Amory Ross, the OBR on the American yacht, memorably described.

“They seem to be able to carry more sail and keep their bow up, and while we struggled in the waves to keep from nosediving, they were able to sail at the same speed but lower,” he wrote.

In an interview after the finish, Enright was a bit less diplomatic. “It was kind of at that point in the race that everybody realized that Malizia was this Southern Ocean downwind machine—right before the scoring gate—and we were like, ‘Oh f—,’ you know…”

While the first half of this Southern Ocean drama was dominated by Escoffier’s boat, the second act in the Pacific saw a restart at Point Nemo and then a dogfight at the front between Holcim and Malizia in the run down to Cape Horn in big weather. It was a battle that continued up the South American coast, when three depressions produced the roughest weather, with the breeze topping 50 knots on three successive days.

And it was on the run to the Horn in big breaking seas that Malizia crewmember Kuiper was thrown out of her bunk when the boat spun off a breaking wave. She landed on her head, inflicting a concussion and a nasty wound, an incident that only underlined just how dangerous these platforms are in heavy weather. But the tough 27-year-old Dutchwoman, who was one of the brightest stars of the OBR show on this leg, just laughed it off, comparing herself to a pirate with an eye patch.

The weather pattern after the Horn was a gift for Malizia and just what this band needed to hold Holcim off all the way to the finish. Herrmann and his jovial squad crossed the line in the early hours of the morning after 35 days at sea, having sailed 14,714 miles and with Holcim still 80 miles out.

“It’s taking a few days, to be honest, to really realize what we’ve achieved because the last few days were really intense, trying to make sure we stayed ahead of Holcim and just really guaranteeing that we were really going to win this one,” Harris said after the finish. The 29-year-old Englishman couldn’t help but look back to the mast damage early on and marvel at how they turned things around.

“It was such a big comeback,” he says. “If we think back to week two of the leg, it didn’t seem like winning was even possible, so I am very happy that we’ve managed to get there, and we’re all slowly realizing it.”

Harris was candid about Malizia’s performance woes in light air, but he reckoned the crew had mastered its weakest link: marginal foiling conditions in winds of 10 to 16 knots, when the boat is sluggish and won’t get up and fly. The secret, he explained, is to sail with as much heel as possible and load the leeward quarter with all the movable weight to take advantage of a flat spot in the hull. “For the first minute or two, the boat will feel very slow, and then suddenly, it builds apparent and it starts taking off,” he says. “We call it semi-foiling.”

Malizia’s performance in this leg moved them one point ahead of Mãlama into second place overall, five points behind runway leader Holcim. It was a bitter pill to swallow for Enright and his crew, who held off Biotherm all the way from before the Horn to the finish to secure the final podium position. They managed to do so despite trashing their mainsail when the autopilot dropped out, causing a violent crash jibe off the Argentinian coast. Biotherm was also wounded, having hit a submerged object and damaging a foil, and the Americans kept their mainsail damage secret while they effected a Herculean repair.

“We knew it was going to be tight with Biotherm at the finish by virtue of them being in the same weather system as us, so anything we could do to gain an advantage and get a jump on them we had to do,” Enright said in Itajai. “We knew that they were facing adversity too, and if there was a chance that by them not knowing the news of our mainsail damage, they would be complacent, even for just a few hours, they were hours that we desperately needed.”

Fisher, on his sixth circumnavigation, has experienced his share of challenges, but the bleary-eyed and unshaven faces of him and his teammates were all one needed to see to understand the toll this leg had taken on them, as well as their spares and tools.

“We always said it was going to be tough, but I don’t think we ever imagined it was going to be as challenging as it was,” Fisher said in a team statement after finishing. “As much as we would have liked to finish in first place, the fact that we’ve managed to get through this in spite of all the issues we have been dealing with over nearly 38 days is a great achievement.

“Jack has done a fantastic job as boat captain keeping the boat together, but there came a point in the leg that it wasn’t about winning, it was about getting to the finish line. We knew it would be difficult and long, but we all agreed that we should make the most of it. It was about setting the mindset and enjoying it; you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it.”

Arriving in Brazil, Enright knew the pressure was on, but he was feeling confident the scales would turn back in his team’s favor now that the race had returned to the (supposedly) calmer waters of the Atlantic. For his sake, one would hope Harris’ new-found confidence about Malizia’s performance in medium conditions would prove misplaced.

“We definitely have a boat that is more comfortable, shall we say, in the Atlantic, and we are happy to have turned the corner,” Enright said. “If you could pick a boat for [Leg 3], you probably wouldn’t have picked our boat, but I’m happy with where we are at for the rest of the race.”

Enright placed a lot of emphasis on competitiveness at the end of an Ocean Race, not its early or middle stages, and he certainly wasn’t ruling out winning this edition with four legs still to go, including a transatlantic from Newport, Rhode Island, to Aarhus, Denmark, in late May.

“We’ve always maintained that we want to be the team that is sailing best at the end of the race and improve the most from day one until the finish, and we still have that opportunity,” he said. “No one here is ­worried; we’re just going to keep chipping away, and when you chip, you get chunks.”

Enright, 38, has been around the block in fully crewed ocean racing—this being his third Ocean Race—but he says he has not experienced anything like Leg 3 before.

“It’s by and away the most difficult thing I’ve done,” he says. “That’s not even from a conditions standpoint; it’s from a duration standpoint, but also the platform. There are people that have sailed in the South and people that have sailed IMOCAs in the South, and we are now in that category, and it’s no mystery to me why this class moves in four-year cycles.

“I tell you what,” he adds. “If I was doing the Vendée Globe, man, I’d want to do The Ocean Race. I’d want to get down there two years in advance and know exactly what we are dealing with, with the newest kind of design innovations in the boats and what have you.”

Harris, meanwhile, was hoping to get himself fit and healthy for the next stage from Itajai to Newport in late April. And the young Englishman was daring to dream that Malizia’s performance in Leg 3 could yet herald something even more magical for him and his team. “We’ve proved that we are a really strong team in terms of development, and that’s what this race is about,” he says. “If we can keep developing and learning faster than the others, we can certainly start winning toward the end.”

The post The Ocean Race’s Most Punishing Leg appeared first on Sailing World.

It’s early April on Miami’s Biscayne Bay, with an 18-knot easterly, gnarly chop and ribbons of sargassum seaweed—tough fare for racing any boat. We’re at the 2023 Don Q Snipe Regatta, heading uphill and racing against competitors with decades of experience in the class, as well as a slew of young hotshots and some first-­timers—40 teams in all. It’s baptism by fire, my first real experience racing a Snipe. And like many who jump into the boat for the first time, I’m being served heaps of humble pie. About the only time my crew, Danielle Wiletsky, and I see the top of the fleet is when we cross paths on opposite legs of the course.

The upside is that we have a ringside seat to their techniques. At one point, we watch as the eventual regatta-winning team of Ernesto Rodriguez and Kathleen Tocke round the weather mark. He hands her the tiller extension and mainsheet, slides back to clear weeds off the rudder, then takes over again. Blink and we’ll miss it.

“It’s something we’ve practiced,” Rodriguez tells me afterward.

Then it’s back to the business of riding waves, Tocke at times with her face almost at the headstay when going down waves, then rapidly sliding aft as the ride nears its end. It’s the product of years of muscle memory, and Tocke and Rodriguez are clearly in sync. Tocke, who first sailed the Snipe in 2008, says they don’t talk much on their boat. “Occasionally, he’ll tell me to hike harder,” she adds, “not because I’m not, but more as encouragement.”

Soon they’re a speck on the horizon as we plod our way upwind to the mark.

We’re not alone at the humble-pie buffet. Here at the Don Q, scores of top-notch sailors, ex-collegiate and otherwise, come with high expectations only to leave with egos battered and bruised by class veterans, many old enough to be their parents. Rodriguez has been at this for more than two decades. Plus, he regularly trains with the likes of Hall of Famer Augie Diaz, who has been in the class for 56 years and won more Snipe championships than space allows here, and Peter Commette, 36 years in the class, a former Olympian, a Laser world champion, and keeper of his share of big-time Snipe titles as well. “They taught me a lot,” Rodriguez says. “I’m still part of that group, and we always go back and forth with information, sharing a lot about tuning and ways to best sail the boat.”

The Don Q was started by class icon Gonzalo Diaz in 1966 and named after its rum sponsor. It’s been held every year since, even during the pandemic. As boats set up at the host Coconut Grove Sailing Club, with the overflow at the US Sailing Center to the north, it’s impossible not to notice the number of 30-somethings—not only as crew, but also skippers.

At a gathering at a recent Snipe event, Augie Diaz asked, “How many here are under 30?” Over half raised their hands.

So, how is it that a 1931 design is still going strong? With its 380-pound hull, unstylishly high boom, and an off-wind setup requiring a whisker pole, it’s a quirky boat that doesn’t align with modern metrics for success. Cue the Snipe class promotional video and enter Gonzalo Diaz, affectionately known as “Old Man.” Born in 1930, his Snipe career began in Havana at age 15. He left Cuba in 1965, settled in Miami, joined the Coconut Grove Sailing Club, and began working his magic in the local Snipe fleet.

“He was the kind of fleet-builder who spent a lot of his private time helping people get into Snipes,” says his son, Augie. About 30 years ago, he started a rent-to-own program. “He’d get a boat and pretty much let a prospective owner say how much they wanted to rent the boat for. The rental fee went toward the boat’s purchase. If it took them five years to pay the boat off, that was fine with him. If it took 10 years, that was fine too.” Augie admits that it’s tough to tell just how many boats his father ran through this program, but he ­estimates it’s well over 30.

“It’s a great way to promote the boat,” says Alex Pline, of Annapolis, “because those renting boats have skin in the game. The longer they rent the boat, the more they have invested in it and the less likely they are to give that all up.”

There are rumors about a Miami-area warehouse full of an ­unsubstantiated number of Snipes—usually in the double digits—and it’s clear who the supplier is.

Pline’s fleet adopted a version of the Old Man’s program in 2021. His wife, Lisa, says: “I love stealing good ideas. We’re on our third boat and our fourth person, who just got busy with other stuff. But we were able to turn that boat over pretty quickly.”

Rodriguez, also from Cuba, was a Laser sailor who met Old Man shortly after arriving in the States. “He gave me a boat to use for free and helped me out in a bunch of ways, including getting me in ­regattas when I couldn’t afford it.”

