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.

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.

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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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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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The most recognizable ­spinnaker in the US J/70 fleet is arguably the white one with a stylized red stick figure. And it is immediately recognizable because Brian Keane’s Savasana has been a fixture of the class since 2012, usually near the front of the fleet and found wherever J/70s gather in numbers. Keane and his teammates have won plenty of J/70 regattas over the years, but never a world championship. Close, yes, but never No 1.

However, his current cast of teammates—Thomas Barrows, Ron Weed and Conner Harding—have their collective minds set on the impending Worlds in St. Petersburg, Florida, in November. There’s no reason to doubt this could be their year to win the big one, especially considering they ran the table on the Miami J/70 winter regatta circuit with three big wins and then followed up with another at Charleston Race Week.

You might think this peak in Keane’s long sailing career, which includes Junior National Championships, All-American honors and the Hinman Trophy, and has spanned eras in the J/105 and J/80 classes, is the result of some ­game-changing sail development or magic bullet. But you’d be wrong. The difference is Keane’s present battle with cancer.

“Fewer things bring about clarity, focus and purpose than knowing you have been diagnosed,” Keane says when we speak by phone in April after winning the J/70 Midwinters. “I can say for sure that has helped me this year because I want to win. It’s a focus. Millions of people have cancer, but it’s real, and I’m confident in a full recovery. That purpose is important to me.”

That is certainly a far ­bigger challenge than battling at the top of a pro-stacked one-­design fleet.

“A lot of people may feel the J/70 class is overly pro-ed up, and I can understand that. But for myself, I want to go against the best of the best, and I love the fact that the class is not being dumbed down. It’s still exciting for me, and many of the newer teams to the fleet to go against some of the people they’ve been reading about or have heard about.”

What’s on the road to the Worlds for Savasana?

So far this year, we’ve done two Davis Island events, then the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta in St. Petersburg, the Bacardi Invitational in Miami, the Midwinters and Charleston. We’ll do [HHSWRS] in Annapolis and Marblehead, North Americans in Chicago, and then we’ll be spending some time in St. Pete in October before the Worlds.

Given that most well-­attended events like the winter ­regattas are 50- to 60-boat affairs, what do you find are keys to success on these crowded racecourses?

First is the team ­mentality. To have any chance of winning, every team member must understand what their job is and do it to the best of their ability. At the same time, each of us needs to understand what every other person’s job is and what the interdependency is. That interaction is super important to our team and our time in the boat. At any point in the race, for example, I know what Thomas or Ron is doing, and that simplifies the language on the boat. We are always together during events. We learn together, we eat together, watch movies at night and talk about sailing all the time.

The second thing is communication, which does sound trite, but there are two categories of this: communicating what’s happening outside the boat and what’s happening inside the boat. This is all routine for us at this point. For the outside stuff, for example, before starting each race, I’ll start off the questions: What do we see? What’s our opinion? What do we see on the water? How does it compare to the forecast? What did we learn in the last race? What side of the line and why? During the race, communication shifts to our speed and height relative to the other boats around us. In the big fleets, I’m not looking around, and a lot of it is how quickly you can find a free lane after the start. So, it’s so important to have the team looking around and providing real-time feedback on the wind, current, boat performance and tactical situation.

Inside-the-boat communications is about making sure we’re set up for the given conditions. Before the race, we ask about the rig, the backstay, the jib tracks, making sure we’re in the right gear off the line. The gear you set up in for the start may be a different gear than you’re in 10 minutes later, so it’s imperative you always start in the right gear.

During the course of the race, we are a quiet boat; just talking about how the boat feels and taking a lot of input. I’ve been on a lot of boats where it seems the only person who has a valid opinion is the tactician, but we have four good sailors on the boat, so it’s important to hear how everyone feels and what they think is important. I think we do that as well as anybody.

The next category is adjustments, and I think we’re at a new level this year. That’s making a difference. Especially in the challenging conditions of Miami, with the waves and the wind, it is so essential to be always adjusting. The J/70 has so many tools, but the tools are useless unless you use them. With adjustments, we think of it from front to back: jib halyard, jib track, the ratio between the primary (sheet) and the inhauler. The traveler, backstay, vang and cunningham—in that order. Whatever we do with the headsail drives how we set up the main and how I drive the boat. Even a windspeed change of 2 knots or a modest change in wave state will require one or several changes of these tools.

We keep getting better at this and knowing what each of us will do and knowing what those adjustments are. The key to that is we compile comprehensive notes after each practice day and every race day, and it all goes into a repository. That becomes our baseline, and it allows us to be at that point where we can sail by the numbers. For example, if we are high and slow, the reaction is, “OK, let’s do X, Y and Z, and if we’re low and fast, let’s do A, B and C,” but we already know what the playbook is. Any team that’s serious has to have this database of notes so things become intuitive.