Greg Saldana, another Old Man recruit, had never sailed a Snipe but showed enough interest to catch Diaz’s attention. “We met at the US Sailing Center when there were just trailers and a bunch of boats. Here comes this little guy in a van. He gets out, and he’s carrying a briefcase, pen and a piece of paper, ready for me to sign. I said, ‘Wait a minute. Before I sign, can we first go sailing?’ He really didn’t want to because it was really hot out, but we went. We didn’t even get out of the channel when he said, ‘You’re going to do fine. Let’s go back.’ And I signed.”

The list goes on, and although Old Man passed away in early March 2023, Augie carries on his father’s legacy. “He had a love for the class that was infectious. I don’t know how many people I’ve brought into the class,” he says, “but I’ll always be behind the number my father brought in. I keep trying to catch up to him. I don’t keep count. I’m just going to keep doing what’s good for the class.”

There are rumors about a Miami-area warehouse full of an ­unsubstantiated number of Snipes—usually in the double digits—and it’s clear who the supplier is. As my crew observed, “It seems almost every boat here was either owned by Augie or is being ­borrowed from him for this event.”

That includes us. We quickly get a taste of another component of the Snipe’s continued success as Pline comes over while we are setting up the boat. He helps us get the rig base settings correct, and Andrew Pimental, the US Snipe builder who is right next to us in the parking area, jumps in as well.

“Everyone’s always helping each other,” says Charlie Bess, who crewed with Enrique Quintero to take second in the Don Q. “It doesn’t matter if it’s someone’s first time in the class or someone who’s been around for decades. You can ask them anything.”

The assistance doesn’t end in the boat park. Just after the start of the first race, our hiking stick universal breaks, and as we are approaching the club dock, two people rush to see what had happened. It’s Saldana and his crew, Grace Fang. “We got out to the end of the channel and decided we didn’t want to deal with those conditions,” Fang tells us. They quickly offer up the tiller and hiking stick from their boat, and we make it out for the second race. With a no-throw-out series, it was a tough way to start a regatta, but the hospitality put it all into perspective.

Later that evening, I was about to deal with our universal repair when I find our original tiller and hiking stick back in our boat, repaired and ready for the next day, no doubt the work of Saldana and Fang. We discover later that Saldana was Old Man’s regular crew and close friend for many years. Saldana and Fang are not here just for the racing either.

“We couldn’t attend the memorial for Old Man,” Fang says, “but we thought just being here for this event would be a good way to honor him. I think there are others here for the same reason.”

On the water, top Snipe sailor Jato Ocariz serves as the fleet coach, coming alongside boats between races to offer advice. On the second day, with the wind now around 15 but still a strong chop, he has us sail upwind so he can check our setup. “Put two more turns on your shrouds and move your jib leads back,” he says. And just like that, we are able to point better and log our best finish, just about midfleet.

One of the class’s most successful endeavors is recruiting younger sailors. Bess is a self-confessed poster child for the effort. “When I was 15, Augie sent me an email, along with around 10 other juniors in our program. He got us a boat, provided coaching and helped us out. That’s how I got into the class,” Bess says. Now she’s the Miami Snipe fleet captain and on the class’s “next gen” committee, which focuses on attracting 30-somethings. “The idea behind it is that a lot of people do junior sailing, then college sailing, graduate and discover they have no place to go. We try to make the point that we are that next step.”

What is it about the Snipe that appeals to that demographic? For starters, there’s a practical component. Commette says: “Over the last 20 years, people have won Snipe world championships in boats that were 10 to 15 years old. I just sold a 1998 boat I wasn’t racing anymore. It’s one of the best boats I’ve ever sailed, and it could win a world championship easy. That’s the great thing about the Snipe. You can get an old boat and be competitive. You can get a used Jibe Tech or Persson for $5K, put some time into it, a couple of hundred dollars to update lines and things, and win a Worlds with it. That’s what makes it so fantastic for young kids.”

The boat is also a technical step up from junior and college sailing boats, but not so much that it’s intimidating. The spreaders can be adjusted to accommodate a range of crew weights, the mast can be moved fore and aft at deck level with a lever or block-and-tackle system, and there are the usual jib and main controls. Class veterans Carol Cronin and crew Kim Couranz are at the lighter end of the weight spectrum, which, according to Diaz, is optimally around 315 to 320 pounds, making it well within reach for mixed-gender teams and smaller teams. “There are enough controls that you can customize the boat to how heavy you are and how tall you are,” Cronin says. “Like the Star, the bendy mast keeps the boat exciting to sail. It takes a little more technique, but it also means you can tune the mast to fit a wider variety of weights.” Despite a breezy first two days, Cronin and Couranz finish ninth overall.

Then there’s the class motto: “Serious sailing, serious fun.” That appeals to the younger crowd. “I’ve always thought it sounds a little cheesy,” Bess says, but it’s entirely accurate. Taylor Schuermann, who crews for Diaz, says: “There’s a tremendous amount of enthusiasm, now more than ever, from that group. We have a WhatsApp group, and on Monday and Tuesday people are already asking, ‘Who’s going out this weekend?’ People are chomping at the bit to practice, sail together, and really put in that effort. Then when you show up to a regatta, no matter how long you’ve been in the class, it feels like a family reunion.”

And like a reunion, there are always those moments when you remember who is absent. Fittingly, the regatta’s Saturday night Cuban dinner includes a celebration of Old Man’s life, with photos, videos and a lot of storytelling.

“It’s all about peer groups,” Lisa Pline says, “and keeping it fun and competitive.”

Carter Cameron got into the lease-to-own program in Annapolis, says Evan Hoffman, the current Snipe class secretary. “All of a sudden, he started inviting all of his friends and became sort of a lightning rod for the fleet. Now he’s in San Diego, working for Quantum, and he’s doing the same kind of thing there.”

There is a downside, however, to the youth recruiting scheme, Pline says. “Every time we bring a new kid into the class, I think, ‘Oh, great, another kid who’s going to kick my ass.’”

The class also hosts under-30 regattas. “We found that if you can get a younger person interested in a Snipe, they’ll get other people their own age interested as well,” Pline says. “The U30 events really help with that. The idea is that it’s a regatta for younger people—it’s the older generation, if you will, reaching out to younger sailors, loaning boats for the event, doing whatever we can to make it successful.”

Over the years, the Snipe has withstood a lot of competition from startup classes that have the mentality of keeping it simple and easy.

Over the years, the Snipe has withstood a lot of competition from startup classes that have the mentality of keeping it simple, easy, and all the things that would make it a Laser-like doublehanded boat. “But the problem is,” Commette says, “that’s a dumbed-down type of sailing. While the Laser has excelled for what it is, it doesn’t teach you how to do so many other things necessary to become a really good all-around sailor. With the Snipe, you learn so much more, which is why so many America’s Cup champions, so many Olympians, so many other world champions have had significant Snipe experience.”

“One of the things that’s always appealed to me,” Cronin says, “is that, if you look at Old Man and Augie, you realize, ‘I can keep doing this for a long time, if I stay fit and stay interested.’”

I can relate. As a late adopter to the Snipe myself—let’s just say a few years past my retirement—I now know firsthand from the Don Q that I’ve got a long way to go to get to the front of the Snipe fleet. Thankfully, I’m guided by Old Man’s legacy and the efforts of many others in the class. Keep at it, ask the right questions, and someday I might be within shouting distance of Rodriguez. I’m sure many of the new kids in the class hope for the same.

The post The Endurance of the Snipe appeared first on Sailing World.

The importance of comparing your performance to another competitor during a race is an underrated part of sailing a boat competitively. We hear a lot about having good onboard communication about what’s happening on the boat. While that’s true, it’s also important to communicate what’s happening outside the boat and what’s happening relative to your nearest competitors. So, let’s cover some techniques to improve this aspect of your next race. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on calling upwind relatives.

It’s best to start calling ­relatives as soon as possible after the start. This first few minutes is a critical boatspeed part of the race, and the sooner your team can get locked in, the better. Oftentimes, the teams that get their performance going the soonest after the start are the teams that emerge from the fray in the best position.

Once you start calling ­relatives, do so with confidence, announce that you are calling relatives, and identify who or which boat you are calling relatives against. For example, “I have us with (name of boat).” Knowing who you are gauging performance against is important.

On a boat with true wind direction displayed somewhere, announce that number. For example, I might say, “Starting wind direction is one-eight-five.” If the wind direction changes during the lineup, this will be valuable information to provide accurate comparisons.

If there’s no TWD displayed on your boat, or you don’t have instruments, you can use your compass heading instead and say something like, “Starting heading is one-four-six.” It’s not quite as accurate as TWD, but it’s better than nothing.

Always refer to your boat first. For example, I might say, “Higher, same speed.” To avoid any confusion, don’t refer to them first. If they are higher than you, state, “We are lower.” Be consistent and always use the same process, no mumbling. Remember, the goal is to let your teammates know how you’re doing.

Some examples of ­describing clear-cut VMG differences are “higher, faster,” “lower, slower,” and “same angle, same speed.” However, if the speed and angle are split, you will need to judge which VMG is superior. For example, I might say, “Higher, slower, VMG them,” or “lower, faster, VMG us,” or “higher, slower, VMG even.”

Accurately and confidently judging performance and VMG differences takes time and experience, so if you’re new to it, there is no time like the present to start practicing. And speaking of practice: A great opportunity to get in the rhythm of calling relatives is during your pre-race tuning-partner ­lineups. (Of course, you do that already, right?)

At the beginning of an upwind lineup, try this technique: Imagine you were to tack. Where would you end up? Would you be behind them? Would you cross them? Would you hit them at their mainsheet winch? Their front hatch? Start every relative performance call with this information. For example, I might say, “If we tacked right now, we would miss them by 6 meters.” One minute into the lineup, I might say, “If we tacked right now, we would hit them on their transom; we have gained 6 meters since the beginning of the test.” Another minute later, I might say, “If we tacked right now, we would hit them at their mast; we have gained one boatlength since the start of the test.”

If you are clearly outperforming a competitor above you, or if they are in a compromised position, make the announcement that you are switching relatives to another boat. For example, I might say, “(Name of boat) won’t live there for long, switching to (name of new boat or sail number).”