We also have numbers all over our boat. Let’s say we’re sailing in a regatta using the J/9 jib. We know how it should be set up in terms of the jib track; then we start focusing on the ratio between the primary and inhaul sheets, so these go into the notes as numbers. For example: jib track at 6, primary at 3.5 and weather sheet at 8. During the race, we’re talking numbers, and if someone is feeling something, we might say, “Let’s go primary to 2. 5 and weather to whatever.” It’s knowing what the numbers are. A lot of teams just go into the boat and trim by eye or feel. We go to settings. It makes our life easier.

I imagine that makes things a lot easier for you to strictly focus on driving.

It’s been a huge change for me. I grew up as a singlehanded sailor, and in college sailing, the skipper does everything, and I don’t do that. I focus on driving, but I have the base of knowledge, and that’s why when everyone in the boat is talking about what’s going on and we’re problem-solving, I may chirp in with an observation. The goal is to get to the point where everything is happening naturally. For example, as we’re approaching a wave set, Conner is easing the jib halyard, and Thomas has already eased the backstay. We may adjust the jib halyard 20 times in a given windward leg. It’s very dynamic, and that’s not how we were sailing three years ago.

Do you play your own mainsheet?

I used to do it, but I have not for the last five years or so. It took a while to get used to, but you eventually realize you have two people to play three lines, and given how dynamic we are, I bet I am by far the most active person in the fleet when it comes to the traveler. It’s moving nonstop. I will drop the traveler an inch or two, and our level of heel does not change. That leads to more direct efficiency on the keel and rudder.

Take us through how you sail through puffs on the J/70.

Conner’s calling puffs; their strength and direction, and whether it’s a lifting or heading puff. The traveler is always uncleated and in my hand, and what we try to do is be dynamic with steering. Thomas is trimming in the backstay just as the puff is coming on with one hand, and his other hand is on the mainsheet, so he and I are playing all three at the same time. One of the effective things of a traveler burp is you can burp it out with the initial puff and almost within a second start trimming it back in; the heel-­angle change is imperceptible. If we do that right, we’re going to gain half a boatlength with every puff from boats that don’t.

How about the jib adjustments?

If we are coming into either a big puff or chop, the weather sheet comes off, which gives me a bigger groove. The halyard is being played with every up and down change in velocity or any wave-state change that’s going to affect our speed. Flat spots are just as important as puffs and waves; if we approach the flat spot with speed, we can go with a little extra trim on the main and banjo the weather sheet for about 15 seconds to be able to feather up and gain a bit of height in that one flat spot.

Confident breeze calling is important to this style of dynamic sailing.

Yes. One of my pet peeves is when people become talking heads, and 80 percent of what they’re saying I feel no difference in my tiller or face. In that sense, sometimes less is more because if you are saying something, it has to be important. Along that note, whenever I have a substitution for an event, I remind everyone that we will all make mistakes, so no barking. Just carry on and do our job.

Share some thoughts on starting in this class, especially with everyone using GPS starting devices these days.

We can continue to get ­better here. In general, what works for us is to set up around our spot early, but setting up early comes with its trade-offs. You have to have the skills to defend against port-tack poachers and really be able to defend your space—doing double tacks and basically doing what you can to push away boats on both sides so you leave yourself enough runway so that when it’s go-time, you can go faster than the boats around you. If you’re late to accelerate because you are too close to the line, boats around you that started two lengths before will own you. For me, the big thing is if we don’t have a lane off the start, I will happily take as many sterns as I have to in order to get out and get a lane. We have confidence in our speed, so at that point in time, say 30 seconds after the start, you’re still within five lengths of the leading boat, and that’s not so bad. So, we’ll give away a few lengths by ducking to get a lane, and sometimes finding that lane may take two or three tacks. But if you have a leg that is 1.5 miles, it’s worth it. Plus, in big fleets, there is that phenomenon where the wind is coming down the course and the entire wind mass rises above the wall of masts and sails. It’s good to get away from that wall.

Winging has become a ­powerful tactical tool in the J/70. Your thoughts?

It’s been around for a long time, but right now some sailmakers, like Doyle, have a kite that’s made to be a better winger. It’s critically important, but you have to do it at the right time. You have to be going 5 knots before you’re even thinking about doing it. Secondly, if you’re rounding near the front of your fleet, it’s dangerous to wing too early because the wind block from the cone can be deadly. You can make good gains by letting the cone thin out a bit, do a full jibe, go for a minute, and then pop the wing. At that point, you are one of the first to go over, and you are far enough out to get the clear air and then able to go straight to the mark. But you have to earn the opportunity; you have to fight for the spot to make it happen, then wait for a breeze and then pop it.