If there are no boats above you to call relatives with, announce you are going to hike instead. This lets your team know why you’ve gone silent. For example, I say, “No gauges above us; I am hiking.” Or take it a step further and challenge your teammates to hike even harder. I say, “No good gauges above; showing the young guys how to hike.”

Having been a pro sailor and coach for a long time, I’ve experienced my share of situations where a lack of calling relatives or poor calling in general leads to unwanted outcomes. To prevent this from ever ­happening on your boats, let’s run through a few common scenarios.

Silence is deadly

What happens: We start the race and nobody says anything.

The result: We come off the line in a low mode that is not optimal VMG. The boats above us are able to live in an otherwise compromised position all the way to the layline, which costs us a lot of places.

The fix: Identify immediately who you’re calling relatives against and make it clear how your team is going against them.

Head in the clouds

What happens: We don’t take note of the TWD or heading when we start the relative calls. We state we are losing a lot to the boat above us, oblivious to the fact that the wind has lifted us 15 degrees.

The result: We start changing settings, away from what we know, to try to improve based on the feedback, but we only perform worse and lose a lot.

The fix: Announce the TWD or heading when you start the relative calls. Then you can allow for TWD/heading changes in your analysis of performance. For example, “We are doing well against the boats above considering we’re in a 15-degree lift.”

Comms breakdown

What happens: We say, “They are lower.” The helmsman puts the bow up to sail a higher mode because he only hears the words “are lower” (the other words err out in the wind), and the helmsman and trimmers assume we are the lower boat.

The result: We sail too high and slow, and get rolled by the boat above us.

The fix: Always talk about your boat first, not the other. In this case, we were already higher and should have said, “We are higher.” Instead, by switching between us and them, we ­create confusion.

Stay on task

What happens: We aren’t going well, so we stop calling relatives.

The result: At a time when we need to be honest and identify there is an issue with our performance, we go quiet. Nothing is done to address our performance issue, and we go backward because of it.

The fix: No one wants to be the bearer of bad news or a Negative Nancy, but this is an important part of the race. Be consistent. Be honest. Keep the process the same, rain or shine.

Lost in translation

What happens: We say, “Higher, slower.”

The result: Our skipper responds, “Is that good or bad? Are we gaining or not?”

The fix: If the speed and angle are split, finish your call with whether that mode is a gain or a loss.

Attention deficit

What happens: After a very long lineup, you are unsure as to whether it has been a gain or a loss over all the changes that have come and gone.

The result: You don’t really know how you have gone over the long term and just make something up.

The fix: From the beginning of the lineup, announce where you would be if you tacked. Five minutes later, you will know how you have gone by checking in using the same method. Maybe you haven’t gone well in the last 30 seconds, but overall you have moved forward by two boatlengths.

Hang up and dial again

What happens: The boat above you has a poor start, and now they are in your quarter waves going even worse. You keep calling relatives on them because they are closest to you.

The result: Your team thinks they are going very well based off your calls. But the boat you are calling is compromised. The next boat up is outperforming you, and you have not identified that your team needs to change modes to match.

The fix: As soon as the boat you are calling relatives against is compromised or going really badly, look for the next boat above them to keep improving your mode.

Lost in space

What happens: All the boats above you tack away. There are no other nearby boats to call ­relatives against, so you go silent.

The result: Your skipper yells, “Please keep calling relatives!” and loses focus in the rage.

The fix: As soon as there are no boats above you to call relatives against, announce that fact. And hike your butt off.

The takeaway from all these scenarios should be that it’s critical to continuously call your relative performance against your competitors, and when you do so, be clear, confident, accurate and consistent. Doing all of the above will help relieve tension on the boat and improve performance. If there is no one left to call relatives against, hike hard and do the rest of your tasks well. Enjoy yourself. And don’t forget to call your mom or dad after racing to tell them how well you went. If anything, it’ll be the most important call of the day.

The post How to Communicate Relatives appeared first on Sailing World.

My current project is a ­partnership in a Sunfast 3300, a 33-foot doublehanded offshore boat. Our intention is to sail the best races in Europe over the next few years, and while there are clusters of similar doublehanded boats in England, Spain, Italy and Scandinavia, the cream of the crop is racing in France. 

The French have been playing this game for a long time, so we decided to enter the springtime Spi Ouest Regatta in La Trinite sur Mer. This is one of the biggest regattas in the world, with over 460 boats. The format is short coastal races in the Bay of Quiberon, a perfect opportunity for my doubles partner, Alyosha Strum-Palerm, and I to test our skills. Using this regatta, we figured we can see where we need to improve in advance of our big test this summer, the IRC Doublehanded European Championship in July.

Our goals for the regatta were to work on boatspeed, refine our sail crossovers, work on communication and division of responsibility, solidify our boathandling, and enjoy racing in an incredible event in France.

Starting

We did not practice starting, and during the event, that was our weakest area. We had three mediocre starts, one of which we were barely OCS, and one decent start. In retrospect, we should’ve practiced more, and started more in the center of the line. In tight inshore racing, with 58 ­similar-speed boats, the start is critical. With better starts, we could have won the regatta.

Upwind tactics

Our play calling was below average, especially early in each of the beats. The correct side was not obvious, and we would typically go the wrong way, then figure it out and gain some back at the top of each beat. But this is an area for improvement. In some instances, a little more current research could have informed us; in other cases, we should have taken a smaller early loss to stay in touch with the leaders. It was another good lesson.

Upwind speed

Our pace was decent in over 10 knots, but not so good in lighter air. We made some small changes to the rig tune before the event, which I think were positive. We learned to use the J1.5 jib higher into the range than we thought we could, say 14 knots true windspeed, with more halyard and lead pushed outboard for the upper range. We also had good success with the J2 in 15 to 20 TWS and learned the boat likes a pretty powerful jib. A heel angle of 18 to 20 degrees seemed to be a good target upwind and reaching. In light air, it’s hard to induce enough heel in this boat, so I learned to trim the main tighter in less than 10 TWS, which resulted in more heel and power.

Boathandling

Our ­handling was good, among the best in the fleet, which means our training back home in Seattle paid off. It was also an advantage at times to have an asymmetric spinnaker, while many boats had a symmetric. Alyosha also did a good job of predicting the correct sail for the next leg, which is not always easy with the random legs and strong current.

One area we need to improve is tacking. In stronger wind, we lost a lot versus the ­single-backstay boats because it took us a long time to get to full backstay tension. I started to dump the main fine-tune out of the tack instead of the traveler only, and I think that was an improvement. The challenge for us is that the jib sheet and the runner use the same winch, so now we want to try a slightly different jib-tacking technique: Cast off all wraps as the boat is turning, tail to hand tight through the self-tailer, then immediately go runner-up, then jib final trim.

Reaching and downwind tactics

This was a real strength for us. We picked the right side on the runs and played the shifts well, and we got clear air and stuck to the rhumbline on the reaches. It’s important for the helm to know the leg compass angle because you often could not see the next mark.

Reaching and downwind speed

We always passed boats reaching and running. It’s partly because our kites are bigger and our hull form is good for downwind sailing, but I think we have fast downwind sails, and we have a good feel for the right angles and trim.

Sail crossovers

We used the masthead code zero exclusively, using no tweaker most of the time. The A1.5 is good for 3 to 12 knots, and the A2 for 8 to 25 knots. The A2 was surprisingly good for tight reaching in moderate air, up to 105 TWA. We used the spinnaker staysail in 10-plus knots when running and 8-plus knots when reaching.

Weight placement

We went max forward with the sails and gear in less than 10 knots, then centered until about 15 knots, and put more in the stern above 15, especially reaching. In light air, if one tack is favored, it might be worth putting the weight to leeward rather than max forward to try to induce heel.

We ended up 14th of 58 with an OCS, 3, 4, 3. We would have been fourth in the first race, which would have been 4, 3, 4, 3, or 14 points. The winner had 12 points, so we are definitely in the game. The main areas to improve from this event are starting, early leg tactics and light air upwind. The areas we don’t know about yet are big-picture tactics and endurance and energy management.

It’s rewarding to look back on how many goals we were able to focus on with measured success. We raced bow to bow with good teams in a large competitive fleet of boats, made French friends, and soaked up the atmosphere of the largest multi­class regatta in France. We had a lot of fun, and we are excited about our future. It was definitely worth it, and we hope to return next year. Voila!

The post Prepping For the Big Regatta appeared first on Sailing World.

Victor Diaz de Leon often rides his road bike for a couple of hours before and after a day of racing. In the saddle, he doesn’t listen to music. Instead, he’s simulating racecourse scenarios: what was happening on the boat, what the tactical play would be or could have been. “It’s a time of meditation; a place where I get ideas,” says the Etchells world champion tactician, who calculated a brilliant final-race win in Miami in April, a race executed alongside his teammates on John Sommi’s Veracity.

To earn the title on that light and shifty last day of the Aon Etchells World Championship, Veracity had to beat series leader and past world champ Steve Benjamin and his all-star crew on Tons of Steel, but there was a lot to it. Hedging a one-race day, Diaz de Leon hatched a plan: “I knew it would be hard to make nine points on Benji with only one race, especially if they had a good race themselves. So, I’m thinking we just have to have a good start, assess where ­others are in the race and take it from there.”

The others were Jim Cunningham’s Lifted, tied with Veracity, and Luke Lawrence’s Cruel Jane 2.0, sitting mere points behind in third.

“We started near the favored pin end in a tight lane, but held on long enough that when we tacked to port, we were strong on the fleet. When we tacked, Benji was a few lengths below us, slightly bow forward, and it turned into a real speed thing to get strong on him and get ahead of him. When we finally recognized Jim and Luke’s teams were deep, it was us and Benji, and it was on.”

Problem was they were 1-2 at that moment and both were “launched.” “If we won and they got second, that wouldn’t work,” Diaz de Leon says, “so we decided to start playing down on them.”

Veracity slowed its rival as much as they could on the starboard layline, allowing a few boats to get ahead and between them. Veracity was fourth to the mark and Steel was ninth. Still not enough.

“Playing backward downwind is very risky,” Diaz de Leon says, “because it’s easy to get passed. So, I was comfortable just doing it all upwind.”