The post Winner’s Debrief: Brian Keane’s Savasana appeared first on Sailing World.

Karl Anderson is working in his shop when he stops to answer what should be a straightforward question: How many boats do you own? After a lengthy pause, the 64-year-old responds, “I don’t even know.” Yet the answer can be found with a thorough inspection of the grounds outside the door of Karl’s Boat Shop in Harwich, Massachusetts. What a passing motorist on Great Western Road might assume is just another Cape Cod nautical junkyard has an eclectic collection of vessels ranging from beautifully maintained racers to unfinished projects. Anderson owns a lot of them—some by choice, a few by trade, but most by chance or unpaid invoices.

When I pay him a visit, and our discussion turns to an obscure design by Ray Hunt, Anderson perks up. “I have one of those in the woods out back,” he says. “You can have it if you want it.”

This is not an attempt to bribe a reporter into writing a more favorable story, just a fact that it is there for the taking.

One reason Anderson has so many boats in his possession is because he has always had a fondness for things that float (or should float). He learned to sail on the waters of Cape Cod in general and Dennis in particular, first in Turnabouts and then in O’Day Widgeons. His first Rhodes 18 was a boat that had washed up on shore, upside down with the centerboard stuck in it.

In 1973, Anderson begged his mother for the $800 to buy it, and an older sailor advised him on how to restore it. He started sailing with his friends Chris Cooney and Wick Shepherdson. Four years later, Anderson had sorted the boat and made a name for himself in the class. At the helm of his parents’ Ford LTD station wagon, a water buffalo of a tow vehicle, Anderson and his crew drove north to Biddeford, Maine, for the Rhodes 18 Nationals. Before the team entered the tunnel in Boston, Anderson looked up and noticed his father, who turns 100 this year, waving from a bridge above. The drive home was a fun one, as the team won the national title.

A love of sailing motivated Anderson to open his boat-repair shop in 1983. The firm’s philosophy is summarized in five words: “Have fun working on boats.” And work on them he does. But first, he sails on many of them so he can develop a feel for what they need. One case in point is the J/24. Way back, Anderson started out sailing with sailmaker Dan Neri on his J/24 in Newport and then jumped into a boat with Ken Read. Back in the 1980s, brand-new J/24s needed substantial modifications to be optimized, and he was the guy to do it.

Anderson’s philosophy of boat preparation is the same today. “My method is the blades first. You make the blades the best,” Anderson says. “Secondly, make sure the rig is aligned with the blades, centered side to side. If the rig can’t be centered side to side, what’s the best compromise? Then the bottom. I might even go rigging, ease of use, then the bottom after that because if you can’t tack the boat, it doesn’t matter how good the bottom is.”

Read, now president of North Sails, is a busy man but eager to make time to talk about his boatwright of choice. He quips, “Is this for an article…or a book?”

They started sailing together in the late 1980s and have a lot of time on the water. Read credits Anderson as a critical factor in what he describes as a division of responsibilities.

“Karl was in charge of the boat from the waterline down. Someone else was in charge of the waterline up. I was in charge of the sails. Moose [McClintock] was in charge of the safety gear.”

It was a different era. Professional ­sailors didn’t get paid to sail. They all had jobs, and if they sailed well and won regattas, it boosted their businesses. Anderson worked on boats. Read sold sails, and success on the racecourse was good business. And they still had fun. At the J/24 North Americans in San Francisco, for example, the team could work late into the night to prepare the charter boat. Or they could get most of the work done, knock off early and attend a Grateful Dead show. The vote was unanimous, and Read, Anderson and the rest of the crew saw the Dead in their natural habitat.

After more victories in the J/24 and Etchells than he can recall, Read is quick to credit Anderson. “Karl has a lot of talent and not a lot of ego. I think it comes from a blue-collar mentality. Whenever he introduced himself, he would say, ‘Karl Anderson, Karl’s Boat Shop, Karl with a K.’ He doesn’t mind getting dirty. Anybody who knows how to use tools and doesn’t mind fairing the damn keel himself is naturally going to have less of an ego. It’s work ethic, family, surroundings, what he does for a living. It’s never pretty with Karl, but it somehow works. If you said to him that the bottom needs to be perfect, it was perfect, exactly to the tolerances you were looking for. He doesn’t do things conventionally, but he always does things right. The guy just wins.”