On the second beat, Veracity herded Steel deeper into the fleet, always from a controlling position. “It was important to do it as early as we could,” Diaz de Leon says. “We were conscious about not getting too close or ever slower than them, but there was less tacking than I anticipated. They were content sailing in our bad air, which made it a bit easier. They were also reaching a lot to try to get clear air, and I was happy with that too as we were sailing into the fleet. The magic number for us was they had to finish 22nd or worse.”

A jibing duel down the next run continued the skirmish, ­pushing Steel ever deeper to beat them around the course with points to spare. They celebrated their win with Champagne and plunges, but once ashore there was the business of two protests lodged by Benjamin’s tactician Mike Buckley, who invoked rules 11 and 17. To the protest room Veracity dispatched its trimmer, Will Ryan, a two-time Olympic medalist and national judge. The situation involved an attempted luff on a windward leg, and the way the veteran judges saw it, Benjamin overstuffed his luff and was ultimately disqualified.

Veracity’s owner and skipper, 65-year-old John Sommi, from Darien, Connecticut, got his first sailing world title, and as is always the case, this win was a high-caliber team effort. On the bow was Beccy Anderson, who is also Veracity’s boat captain. It was Anderson who deftly identified Lifted and Cruel Jane in the lineup of identical boats and white sails during that last race, empowering Diaz de Leon to promptly ­execute Plan A.

Ryan, who won his Olympic 470 gold medal in Tokyo and his silver in Rio, is the team’s speed maestro, and Sommi is, of course, on the helm. They’d been sailing for more than a year, a syndicate that formed when Sommi, a successful Wall Street executive and father of four young adults, found himself with an empty nest and a desire to get back to sailing. Sommi campaigned a J/88 and a Melges 20 before diving into the deep end of the high-stakes Etchells class. “The goal was to go sailing and play at a high level,” says Diaz de Leon, “and I remember John saying that he just wanted to sail well and be respected—or something like that.”

They won both the National and North American championships last year. “We were sailing really well,” Diaz de Leon says. “And then one day, Will said, ‘Someone has to win the Worlds, so why couldn’t it be us?’”

With a supporting cast of top-shelf coaches that included Veracity teammate Tom Dietrich, sailmaker Chris Larson, Etchells whisperer Jud Smith and pro-sailing legend Morgan Trubovich, Veracity established itself as the team to beat by winning the first of three Miami Winter Series events that were each essentially pre-Worlds regattas. As a result of a collision before the second event, Veracity’s mast was toast, and that’s a big deal in Etchells sailing because rig tune on this tweakable old one-design is everything.

“All the tuning numbers and the characteristics of the rig that suited our style were gone, and the next rig we got didn’t suit our style,” Diaz de Leon says. “That was difficult, and we did the second event with the new mast and we struggled.”

They then dispatched Larson to the Selden Mast factory in Charleston, South Carolina, on a forensic search for the perfect spar. Larson bend-tested several spars and picked the best two he could find. “We weren’t as fast as we were [with the old mast] initially, but we got better and better,” Diaz de Leon says.

Veracity’s results at the Miami Worlds speak for themselves, from the development of their sails with Smith to their many tuning and training sessions of the past year. They were never slow and, aside from the match-race discard with Steel, 12th was their highest finish over eight races in the fleet of 65. A review of Veracity’s tracker replays paints a picture of their consistent approach to the congested Biscayne Bay racecourse. They never once started at an end, they worked the middle left on the first beat, middle right on the second, and worked the center of the course on every downwind leg, which is easier to accomplish with good starts.

“Most of the time when I start a race, I don’t know where I want to go,” Diaz de Leon admits. “I like to leave my options open and decipher during the race. By starting toward the middle [of the line], there’s lower density, and it’s harder for the race committee to call the boats there. Working with Truby (Trubovich) in our debriefs, we got a sense of the race committee’s style during the general recalls. The race committee [on the signal boat] was more aggressive calling boats than the pin boat, so I figured I might as well move a bit left.”

They were also geared up for every start, and Diaz de Leon says that was all thanks to Trubovich, who deployed his own buoys in the starting area in the morning, which Veracity would use for three practice starts as part of their pre-race routine. Trubovich, a 16-time world champion from New Zealand who has enjoyed a fruitful career in the grand-prix world, is also representative of the level of coaching in the Etchells class today that makes winning impossible for mere mortals. He brings all the tools to the table, as well as an attention to technical detail and a sense of humor that Diaz de Leon says was magic to the team.

“He just brings such a great positive energy, and his debriefs are incredible with the technology. Let me give you an example: For the Worlds, he sent me out to Best Buy to get a bigger TV for the hotel room because the one we had was too small. He told me the model we needed, and I came back with this huge cinema TV, and it really did help see the footage better from the GoPros we have on the boat, his stuff from outside the boat, all the data, speed, heading, and we have microphones on so he could hear how we interacted with each other.”

In these debriefs, Diaz de Leon says he realized how hard he was on Sommi at times and thought maybe he should dial down his intensity. “But John never once complained, he just grinds away and is completely focused, and works his ass off to correct any weakness. He’s been so successful in life, has a beautiful family and, as a young guy, I very much look up to him as a role model. I remember him telling me once that in his 30 years on Wall Street he never once missed a day of work, and that’s the same commitment he brings to the team. After our practices, he was always the one asking for 10 more tacks, or jibes or more starts, or whatever. His dedication is amazing.”

Veracity established itself as the team to beat by winning the first of three Miami Winter Series events that were each essentially pre-Worlds regattas.

Sommi’s focus on the helm, Diaz de Leon says, is what allowed them to be so strong in the first few minutes off the start, surviving and climbing off competitors in lanes so thin and seemingly impossible to hold. But it wasn’t just Sommi that made Veracity’s tactician look smart all the time—full credit, Diaz de Leon says, goes to Ryan.

“He’s the best sailor I’ve ever sailed with,” Diaz de Leon says of the Australian medalist and decorated world champion. “He’s insane and has a feel for the boat like no other. I sometimes think I can feel the boat better than most—and I’m not being cocky here—but the first time I sailed with him I thought, ‘Man, this guy is feeling things that I don’t even feel at all.’ He’s an animal and has a crazy ability to focus under pressure in the thick of it.

“He said something to me once that I thought was really cool: He said, ‘We’ve earned this privilege to race under pressure, so let’s enjoy it.’ He’s just positive, so polite and fun to sail with. To be honest, I have a man crush on him, and he has one on me too.”

Ryan is a disciple of the 470, and Diaz de Leon says: “His understanding of how the rig works, how all the jib controls work—it’s all amazing, and he knows what control to touch to achieve whatever mode we want to sail. He and John are now so good at moding the boat that I can look out of the boat all the time.”

In the 7 to 18 knots of “Champagne sailing conditions” for the Worlds, Veracity—the boat and the team that massaged it around the racecourse—was collectively true to its namesake. They were honestly fast and sharp under pressure, and there’s a parallel to be drawn between Diaz de Leon’s obsession with bike racing and the experience of winning one the most difficult world championships in one-design sailing, especially the calculated handling of Steel in that final race. “In bike racing, when you’re in a breakaway, you’re suffering with everyone. You want to keep up, and you might want to quit, but you tell yourself, ‘Hang on a little longer because they’re eventually going to give up.’ You need to be patient. It’s said that everyone has a limited number of matches, and whoever finishes the race with the most matches left will win the race.”

Such is the mentality of Etchells sailing’s breakaway specialists. It is the same in sailing as it is on the bike. The fight for every advantage, every inch and every point is fueled by determination, discipline and a willingness to suffer. As it was for team Veracity, it’s about getting out front and setting the pace until the title is firmly in hand.

The post How The Worlds Were Won appeared first on Sailing World.

The Rhodes Bantam sloop is an open racing dinghy designed by renowned naval architect Philip Rhodes in the mid-1940s. At 14 feet, 325 pounds, and with 130 square feet of working sail (including a large genoa jib and a large spinnaker set on a 7-foot-long spinnaker pole), it was a hot boat in its day. The first wood Bantams were produced by the Skaneateles Boat Company in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York and were an instant hit after World War II. Eventually, nearly 2,000 boats were produced, first in wood but later in fiberglass. Fleet racing was active in upward of 30 fleets, and the Rhodes Bantam Class Association held an International Regatta every summer at venues as widespread as New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Mississippi.

At age 15—63 years ago—I fell in love with the Bantam and ­persuaded my father to share in the purchase of a new Gibbs Boat Company wood boat, Hull No. 836. I sailed and raced that boat through high school on Acton Lake near Oxford, Ohio, and then traded it for a new wooden Baycraft-built hull, No. 1257, when I was in college.

After college, graduate school and a five-year hitch in the Air Force, I settled in upstate New York, sold No. 1257, and bought No. 1775 Spirit from legendary dinghy racer and builder Dick Besse in nearby Skaneateles, New York. My late son and I won the Rhodes Bantam International Regatta with this boat in 1981 and 1983. She was a joy to sail in a fresh breeze.

Like many two-person racing dinghy classes, the Rhodes Bantam class fell on hard times in the late 1970s as new classes came on the scene and younger sailors gravitated to Lasers and crewing on larger one-designs. By the end of the 1980s, only a few fleets remained, and the class no longer held its annual International Regatta. A few reunion regattas were held in conjunction with other regattas in upstate New York, but the class simply faded away for all practical purposes.

Fast-forward to 2009. The Skaneateles Historical Society operates a lovely museum called the Creamery in the Village of Skaneateles. The museum has displays that chronicle the history, culture and industry of the region, with an impressive collection of small craft built and sailed in Skaneateles. A few years ago, the society acquired Skaneateles-built Lightning No. 1 on a long-term loan from the Mystic Seaport Collection, and it is now on display in a new wing of the museum.

The family of the late Dick Besse also donated his last Bantam build to the museum, R-B No. 1823 Woodwins, an all-wood creation right down to the Sitka spruce spars. This boat is a real beauty and was displayed next to Lightning No.1.

The Skaneateles Historical Society, however, had an interest in acquiring a much older, historical Rhodes Bantam for its collection. Knowing of my interest in the class, one of the society board members approached me to see if I was interested in finding a suitable candidate. I readily agreed, but little did I know the search would take the better part of six years.