McClintock has sailed with Read and Anderson a fair bit too and says, “Sailing is a sport where you have to earn your respect, and Karl’s earned it with everybody.”

Part of Anderson’s reputation is his demeanor. McClintock says he’s never seen Anderson angry. He’s also quick to note that he’s a great athlete. “He looks like a dumpy guy, but he’s not. He’s quick, he’s agile, he can ski, he can play hockey, and he’s one of the best technical crews you’ll ever see. I learn from him every time I sail with him. He’s really good at making boats go fast.”

While Read is a well-known sailor around the globe, he is not the most famous customer of Karl’s Boat Shop—not by a long shot. That honor belongs to the late, great Sen. Edward Kennedy. For a decade and a half, the senator entrusted Anderson with the care of his beloved Ray Hunt-designed 50-foot Concordia schooner Mya.

Anderson went sailing with Kennedy on numerous occasions. With a grin, he recalls being out on Mya for a sail and saying, “Senator, there are rocks over there.” To which the senator replied, “I’ve been sailing these waters for 50 years; there are no rocks there!”

About two minutes later, the boat stopped—abruptly.

Anderson and his colleague John Sheehan made news when they lost control of Mya during a delivery at the end of the season and put the boat aground in the soft sand of Cold Storage Beach in East Dennis. The famous vessel was later pulled to safety by a tugboat. The damage was minor.

Many sailors on Cape Cod are summer people, so when the crocus and daffodils are popping through the underbrush, so too is the pace at the cluttered boat shop. “We have a very seasonal group that comes here for the summer. They race the local boats, such as the Wianno Seniors,” Anderson says. “They come the first week of June, and then they’re gone the week after Labor Day. They have a certain amount of time, and they don’t want to miss anything, so if something breaks, they want it fixed yesterday.”

Few people in the boat-restoration business are fortunate enough to have created an iconic product that is an embodiment of who they are. The Karl’s Boat Shop tiller is a thing of beauty, a shape that can be identified from afar. In keeping with the philosophy of the shop, the tiller wasn’t a creation based on divine inspiration. It was a sublime answer to a practical problem.

A sailor by the name of Rick Bishop didn’t like the feeling of the stock, straight J/24 tiller hitting him in the back of the legs. Anderson thought about it for a bit and ­created a design with a distinctive bend.

At the time, his shop was laminating ribs for a boat. Anderson gathered up the scraps and fabricated the first of his iconic tillers. “They were made from quarter-inch strips,” he says. “We always said it was mahogany, but it’s really red cedar. That’s how we got them so light. If you don’t varnish them, they will go 10 years. Some guys have them for 20 years. Each tiller receives two coats of sealer, three coats of varnish. The varnish of choice is Epifanes.”

Two of Anderson’s tillers, one for a J/22 and another for a J/24, are mounted on the wall of professional sailor Chris Larson’s home because of the wars they have been through and the great memories they recall. After Read moved on to other classes, Larson inherited Anderson and went on to win the J/24 Worlds with him in 1996.

Larson is quick to corroborate Anderson’s meticulous boat preparation. “Karl was always the master of figuring out what to do next with boat optimization. Once you got the boat back from him, you were confident that it was sorted. You had to have good boat mechanics, get a good start, and if all of that worked out, you were going to have a good event.”

Larson adds that Anderson is the kind of guy who simply gets the job done. “It doesn’t matter what you have to do,” Larson says. “His wasn’t a shop where everything was pretty. It was a get-it-done approach. That’s just how Karl operates. He was always one of those larger-than-life guys, always part of the team. Everybody in the boat park knows Karl. He has a personality that everyone likes and respects. He’s the good part of sailing, the nostalgic history of the evolution of certain classes. In the J/24, he was in the middle of it all, and it would not have been the same without him.”

Professional sailors are not the only customers Anderson caters to. Mark Hillman is a highly accomplished Corinthian competitor who has owned a fleet of racing boats, including five J/24s and a J/70. When Anderson was working on his J/24 (No. 196 named Dr. Feelgood), he arrived to find there were still some details that needed tending to. “We enjoyed a vacation in Chatham while we waited for the boat to be ready,” Hillman says. It was worth the wait; Hillman would later finish third in the J/24 World Championship and win the East Coasts.

A lot of boat shops have come and gone since 1983, but what has kept the doors open at Anderson’s place makes complete sense. “Stay away from building boats,” Anderson says, looking up from an invoice on his cluttered desk. He has built a few ­custom boats and restored countless yachts, but he has never been lured into the production boatbuilding business. It’s too volatile. Instead, seasonal work, hauling and storage keep the lights on. The race-boat stuff is a passion. Then there are the friends who show up with interesting projects.

Anderson has been in the business long enough that some of the boats he has restored over the years are ready for a second restoration. One he’s trying to get back on the water is Wizard, an aptly named 40-foot 1959 Concordia yawl designed by Ray Hunt, which is hibernating in a well-loved boat barn toward the back of Anderson’s property. If he can convince one or two partners to join him, and find the time between a busy race schedule and running the shop, Wizard will set sail again on Cape Cod—someday.

Wizard is a big project, one that will ­consume a substantial amount of time, talent and money. But with a twinkle in his eyes, Anderson says he’s bought plenty of things he couldn’t afford over the years, but somehow he found a way to pay for them. Sweat equity is how, and at Karl’s Boat Shop, there’s plenty of it. The work is dirty. And it’s messy. But the result is always fast.

The post The Magic of Karl’s Boat Shop appeared first on Sailing World.

With big breeze, blue water and waves, Key West has long been an ideal stage to spotlight the newest grand-prix sailing toys, which now include the emerging Cape 31 One-Design class. At the Southernmost Regatta in January, five crews of these 31-footers marked its North American arrival, and the class stole the show.

The Mark Mills-designed and South African-built sportboat has gained international attention as a high-performance speedster that is competitive in all breeze conditions. “The inspiration for the Cape 31 came from renowned Scottish yacht racer Lord Irvine Laidlaw, who wanted to provide a boost to the Cape Town yachting community with a cutting-edge boat that could be built locally and offer youth sailors a compelling reason to step up to big boats,” Mills says. “It needed to offer high performance across the full range of Cape Town conditions, be fun to sail and be robust—all factors that have stood the design in good stead as it expands around the world.”

The 31 fleet at the Southernmost Regatta was a mix of European teams en route to winter regattas in the Caribbean and a few charters arranged for potential American owners keen to try before they buy.

“I feel momentum in terms of people talking about the boat,” says Dan Cheresh, of Saugatuck, Michigan, who chartered a Cape 31 for the regatta. Cheresh is past president and champion of the C&C 30 One-Design class, another Mark Mills design. “We have the IC37 and the J/70, but I really think that a 30-foot highly technical one-design fleet is something we’re missing.”

At the core of the Cape 31’s success is its versatile design and ability to perform across the wind range—and more importantly, at the upper end.

“Modern hull shapes offer more opportunities to tune the weight and righting moment across the range of heel angles, which means we don’t need so much bulb weight,” Mills says. “Upright in the light, it’s a relatively low wetted surface shape that goes well, but once you start heeling, the righting moment builds quickly to allow you to power upwind or reach like crazy. Then it’s just a question of finessing the right amount of sail plan onto that platform—not too much, so you don’t overpower too early, and not too little to make sure the boat is fun all the way through the wind range.”

The intricacy of the design places a premium on teamwork, communication and boathandling to be competitive in the fleet. “I think one of the reasons that everyone is interested in the boat is that it’s highly technical—it takes a lot of coordination to sail,” Cheresh says. “If there’s anything I learned, having no experience on the boat, it is that you have to recognize the importance of the relationship between the jib trimmer, the main trimmer, the helmsman and the runner. All those people have to be aware of the difference that’s ­occurring with pressure, whether it be a puff coming in, a light spot, or a left or right shift. If a guy on the rail calls a puff and waits for the mainsail trimmer to process it, and then calls for a runner and jib change, you’ve already missed it—you’re two seconds late, and it takes another three seconds to get back up to speed.”

True to Laidlaw’s intentions, the Cape 31 is providing a pathway for youth sailors onto a physically demanding sportboat that teaches the skills necessary to thrive in modern high-­performance keelboat racing.

“If you’ve got a strong youth sailing background, then this is the perfect boat to get into,” says Madelaine Kirk, a student at the University of Southampton and a former member of the British Youth Sailing Team. Kirk began sailing on the Cape 31 Jiraffe on the Solent after 29er and Nacra 15 campaigns as a youth sailor. “A lot of owners want young people on the boats because they are physically demanding to sail. You get put into a position that is accessible to you at that point, and then you learn from the others on the boat. There are pros on almost every boat, and you learn so much from them, which gives you the skills and ability to then go into professional sailing if that’s what you want to do.”

According to 31 North Yachting, the exclusive Northern Hemisphere supplier, 65 Cape 31s have been built to date at Cape Performance Sailing, with strong fleets now established in South Africa and Europe. Marty Kullman, of Sailing Inc., the US distributor, says they have five boats incoming and five more down the line, enough to build a summer race calendar in New England. Base price for the boat starts at $185,000; once shipped to the States (it fits into a 40-foot container) and pimped to grand-prix ­travel-program ­status, the options list grows to $250,000-plus.