I immediately started my quest to find the oldest surviving Bantam in existence. A quick internet search turned up Lawrence Fortunato’s excellent Rhodes Bantam website and photo gallery, which also featured a bulletin board where visitors to the site could post comments. Sure enough, a gentleman named Charles Jannace posted that he had owned Rhodes Bantam No. 1 from 1954 to ’55 and had sailed it on Little Neck Bay on Long Island. Then came another post from a gentleman named Alexander Scott, who said his family had owned and raced Bantam No. 2. Scott also stated that No. 1 was no longer in existence, and his father, Fred Scott, who had worked for the Skaneateles Boat Company, had redesigned the interior. No. 2, he said, was the actual production prototype for all the subsequent Skaneateles-built wood Bantams. Fred Scott went on to design several popular small sailboats, most notably the Force 5 and the Puffer. Alexander Scott left a telephone number on the ­website, and the hunt for No. 2 was on.

I called him and explained my interest in finding the boat. The call also reminded me that I had actually sailed on No. 2 with Alexander’s brother, Rick Scott, one summer afternoon in 1963 when I was on vacation in Skaneateles. (I was 19 at the time.) I also learned that No. 2, named Cockerel, had quite the racing pedigree, having won the R-B International Regatta in 1949 and again in 1953. Alexander explained that his family had sold it to an attorney named Larry Hale, who lived somewhere in Massachusetts.

After a little more internet sleuthing, I found a website for Lawrence Hale, Esq. in Carver, Massachusetts. Using the firm’s website, I emailed Hale, and he confirmed that he had purchased No. 2 in 1981, did some work on it, and even took it on his honeymoon in Maine in 1984. He also explained that he had given the boat to Reverend Cuthburt Mandell, the rector of the Aquia Episcopal Church in Stafford, Virginia. Naturally, I found an email address for the reverend, wrote to him, and found that he had owned No. 2 but ended up giving it to somebody who lived on Cape Cod. That’s where the trail went cold; he had no name, address or telephone number.

Then, somewhat out of the blue, Mandell contacted me again and said he learned that the name of the last known owner of No. 2 was Mark Sherwin, an artist on Cape Cod. I now had a name but no other contact information.

Anyone familiar with Cape Cod knows there are a lot of artists who live there. It’s also known to be a bit of a graveyard for boats of all types and sizes. A cursory web search yielded no match, but I persisted and did numerous web searches with different search words in my spare time. Finally, I found a post on an obscure artists website where—ta-da—one Mark Sherwin had posted and left—ta-da again—a cellphone number.

I immediately called and, after leaving a few messages, finally had a live telephone conversation with Sherwin. He confirmed he was indeed the current owner of R-B No. 2 and might be interested in selling or donating it for my museum project. He stated that he would contact me in a few months, and we could work something out. I was elated, but my elation was premature.

Months passed, and I did not hear from him. I tried to reach him again, but calls and emails went unanswered. I suddenly had this image of the hulk of R-B No. 2 sitting on the bank of a salt marsh somewhere on the Cape, slowly but surely rotting away.

But I had one other lead. A neighbor in Cazenovia, New York, where I live, had spent a lot of time on Cape Cod and knew the Sherwin family. He made a few inquiries, and low and behold, Sherwin emailed him at the end of August 2015, referenced my ­earlier contact, and expressed an interest in selling the boat.

Apparently, Sherwin had been dealing with serious health problems that might have accounted for some of our earlier miscommunications. But I now had a valid email address, home address and telephone number for him. I wrote and called him right away.

Over the following few weeks, we corresponded regularly. I learned that his son, a sailmaker in Seattle, had removed the 1/4‑inch plywood bottom from the hull and replaced several damaged mahogany frames aft of the centerboard trunk. It was also missing a mast and a tiller handle. Sherwin emailed me several good photos. We agreed on a fair price that would cover his storage costs over the years and restoration efforts to date, and settled on a pickup date.

On October 14, 2015, I pulled up to Sherwin’s house in Sandwich and saw No. 2 for the first time in 52 years. As advertised, the bottom was missing, but his son had done a fine job of replacing several damaged mahogany frames. There were only pieces of the mast left, no tiller handle, and the rudder was a kick-up design not original to the boat. As is, the boat was not going to win any beauty contests, but she had “good bones,” as they say, and could be restored to display condition with a new plywood bottom, a lot of sanding, paint, varnish and some new period-correct components. Sherwin could not have been more gracious. I am sure he had some regrets about parting with this boat, but I sensed that he shared my vision of where it should spend the rest of its days. We closed the deal, and I was off to brave the hazards of the infamous Bourne Bridge rotary and the Mass Pike back to my home in Cazenovia.

I suddenly had this image of the hulk of R-B No. 2 sitting on the bank of a salt marsh somewhere on the Cape, slowly but surely rotting away.

The boat and gear spent the winter in my barn, but I trailed the hull over to Skaneateles the following spring and formally donated it to the Historical Society. Dave Miller and John Barnes, two of the active society members, agreed to work on the hull, and I agreed to find the missing parts (mast, rigging, and the rudder/tiller assembly) and restore them and some other parts to display condition. Luckily, I found an almost-free 200 series Bantam barn-find derelict in nearby Tully, New York, that yielded all the period-correct missing parts and gear. Miller and Barnes cleaned the hull, fitted a new plywood bottom, and were well on the way when COVID-19 hit and everything came to a halt for the better part of two years.

The museum staff and I finally elected to do a fundraiser focused on former Bantam sailors and then contracted out the rest of the restoration to Todd Kallusch in Sodus, New York. His family used to build beautiful wood Bantams, and he did an inspired job of ­finishing the restoration.

Miller did the final work of displaying the boat at the museum, and we rounded up vintage photos, and even found and displayed the first-, second- and third-place International Championship Regatta perpetual trophies. The display has been a popular exhibit since it opened in 2022.

There are really two stories here. The first is about the birth, life and eventual demise of a fine sailboat class. The second is about how to find a 70-year-old relic so people can see it and reflect on just what a great little boat it was. I am happy to have been part of both stories, and while I have mixed feelings about the internet, I would have gotten nowhere in my nautical treasure hunt without it. If you are ever in Skaneateles on a Friday afternoon when the museum is open, gaze at the beautiful lake, have a beer at the Sherwood Inn on Genesee Street, then take the short walk to the Creamery on Hannum Street and enjoy being in the presence of its collection of wonderful old boats and associated displays. And give No. 2 a good look. She’s worth it, as was the hunt to find her.

The post In Search of The Missing Bantam appeared first on Sailing World.

Here is the honest-to-­goodness truth: After a North U Performance Race Week in St. Thomas, you will be faster, smarter and definitely a little sunburned. Most importantly, though, you will be ready for your home-fleet racing, with one distinct advantage: You will have done more starts, more mark roundings and a lot more boathandling than in an entire season. It’ll feel like boot camp in paradise, but when you get home, you’ll be ready to serve.

This tropical Performance Race Week happens twice each winter, once in February and once in March, and running the immersive sail-racing clinic is the kind professor himself, Bill Gladstone, who’s been teaching the North U curriculum for decades and always greets the students with a kind smile and inquisitive head lean.

North U is now owned by the American Sailing Association, whose primary mission since the early 1980s has been to teach sailing and seamanship. With Gladstone’s North U in their portfolios, they’re now expanding into teaching racing through live clinics and online courses. Race Week students, from all sailing walks and classes, spend a couple grand apiece to get schooled on boatspeed, tactics and rules. But ultimately, the experience is all about teamwork, and the lesson plan is reinforced over five long eight-hour days on the water, in the classroom and with onboard coaches.

As this year’s March edition of Race Week gets underway on an early Monday morning at the St. Thomas Sailing Center, the birds are chirping as Gladstone assembles the eager students. After pairing them with their coaches, he proceeds to pull boat assignments from a hat. It’s no secret among the veteran coaches that some of the IC24s, which are modified J/24s, are faster than others. But at the end of the day, the boat draw doesn’t matter because if the crew work isn’t sharp, a faster boat isn’t going to make a difference.

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

For the team I’ve been assigned to as a coach, what does matter is the color of the boat. Gladstone pulls our team’s name and announces One Love. It’s the bright yellow that’s impossible to miss on its mooring. My first reaction is, “Oh no, not the yellow one.” Brightly colored boats always get the starting-line caller’s attention. But my team is ecstatic with the draw. The Olson 30 a few of them race back home in Duluth, Minnesota, is yellow and appropriately named Tweety.

I’m not thrilled about the whole color thing, but I do like the name, which is fitting for the exercise we are about to embark on. It’s a song of unity, and that’s what the goal will be: a tight unit with respect for each and their skills, doing our job to the best of our ability. Over the next five days, we’re going to get together and feel all right.

My teammates are Bob Schroer, Marne Kaeske, Melissa Kuntz and Tim Buck. Each of them are in St. Thomas for individual reasons, but they’ve come as a team. When their sailing seasons get underway in a few months, they’ll be racing at Minnesota’s Duluth YC on Schroer’s Olson 30 and Buck’s Aerodyne 38. 

For Schroer, priority No. 1 is crew mechanics. And after that, understanding wind patterns and helm balance. For Kaeske, who is relatively new to the racing thing, it’s about confidence and knowing what’s going on inside and outside the boat. Buck’s goal is to correct “decades of bad habits,” but also sail trim and better helming. And for Kuntz, it’s simply about being more comfortable with helming.

This much is all I can discern as we hastily gather for our first team meeting in One Love’s cockpit before rigging and dropping our mooring lines in St. Thomas’ picturesque Cowpet Bay. Gladstone runs a tight schedule, so there’s no time dawdle. A quick run through the boat setup and who’s doing what in the first rotation, and off we go in the direction of Christmas Cove. The morning’s session focuses on the basics of tacking, upwind sail trim and rotating everyone through every position. And when it’s too soon, we’re back ashore for Gladstone’s first classroom session and lunch at the club. The afternoon’s focus is spinnaker handling and crew rotations. With some additional classroom time and a video debrief, the sailors slink back to their condos, heads full of tips and bodies worn from a long day on the water.

The routine continues the next morning, with the addition of starting practice and one-lap windward/leeward races. Each “real” start is preceded by two practice starts, and by lunchtime, it’s easy to understand why Gladstone promises more race starts than a season’s worth. In two days, I think we’ve already met our quota. To mix things up and introduce a few more challenges, Gladstone adds an hourlong around-the-island race, a counterclockwise lap around nearby Great Saint James, which adds in some navigational skill development as well as some strategy lessons in navigating through swift currents and wind shadows.