Cape 31 class rules stipulate owner-drivers and a minimum of five crew (1,311 pounds maximum and 1,124 minimum) with three pros on board, which owner Sandra Askew says are needed to handle the boat properly. Askew, who came from the C&C 30, the IC37 and the Melges 24 before making the switch to the 31 in 2021, was initially attracted by the boat’s racy look and the three-pro allowance. “They’re technical boats—not hard to sail—but you do need to know what you’re doing,” she says. “They definitely get up and go, so it’s good to have people on board that know what they’re doing. It’s challenging but just really, really fun. Fast and easy to manage downwind, and it goes upwind nicely.”

Despite robust fleets at England’s top regattas in 2022, the fanfare of Cape 31 class racing in Key West and its ­success abroad, Cheresh is taking a wait-and-see approach. “I think it’s going to be tough to build a fleet because all of us are sitting back and waiting for the next guy to buy a boat to determine if there will be a fleet in the US,” he says. “I’m a bit on the fence, only because I want to make sure we can develop a fleet in North America. I am very interested in purchasing one of these; I just want to see a ­commitment from other owners.”

Across the pond, UK sailors have faith in the class’s longevity. “We’ve always had the conversation about whether or not the class will stick around,” Kirk says. “There’s been this five-year cycle where boats turn around, but I can see them sticking around because they are so accessible and so many people can sail them. I only weigh 60 kilos (132 pounds), and I can jump on the bow of one, and it is fine. The owners are very involved in the class, so I believe that the boat is not just a fad.”

Mills is confident the Cape 31 will stand out among other one-design keelboat options and has a thriving class to ensure its continuity. “What sets [the Cape 31] apart from other one-designs is that it goes upwind like a bigger boat, which attracts a wider range of racers looking for a tactical challenge as well as pure adrenaline,” Mills says. “But the boat is only half of the formula; the class has built a fun, competitive dynamic that draws owners and crew into the fleet. Happy owners have been our best salesmen; they are having a ball in a well-managed, colorful class.”

While the Cape 31 has a way to go before it becomes an established international class, at least one thing was clear from its Southernmost coming-out party: The boat looks great in the spotlight and sure is a head-turner when planing past.

The post The Cape 31 Class US Debut appeared first on Sailing World.

There must be something in the soil at Point Farm in Warren, Rhode Island. On this land, Steve Clark has reaped everything from traditional dories to C-class catamarans to International Canoes, and all sorts of genetically modified vessels in between. His latest crop is a brand-new International 110 crafted from sheets of mere marine plywood.

Members of the International 110 class talked about the creation of a kit boat for decades. When Clark rejoined the class, the dream became reality in short order. As the ­previous co-owner of Vanguard Sailboats, Clark was accustomed to building 3,000 sailboats per year. In the glory days, it took his firm about 18 hours to build a Sunfish.

Why is he putting his time and talent into building a kit for a one-design first built in 1939? With a mischievous grin, Clark says: “It’s the same reason why a dog licks his balls. Because he can.”
At the age of 69, Clark is retired and still enjoys boatbuilding. He came back to the 110 because he saw it as a “geezer Canoe.”

“My competitive days in International Canoes are fewer than they used to be,” he says. “And I also wanted to be able to sail PHRF on Wednesday nights and navigation races. The 110 qualifies.”

Clark views the International 110 class as his client, and his goal is to build a quality boat that is as fast but not faster than existing boats. The first question he had to answer was what shape to make the kit boat? Clark brought in Casey Brown, who was a collaborator on previous projects, and they scanned a ­fiberglass International 110 built by Westease in Holland, Michigan. “The 3D scanning is remarkable,” Clark says. “Kasey set it up. The thing bounces light off the boat. We get a raw scan, then we run it through a fairing program on the computer.”

After the shape was approved by the 110 class technical chair, Clark worked on how to build the inside of the boat, spending a lot of time creating different layouts on the computer. Along the way, there were numerous obstacles to overcome. One of them was when Clark had a heart attack in June 2022. Another was the chine log. The original wooden 110s had a complicated chine that came out of a shaper. Back in the day, the builders had a large industrial machine to shape the chine. They also had a seemingly endless supply of 25-foot-long pieces of clear Douglas fir. Neither the shaper nor the stock is available.

Clark solved this challenge by treating the chine more like a stitch and glue boat. He covered the edge of the boat with a small chine, then carved a radius into it using a power plane. “It’s the same technique you use for making a round mast. You start off with a square, you cut 45-degree corners, and you sequentially facet the radius. After you’ve done that twice, you are within sandpaper of the right radius.”

Clark went through eight or nine iterations of the construction design until he was happy with the layouts. The files were prepared to be cut on a CNC machine. In the past, Clark has done the same thing with sailing canoes, noting that it is easier to ship files than big, bulky molds. “I’ve had guys in Australia build boats that I designed,” he says. “I send them a compressed file, and away it goes.”

Chesapeake Light Craft cut all of the plywood to build the hull and delivered it in a flat pack for $5,600. Clark sees this technology as a game-changer. “It used to be you had to draw the boat full size on the floor, correct all the shapes. That was a week or two of lofting. Now you can do it all in computers, get the parts cut accurately, then set them up and go.”

With the assistance of ­fellow boatbuilder Bro Dunn, Clark believes his kit-boat International 110 will be completed by May and racing this summer. The response to the project has been positive, with many of the faithful making the pilgrimage to Clark’s barn and laying hands upon the boat. “People are excited to see a new 110 take shape. The 110 class has a large alumnae,” Clark says. “There’s a great deal of nostalgia.”

But he’s not just looking back. He has a plan for the future. Out back, Clark has seven vintage wooden 110s that could use some love. He hopes to create a program with the nearby Herreshoff Museum such that teenagers and young adults can get a boat, learn how to take care of it, then go out ­sailing. The talks with the museum have been positive, and there are still details to be finalized.

On Bainbridge Island, 3,000 miles away just west of Seattle, Fleet 19 is building a prototype 110 from a kit it developed independently of the Clark project. Its approach to 110 construction uses a combination of fiberglass-covered foam and marine plywood. Brandon Davis of Turn Point Design in Port Townsend, Washington, is deeply involved in the project. He knows his way around a build. He has worked on four America’s Cup campaigns, aerospace projects, rockets, satellites, submarines, flying cars and small-boat kits.

“The 110 has traditionally been built with a tortured plywood bottom and deck,” Davis says. “To spring the shape into the 3/8-inch plywood took quite a bit of force, requiring strong internal frames, 12 big trucker ratchet straps, boxes of screws and lots of persistence.”

To simplify the build, the Fleet 19 team chose a 100 percent recycled PET foam core because it was easier to shape. That decision meant there needed to be less internal structure, which resulted in a quicker build.
There were ease of ownership considerations as well. “Most trailerable boats sit in the backyard over the winter and, if they are not tarped perfectly, will gather rainwater in their bilge. That can spell the untimely end to a plywood boat. With a foam-core International 110, you will not have to worry so much about rainwater,” Davis says.

The Seattle team’s plan is to have the first hull ready, which is already built and certified by the class measurer. They’re keen to rig it and do some testing to make sure their boat is not “unfairly fast.”
Like Clark, the Seattle-area 110 sailors are drawn to the International 110 because of its simplicity. Many of them are coming from the 6 Meter yachts, which are substantially more complex and expensive than Ray Hunt’s venerable design.

Milly Biller is the president of the 110 class, and she has rebuilt at least a dozen vintage 110s for her Inverness, California, fleet. She’s running out of old boats to repair, so she is thrilled to have new options for new sailors all over the country.

The post Modernizing the International 110 appeared first on Sailing World.

The Wayfarer dinghy has been around longer than…well, let’s just say a lot longer than the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta Series. By a lot. So how is it possible that this internationally-sailed 16-foot dinghy has zero street cred in the one-design hood? Ali Kishbaugh, who’s been racing Wayfarers for about seven years, isn’t sure why, but she’s hopeful the class’s debut at the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta in Annapolis in early May will help get the Wayfarer the attention it deserves.

According to class historians, the Wayfarer dinghy was originally designed in 1957 by Ian Proctor, the British designer and sailing hardware entrepreneur (Proctor Spars). It was, of course, an international woodie phenomenon until fiberglass came along. With molds passed to and through various builders, including Ontario’s Abbot Boats, the Wayfarer has been modernized over the decades to its current “Mark IV” version, now exclusively built by Britain’s Hartley Boats. The MK IV, aside from modern construction techniques, has improved the original design’s buoyancy and self-bailing issues, and the underdeck spinnaker launching tube now makes sets and douses much easier than from the traditional laundry basket stuff.

The 400-pound centerboarder has a big and open cockpit that can comfortably seat three adult passengers, but class racing calls for only two. It can be coastal cruised (yes, they do…), club raced, and easily handled by beginners or pushed harder by more advanced racers, like other designs of its ilk—the Flying Scot, Lightning or Buccaneer to name a few. Canada’s Parallel 45 Marine is the exclusive importer and distributor for Hartley Boats, but Wayfarers can be shipped direct to the U.S.