On board One Love, I’m feeling pretty chuffed with the team I’ve been assigned because one of the biggest challenges of Performance Race Week is the mandatory crew rotations. Pushing students well out of their comfort zones and outside their normal crewing positions creates all sorts of stress and unfamiliar situations. The bow is usually the most difficult to master for those who commonly hold the helm. And for those who never drive, strong winds, waves and a fleet of student drivers make for heart-pounding starts and mark roundings.

On One Love, Buck and Schroer were plenty comfortable at the helm, but the most peculiar thing started happening: Kaeske and Kuntz, both of whom claimed zero experience driving in a race, were outstanding. By the fourth day of the clinic, our team were beyond basics and focusing on the 2.0 details, like cross-­sheeting, passing the tiller behind their backs, roll-­tacking and jibing. In four fast-paced days, I witnessed an ­amazing ­transformation in this ­foursome—more laughs, a lot less stress around the corners, and more confidence around the track.

We’re mentally ready for the final-day regatta, where the coaches shall only coach between races. But to be sure, I suggest some morning calisthenics on the mooring. I trigger my stopwatch for five minutes, and we get a few curious looks from other teams passing by as Kaeske is on the foredeck end-to-ending the pole to lazy spinnaker sheets, Kuntz is at the back doing tiller passes, Buck’s refining his jib cross-­sheeting exchanges, and Schroer is practicing the roll-and-flatten with the mainsheet in hand. Now it’s really looking like boot camp, and all we’re missing are jumping jacks and burpees.

The “regatta” portion is a two-session, seven-race day, with races in the morning, including one distance race round Great Saint James—this time clockwise—a lunch break at the club, and more races in the afternoon. And as Gladstone promised, we got as many races in as you would over a typical three-day ­weekend regatta. It’s fast-paced fun in the sun. Team One Love is solid midfleet going into the lunch break and, perhaps with a bit of a food coma, puts a 6 on the scoreboard before finally winning a race and closing with a fifth in the eight-boat fleet.

On the dry-erase ­scoreboard back at the club, we later learn we’ve tied for third. On the countback, the team on Huron Girl beats us with a second to our third, and that’s that. Second place is only two points away—so close. But Performance Race Week is not really about points on the board. It’s about getting faster and smarter, and while a sunburn will soon fade, the memories and the lessons will last a lifetime.

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On a dark St. Patrick’s Day morning—some 15 miles from the Lorient, France, finish line for the Globe40 doublehanded round-the-world race—Joe Harris sat down at the bumpy navigation station of his extremely well-traveled Class 40 yacht, Gryphon Solo 2, and commenced to type his final blog post from a cold and rainy Biscay Bay.

“We are loping along at 7 knots of boatspeed without our foot on the accelerator for the first time in forever, as we are going to be in third place for this leg no matter what. So we are timing our arrival for daylight, and I thought this last night at sea might be a good time to digest and try to make sense of these past 10 months,” he wrote in the last of dozens of posts that chronicled the eight-leg, 35,000-nautical-mile voyage he shared with mate Roger Junet.

“Trying is a word that comes to mind. Tumultuous is another, as is turbulence, but maybe I just like words that start with a T?”

As he closed the circle on his second circumnavigation on the boat—the first had been a solo record attempt for a Class 40 in 2015-16—tenacious is another appropriate adjective. That’s because, for Harris, these last few miles were but the latest chapter in an epic nautical journey that started some five decades earlier, commencing with junior sailing, then learning the ropes on a collection of race boats from his rock-star bowman dad, to amassing his own series of racers, including an old, leaky wooden boat, a C&C 40 and an Aerodyne 38. Finally, he moved into the elite realm of shorthanded offshore sailing, first on a canting-keel Open 50 before moving into the Class 40 battles and knocking off a pair of circles around the planet.

And that’s not even counting the seven summers he spent in Alaska’s Bering Sea crewing aboard and then skippering commercial fishing boats out of Bristol Bay. How to sum up this maritime odyssey? It had certainly been a lot of things: technical, taxing, transforming, thorough, tremendous.

Harris comes from strong saltwater genes. For fun, his Dutch grandfather, Dr. Hans Rozendaal, conducted regular transatlantic voyages throughout his life, a total of six in all. His old man, Woody, was a sought-after crewman in his day, winning the Triple Crown of yacht racing—the Transatlantic Race, Cowes Week and the Fastnet—in the late 1950s aboard Richard Nye’s famous Rhodes Yawl, Carina. That was before Woody bought his own 75-foot Chesapeake Bay skipjack to tool around Long Island Sound.

Born and raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, Harris’ own path to the sea began in the junior program on Blue Jays and Lightnings at the Indian Harbor YC. In his teens, however, sailing took a back seat to other sports, particularly hockey and lacrosse, the latter he played four varsity seasons at Brown University. A road trip to Alaska his junior year, which started a string of seven lucrative summers in his own version of The Deadliest Catch, rekindled his passion for the water, especially the gnarly offshore stuff.

A year at The Landing School in Maine gave him the woodworking and carpentry skills he parlayed into winter boat­building gigs at Shannon Yachts in Rhode Island and Ted Hood’s Little Harbor yard in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Somewhere in there, he also built and sold a home on Block Island. It was all good fun, and he was making decent coin, but it wasn’t the career path of your typical Ivy League grad.

Approaching his late 20s, Woody hit him with the age-old, fork-in-the-road question that’s been posed down through countless generations of fathers and sons: What the hell are you doing with your life? When Woody offered to pony up half the tuition to business school, Harris matriculated to Babson University for his MBA, which led to not only a long, lush career in real estate finance and development, but also provided plenty of the cold, hard cash that was its reward. That gave him the means, almost immediately, to invest in sailboats.

The first was a little woody (no pun intended) named Corus, which he soon began calling Pourus in recognition of the steady ingress of water through its seams. Next up was Shiva, so named for a Hindu god, the C&C 40 aboard which he started his skippering career with coastal races, eventually becoming the platform for his initial forays into doublehanded racing with, appropriately enough, Woody as crew. After that came Gryphon, a 38-foot sportboat designed by the late Rodger Martin, aboard which he continued racing two up and also started competing in solo events like the Bermuda One-Two.

For a sailor with ever-­growing long-distance ambitions, it had been a steady, ascending trajectory in the sport. The next step was a major one into a certified big-boy boat, a carbon-fiber, canting-keel, twin-daggerboard, water-ballasted Open 50 rocket designed by French aces Finot-Conq. It was a veteran of two round-the-world solo contests, the most recent by American Brad Van Liew under the handle Tommy Hilfiger Freedom America.

The goal was a round-the-world race called the Velux 5 Oceans Challenge, organized by the famed British solo legend Robin Knox-Johnston. After originally calling his new ride Gryphon Solo, Harris slapped on a new name, Wells Fargo American Pioneer, after securing a sponsorship deal with the prominent bank with which, not coincidentally, he was conducting a ton of business—a win-win situation.

His inaugural Grand Prix event was the 2004 edition of Artemis Transat (formerly called the OSTAR), a brutal 16-day upwind slog across the North Atlantic from Plymouth, England, to Boston, in which he scored second in class. With veteran English sailor Josh Hall, Harris then knocked off an Open 50 class victory on the 21-day voyage from France to Brazil in the Transat Jacques Vabre in 2005, a trip designed to be the serious tuneup before the Velux race.

But there was a hiccup, and it was a momentous one: More or less at the last minute, the organizer pulled the plug on the Open 50 class. Harris was, quite literally, all tuned up with nowhere to go. It was time, as they say, to pivot. And the timing was fortuitous, for there was a relatively new boat and game on the shorthanded offshore racing scene: the Class 40.

Harris purchased his Marc Lombard-designed 40-footer, Gryphon Solo 2, in 2011, aiming to be on the starting line of a dedicated Class 40 round-the-world contest, the Global Ocean Race, in the fall of 2014. In preparation, he knocked off a trio of Atlantic Cup races—a dash up the Eastern Seaboard from South Carolina to Maine—winning it in early 2014. And then the unthinkable happened: the Global Ocean Race was also canceled.

“Once again, I was all dressed up with no place to go,” he says. “After all the time and money I’d put into the new boat, I couldn’t believe it was happening again. So, I said to myself, ‘I’m not getting any younger, and I’m tired of waiting for these races. I’m going to do a solo,
unassisted round-the-world record attempt.’”

It turned out a Class 40 record of 138 days was on the books already, established by Chinese sailor and explorer Guo Chuan in 2013. (Chuan was tragically lost at sea during a singlehanded transpacific record attempt in 2016.) Unfortunately, Harris’ 2015 record run unraveled in the South Atlantic on his approach to South Africa, when the converter box on his hydrogenator fried and forced him into Cape Town for repairs. After resuming the voyage, GS2 hit what Harris called a USO, unidentified submerged object, which punctured the hull and forced an unscheduled haul-out in Uruguay to make repairs. But between those stops, he made a memorable rounding of Cape Horn in a 50-knot gale. Ultimately, he closed the circle on his lonely circumnavigation in mid-2016 after a 33,000-­nautical-mile spin of 152 days.

For many ­marathon solo ­sailors, if not most, it would’ve been the crowning achievement of a noteworthy sailing career. For Harris, however, there was still unfinished business to attend to, a missing check mark on his personal, proverbial bucket list: He still hadn’t raced around the planet. That is, not until the recently concluded Globe40 affair.

Organized by Sirius Events, the doublehanded Globe40 was not your typical round-the-world race. Beginning in Morocco and finishing in France, the 33,000-nautical-mile event was significantly longer than previous traditional, four-stop round-the-world races. This event rounded the great southern capes before heading north into generally lighter, upwind conditions, which extended the length and time of the legs.

The winding, eight-leg ­racecourse, with a decidedly French accent, included stopovers in the Cape Verde Islands; Mauritius; Auckland, New Zealand; Tahiti; Ushuaia, Argentina; Recife, Brazil; and Grenada. Crew swaps were permissible (the Canadian entry Whiskey Jack rotated through six co-skippers); an initial entry list of 15 boats was whittled down to seven starters, of which there were a quartet of finishers. The Dutch duo of Frans Budel and Ysbran Endt on Sec Hayai were the winners; Gryphon Solo 2 notched a fourth after an extremely eventful voyage of 173 days.