The majority of boats being raced, primarily east of the Mississippi, Kishbaugh says, are more the modern-day fiberglass models, but there are quite a few woodies hanging around. “They’re the same hull design, but they sail as well as the composite ones. It’s just that the rigging is a bit different on the newer ones as they’re geared more toward racing. The woodies tend to be more used for cruising, but that’s the one big thing about the Wayfarer—there are the cruisers and the racers and both do very well.”  

There are mainly pockets of local Wayfarer racing, says Kishbaugh, and concentrations today are in Michigan, Connecticut, Florida and North Carolina. Kishbaugh lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and with the boat always at the ready on its trailer she races her Wayfarer in regattas up and down the East Coast. The Midwinter Championship on Florida’s Lake Eustis is always a big gathering, and there’s the Eastern Championship at New Bern’s Blackbeard Sailing Club (NC), this summer’s Nationals in Rock Hall, Maryland, and then North American Championship on Lake Michigan’s Tawas Bay, which typically attracts a strong Canadian contingent.

“The thing that makes it fun and different from a lot of other dinghies is the people,” Kishbaugh says. “I could have chosen a Flying Scot, a Laser or a Lightning or any other dinghy. But it’s the people in the Wayfarer Association that are so welcoming and warm—just fun people. And then there’s the boat. Because of the hard chines, if the wind comes up, it’s a sturdy boat and it does well in strong winds. It moves reasonably well in light winds because it’s not round bottomed.”

In her late 50s and fit as a fiddle, Kishbaugh, includes herself among the older sailors that are drawn to the Wayfarer, many of whom “sail very, very competitively.” Like other legacy classes, though, the class struggles to convince younger sailors to join its ranks. It frustrates her to no end that she knows firsthand that once you race a Wayfarer, you gain a greater appreciation for it.

That’s how it worked for her.

“The first time I sailed one was when somebody came to Catawba to race. I looked at it and thought it was beautiful—a really classic looking boat,” she says.

As her story goes, she crewed for somebody, loved it, and soon after, “on a little lake in Greensboro, North Carolina, I raced a regatta on a borrowed boat, with a crew I’d never met, on a lake I’d never sailed before and I did really well. So that was, for me, the moment I was hooked.”

She bought her first Wayfarer and then “quickly decided I needed a newer one that was a little more competitive.”

Given the Wayfarer has been around for 65 years, there’s not much new to be learned in the way of tricks, Kishbaugh says. “She is what she is and the way that it’s different is how you tune the boat and the sails.”

But her tips for Wayfarer boatspeed ring true for any dinghy and hints at the athleticism required. “Keeping it flat…it needs to be sailed flat because of hard chines…that’s the biggest thing. We may be an older crowd, but we definitely hike hard. Personally, I would rather have more wind than less. In heavy wind, she flies downwind.

“They’re fun boats, but we don’t get a lot of the college kids. Those who say it’s only for older folks are wrong. What I like about it is that it’s more maneuverable inside the boat. A Thistle will beat you up. Our younger sailors are into the 420s, 470s, but I think if people knew more about the boat they would be more interested in giving it a try. We just need to get more people sailing it.”

To that end, Kishbaugh says the elder statesman of the U.S. class is Jim Heffernan, who has raced Wayfarers for more than 30 years, and internationally. He was long the skipper to beat until a much younger Laser sailor named Jim Cook moved to Charlotte for work and joined the Catawba scene. Cook bought his second Wayfarer from USWA Commodore Richard Johnson, and injected his youthful enthusiasm into the class. Cook and his teammate Mike Taylor swept the Midwinter Championship races in Florida in February, but died in a boating accident in late March, an accident that shocked the tight-knit Catawba and Wayfarer family.

 “Jim was an amazing sailor,” says Kishbaugh. “He was a graceful person, and was always humble. He’d walk around and give ideas and pointers if asked but didn’t push his thoughts and was just a good person and a good friend.”

Cook was registered to race the Helly Hansen Sailing World Regatta in Annapolis next month, but with his sudden and tragic passing, Kishbaugh says, the fleet will race in his honor, to showcase that the Wayfarer class is full of good people and friends like Cook.

Most of the Annapolis regatta’s participants will have likely never seen a fleet of Wayfarers, but when the racing gets underway on Friday, May 5, there will be no mistaking the half-dozen colorful hulls and spinnakers of the regatta’s oldest dinghy class.

“I’m really pushing our people to do it,” Kishbaugh says. “While it is an expensive regatta for us because of the travel and housing, it’s such a great place to sail, and I think it’s important for the class to be part of something bigger.”

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