For crew, Harris recruited Junet, an Italian born and bred in the Alps who’d moved to Portland, Maine. “He was an excellent partner,” Harris says. “We got our onboard routines down pretty good. Having the continuity was a real benefit. Our sail changes became very slick.” That said, racing a Class 40 offshore is no picnic. “Actually, it’s very uncomfortable,” he says. “The motion of the boat is very violent. Particularly upwind, the boats just slam horribly in a seaway. They have a really flat forefoot, and they just pancake.”

The opening leg from Morocco to the Cape Verde islands was, “just fabulous,” Harris says. “First a reach and then downhill, which is when you’re loving life on a Class 40.” But the second leg, around the tip off Africa and up to the isle of Mauritius? “A nightmare,” he says. “It was supposed to be about 32 days and ended up being almost 40. You get around the Cape of Good Hope and you’ve got a foul current and you’ve got a thousand miles upwind in light air.”

A series of gates the fleet was obliged to honor, ostensibly in the interests of safety, chopped up the next legs in what in most round-the-world races are straight shots through the Southern Ocean, a section of the trip Harris had reveled in during his previous circumnavigation. So too did the side trip to Tahiti, again off the beaten track, but at least with the addition of a pleasant visit to French Polynesia.

The leg to Ushuaia ended off Cape Horn before a detour up the Beagle Channel, which was unusual but interesting. Next was a long journey to Recife, with the bulge of Brazil positioned well east in the South Atlantic, which made the ensuing leg back to Grenada somewhat of a non sequitur because it sent the racers in the opposite direction of the finish line in France.

And then there was just one last passage back across the North Atlantic. “Twenty days,” Harris says. “One low-­pressure system after another, just continuously slammed, 30 knots and above most of the time. Cold and getting colder. Reduced sail, three reefs in the main. We saw a 63-knot gust, the highest of the whole race. Luckily, we were going downwind nearly the whole way, which was great. But then came the end, the finish.”

And, of course, the last thoughts on that last blog post: “As we come down the home stretch, it is a bit of a melancholy feeling to know that this adventure will soon be over. I am glad I did it for sure, but I am also glad to move on to the next challenges… I love our little GS2 space module/biosphere, where we make fresh water from salt water, produce electricity from moving through the sea and from the sun, and move across the water only through the power of the wind in our sails. I will miss it for sure, as it is a natural high and feels right just being at sea in this fine craft.”

The only thing left to say to sum up the whole crazy sprint of his sailing life, with that last circle now closed, perhaps needed just one more “T” word.

Triumphant.

The post An American Sailor’s Odyssey appeared first on Sailing World.

if conditions warrant, some boats, like J/70s, FJs, Collegiate 420s and Snipes, successfully wing for the entire run. And for other boats that carry asymmetric spinnakers, such as J/105s and Melges 20s, brief moments of winging can present gains, such as when jibing, (a late-main jibe), coming into a leeward mark gaining an overlap, or shooting the downwind finish line. It’s a powerful technique to have in your toolbox these days, so let’s dive deeper into the art of the wing, how to do it and when to do it.

There’s usually no ­question when in the middle wind ranges—from 8 to 14 knots—where the wing technique works well. By doing so, you’ll sail less distance without sacrificing much speed, getting you to the leeward mark sooner than someone who reaches back and forth. But in light air, it’s often too slow to wing, and the jib or kite doesn’t have enough pressure to fly well. Also, when the wind is light, the main falls into the middle of the boat, causing an unintentional jibe. You need enough pressure to hold the sails firmly in the winging ­configuration to make it work.

In the crossover zone, when you are unsure if winging will work, it can pay to give it a shot. If it doesn’t feel powered up and fast, abort the wing by continuing your turn, jibing the boom, and flattening onto the new jibe. The cool thing with this move is that you can get a boost of speed during the flatten, especially in a dinghy. Experiment with winging in the crossover wind range, then aborting, ­making it a late-main jibe.

At the other end of the spectrum, when it gets super windy, boats like the FJ, 420 and Snipe are still winging and might even plane on the wing. For heavier boats that wing, like the J/70, there comes a time to abandon the wing and start planing on the reach. It’s all about your best VMG to the mark, knowing your boat, and understanding when to transition as the breeze changes. In puffy conditions in the planing crossover range, 14 to 18 knots, the true masters of downwind morph from one mode to the next, putting hundreds of meters on the competition.

When winging, you must have a big lane behind you because winging is difficult in bad air. Also, boats behind you that are also winging throw a big wind shadow. Always work to find a nice lane before winging. Some people call this a seam in the fleet, a corridor of nice pressure with no boats behind you.

Winging Angles

For those unfamiliar with ­winging and the angle changes created by doing so, one way to think about it is to compare it to a symmetric spinnaker boat, such as an Etchells or Lightning, that can square the pole back in a medium breeze. In light air, those boats reach back and forth with the pole near the headstay. Once the breeze increases enough, they square the pole back and sail deep. This is a similar angle to winging. A boat with the spinnaker squared back is basically the same as being wing-on-wing. When in this mode, you’ll jibe through about 20 to 30 degrees.

I always look forward, toward the gate marks or finish line, to determine if I am sailing the least distance. Visualize your new angle if you were to jibe and question whether it would be closer to the mark. If so, and the lanes are free, do it. Usually when winging, I want to see the leeward mark right over the bow or just between the jib or spinnaker and the mainsail. While doing this, let’s say you get a lift. The jib or spinnaker suddenly feels less powerful, so you head up to get to the optimal angle again with the sheets pulling. Now the gate or finish line has dropped out of your field of vision, behind the main. That tells you it’s time to jibe. Conversely, if you get a big header while aiming at the gate and now appear overstood, abandon the wing and go back to a reach. The key is to point the boat at the gate or finish line in whatever configuration you need to be in for the given wind conditions, assuming you have a good lane.

Tactical Winging

A key to sailing well downwind in any boat is to satisfy two basic rules: Sail the jibe that takes you most directly toward the ­leeward mark, and sail in the most breeze. If you can sail toward the mark while in nice pressure and in a big lane, you’ll hit a tactical home run. When you are in a boat that has various modes, like reaching and winging, always use the most appropriate mode to help you. Here are a few examples:

A. You round the weather mark in a left shift and want to go straight downwind on the header. It’s blowing 10 knots, so winging will provide the best VMG. After rounding the weather mark, you reach for a bit until a lane opens up. Now you have to decide which jibe to be on while winging. You could simply wing on the starboard jibe, or jibe over to port and then wing. Because you are headed and happy, the correct move is to simply bear away and wing, staying on starboard.

B. You round the weather mark in a lift, so the game plan is to jibe to port. But there’s a cone of bad air at the top of the course. You reach for 30 seconds to a minute, eager to jibe and go the other way. With a train of boats sailing straight out of the mark with you, winging away would put you in bad air. So, the best move is to jibe onto a port reach to quickly exit the train of boats and their dirty breeze. Once clear of the bad-air zone, let’s say 50 to 100 meters, go into winging mode to sail the header toward the leeward mark on the port jibe. You’ll be in a nice lane, sailing low and fast toward the leeward gate.

C. You’re leading a tight race or might be just ahead of a group of boats, and you round the weather mark. Don’t immediately wing. If you do, you’ll likely get covered. Here, the move is to round the weather mark, reach for a while, and be patient. Once the boats behind you wing, then you can establish a nice lane and wing. If you reach for a while and feel like you should be winging, but no one around you is, and you want to get away from nearby boats, jibe to port, as mentioned earlier, reach for a little bit to get away from the group, and then wing into a nice lane.

D. If you round the weather mark in a lift and have no boats to worry about behind you threatening to steal your wind, a technique unique to the J/70 is you can get into a wing by bearing away and slowly jibing the boom. It allows you to quickly sail the other way downwind, as if you had completed a full jibe and then winged the kite. On smaller boats that accelerate more during maneuvers, it’s faster to jibe, flatten, and then wing the jib.

Practicing and Speed

Winging well takes practice and communicating to your team about the next move. It’s key that everyone is on the same page. With all the tactical options in the J/70, the fleet has developed its own lingo about turning while winging, “left turn 1 degree here” or “right turn 1 degree,” because up and down can get confusing with sails on both sides of the boat. For winging or exiting the wing in a J/70, identify the sail you are jibing. For example, say, “jibing boom to a wing,” “jibing kite to a wing,” or “exiting wing with boom over and a left turn.” In small boats, it’s a little more straightforward, but communications need to be defined regardless. A few examples are: “Let’s wing here,” “let’s jibe then wing,” and “let’s do a wing-on-wing jibe.” And to exit the wing, “jibing the boom to a reach.”

Sailing fast while winging is critical, so let’s discuss what you should focus on. The short version is, once you have winged a jib or a spinnaker, sail slightly up toward the jib or spinnaker on a broad reach, or a “high wing,” as some call it. You’re trying to not sail dead downwind because it’s faster to be slightly up toward the forward sail in a high wing. There’s a sweet spot, which is where the sail would want to fall in toward the boat and assume a reaching position, if you were to head up a few more degrees toward the jib or spinnaker. If you see that happening, bear away a few degrees until it’s stable and happy. At that angle, the jib or spinnaker will be powered up.

If you’re holding the sheet, you can feel the sail pulling nicely. Bear away a few more degrees to a dead downwind angle and the sail will lose a little pressure. Bear away a little more and you will feel the slowest winging situation possible—by the lee where the sheet pulls the least because the main starts covering the jib or spinnaker. I see a lot of kids doing this in the FJs and 420s, and sometimes adults in the J/70s. You can end up there by turning down accidentally, having a wave push the bow down, or possibly by a windshift lifting you. To avoid sailing too low or two high, stick to the rule of sailing high on the foresail, but not so high that it wants to collapse in on itself. This powered-up mode is fast. To keep it here, you need to constantly test the ups, look at the telltales and masthead fly, and feel the power in the sheet.

If you are at the perfect wing angle and notice a lift (the masthead fly goes from the weather corner of your boat to the center of the stern), the sheet loses pressure, or you just feel like the boat has lost pressure, head up if you want to continue straight. Or immediately jibe to a reach, throwing the boom over, flattening with extra speed onto a header, then bear away and wing again. The jibe maneuver when lifted is super-fast and allows you to quickly sail the header downwind. If performed before others around you, it allows you to lead on the new, long, headed tack. All of this is tactical gold.

Now that you know how and when it’s best to go wing-on-wing, let’s explore seven top winging moves that can make your race.

Cut the corner. Typically, everyone sails out of the weather mark on starboard, reaching, unless conditions call for an immediate jibe set. If you can wing before the boat in front of you, you cut the corner on them and still maintain a starboard-­tack advantage. The boat in front ends up in a difficult situation in that they want to jibe to aim for the gates, but you have borne away inside them and cut them off, and you’re still on starboard. I love using that move in a J/70. I’ve been passed by it, and I’ve passed boats using it.

Be the first to wing. If you round the weather mark with a big enough lead or a gap behind you and instantly wing, you can gain huge on the boats that have not yet done so. Doing that while leading can instantly break the race open. While others are reaching and waiting for the opportunity to wing, you’re already sailing deep, headed straight for the leeward mark, and you’re gone. You can end up winning the race by hundreds of meters. And if you happen to have a gap behind you, winging before the group ahead allows you to cut the corner on them.

Paint the competition into a corner. In the same realm of cutting the corner, this move occurs in the corner, near the layline. Let’s say you’re going downwind, reaching on port jibe, and following someone who is also reaching. As you approach the left corner (looking downwind), knowing they will jibe soon, wing behind them. Now you’re sailing deeper and cutting the corner. When they jibe, you now have a perfectly matched racing setup to jump them and steal their breeze. As the boats converge, watch their masthead fly to see where their wind is coming from, and then jibe over by simply throwing your boom with a right turn and flattening onto their breeze. It’s a quick move and takes the wind out of their sails, literally and figuratively. From here, either you roll them, or they’re forced to jibe back into the corner, reducing their options and forcing more maneuvers. You can also “paint into a corner” against groups of boats.

If in the back of the fleet, wing immediately. Another time to go right into the wing mode is when you’re doing poorly. Maybe you were OCS and went back now to find yourself in last place, desperately hoping to catch up. Wing-on-wing can give you that opportunity. Once rounding in last, you can always lighten the mood by pointing out the good news of having a massive lane, and then instantly wing. I’ve seen a lot of people in that position catch up a ton downwind just by getting into the wing and keeping it the whole run, sailing less distance.

Sail perpendicular. When coming into the finish line or a leeward gate, sail perpendicular to reduce distance. By winging, you cut the corner on any boats ahead that are reaching. I think of it as sailing one side of a triangle while they sail two, by extending forward, jibing and reaching back. You can get to the finish line sooner with this move, even if the wind is a little light to wing.

There is also a specific scenario coming into a gate where you can use it to get room. If you are closely trailing an opponent and both of you approach the gate just outside the zone (aiming at the middle of the gates), you can wing behind them toward the mark to enter the zone first while they extend forward, then jibe to head back and round the gate. You are now inside and have room. Their jibe opens their stern, and you have entered the zone first and inside. This doesn’t happen often, but it feels nice when it does. It leaves you in a much stronger rounding position to start the next leg.

Ping the competition. You’re on the port jibe near the layline, approaching the right-hand gate (looking downwind), and there are other port-jibe boats overlapped to your right. They’re going to have room on you, probably leaving you on the outside of a big pinwheel around the gate mark. In this situation, you can jibe to starboard and reach toward those boats to take them out past the layline, then lead them back clear ahead and rounding ahead. Chances are, they might not anticipate you doing this, but even if they do, they have to stay clear. For safety within the rules, do this well before the three-boatlength zone, maybe as far out as five or six lengths so there’s no question you’re outside the zone. The boats you’re reaching toward can even be winging on the starboard jibe, but they have to either head up or jibe if on port because you’re the leeward boat. In a classic match-racing move, you’ve reached them off the racecourse, forcing them to overstand. They’re typically flailing at this point and probably starting to yell; bear away once you feel the geometry is correct and jibe toward the mark, breaking the overlap with them and entering the zone clear ahead. We call this the ping move. It can also be done at a ­downwind ­finish line.

Vary modes to manage your lane. If you’re wing-on-wing and someone is sailing at a different angle, about to encroach on your breeze, go into reach mode until you find another clean lane. Then bear off and wing again. If you maximize your time in big seams or lanes, you can do some damage downwind.

The post Sportboat Wing-on-Wing Guide appeared first on Sailing World.

No matter how good the beer tasted on my lips or how glorious the fire-breathing spring sunset was through the windows of Newport Yacht Club’s second-floor bar, I couldn’t muster an iota of joy. If I could’ve reached my backside in this very moment, it would have been covered with shoe prints from kicking myself for doing what I can unequivocally say is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my 40 years of sailboat racing.

Allow me to set the scene. It’s late March and my Turnabout Frostbite season is winding down. I’m knocking on the top of the overall season scoreboard, with third or even second place mere points out of my reach. To shuffle the deck and get me there, all I have to do is pull off a few keepers. There’s no more room for a shocker, and on this fine Sunday, I’m fresh off the plane from a week of coaching at North U’s Performance Race Week in St. Thomas, where I’ve been drilling fundamentals into my students and doing the same for me by osmosis. I’m feeling sharp. I have a confident sense of purpose.

In the first prestart of this ­season-saving race day, I stand up in my little white dinghy at the one-minute horn and look up the course to plot my first move. The light wind is blowing out of the north, shooting unpredictable zephyrs through the buildings. I’m not a fan of the northerly, but I’ve seen this movie before, and I’ve learned the hard way too many times this season: Left is best; right is death.

The seconds tick down as I hover alone near the pin on port tack. I eat up a few more boatlengths toward the pileup near the race-committee boat, tack with 15 seconds to go, sheet in, cross the line, tack again, and point my bow at the orange tetrahedron as I cross the fleet. That’ll work just fine.

But perennial champ FJ Ritt, who has first place locked up for the season (again), is only a few lengths to leeward. We’re matching pace, straight-line ­sailing. Nothing to worry about. It’s just him and me. The tactics are simple: cover, cover, cover.

Round we go past the windward mark with Ritt on my tail. Same down the short run and around the bottom mark. He follows, then tacks. I stand up to take a second look at a wind line sneaking out of the harbor basin that’s near the upwind right side of the racecourse. Puff or cover? Puff or cover? I ask myself twice. Greed wins out. I hold on port and beeline to the puff. But it’s a mirage, so I cut my losses near the starboard layline to the finish. Once I tack and look under the boom, I can see Ritt charging in from the left, riding the edge of a dark wind line. Left is best, right? What the heck was I doing over here on the right. Yeah, dumb. I know.

The lesson for me here is, of course, to always confirm my finish. Listen for the horn, the whistle, the VHF or whatever means the race committee is using. And to be sure, just go ahead and sail around an end.

But it gets worse. Now I’m playing offense, and I ease my mainsheet and bear away a few degrees to close gauge and try to engage Ritt with my starboard advantage. Once I realize I’m running out of runway, all I can do is shoot the finish and hope for the best. Holding my breath, I ease the mainsheet again and glide head to wind to strike the line. All the while, I’m watching Ritt under the boom as he’s doing the same at the pin. They call his number. Nuts. Oh well, second is a keeper.

As we coast to a stop, I start jabbering with Ritt, congratulating him on a great race. Now adrift near the finish line, I notice the rest of the fleet coming in hot and in lockstep, so I bear away to clear out. As I do so, one of my fellow fleet members, who’s calling and recording finishes from the dock, hollers over and says, “Hey Dave. You haven’t actually finished yet.”

“Wait? What? No way! That’s impossible,” I protest. But who am I to question the race committee? So, I loop back around the finishers and cross behind each and every one of them before finishing for real. First to last, in a blink.

The lesson for me here is, of course, to always confirm my finish. Listen for the horn, the whistle, the VHF or whatever means the race committee is using. And to be sure, just go ahead and sail around an end. There’s also a lesson in hubris here, a lesson that the late Dr. Walker has most certainly written in a book chapter or magazine column years ago. As the good doctor would say, the pecking order is real, and Ritt is best—faster, smarter, and less likely to do ­idiotic things like me.

I piled on a lot of unnecessary points with that one race, which punted me a few places downhill in the standings going into the final day of the season the following weekend. Ritt was out of reach and kind enough to volunteer for race-committee duty, allowing the remaining top four—practically tied on points (decimals aside)—to fight for leftovers. A dying easterly blowing through the Newport Harbor wharves is dicey at best, but after surviving and winning the afternoon’s first race, I was confident I’d slid myself back into third overall. I could settle for that, drink my beer and be happy. Just one more race. Don’t be dumb.

With a good clean start, I’m off to the left side. I tack well shy of the port layline so I have a clean and safe entry into the mark zone, with a lot of traffic coming in from the right. I aim for a space in the lineup and tack to starboard, easily laying the mark. But coming out of the left is the one guy I’m certain I need to beat to lock third. He beat me last season, and now it’s my turn. At that moment, I’m thinking there’s no way he can complete a tack around the mark without fouling me, so just to be sure, I point straight at the buoy and shut the door nice and tight.

That was dumb. He wasn’t going to make a tack-­rounding stick anyway, so me closing the door just brought us closer together. He was late ducking, and because I was sitting to leeward to induce some heel, I didn’t see the top of our masts embrace, but I sure did hear the telltale dong of aluminum on aluminum. Rigs locked, we pirouetted downwind of the mark, boats streaming past until it was only the two of us licking our wounds. There was no getting back from this disaster, and the season came to a whimpering and depressing ending. Down I slid again, fifth overall.

I’d posit Dr. Walker would offer up yet another lesson here, something along the lines of how playing offense later in the race is better, or using the rules tactically can often backfire. Of course, Walker would be right. In hindsight, I should have just kept my line into the mark and sailed my own race, and all would have been fine. That much of it bothered me later that night, tossing and turning in bed, as I do on any given Sunday night after racing, replaying races good and bad. I could have gotten around that weather mark clean, I should have not been so aggressive on shutting him out, and I would’ve ended the ­season on a high note.

Dumb is as dumb does, but in recent memory—short as it may be these days—I’m ­confident nothing tops my Doofus Dave moment quite like whiffing that earlier finish with Ritt. As I drowned my humiliation in my pale ale that afternoon, Ritt and I got a good chuckle at my expense. “I foresee a column about this,” he said with a smug chuckle.

Once again, the season champ has proven he knows my next move.

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