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

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

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

Starting

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

Upwind tactics

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

Upwind speed

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

Boathandling

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

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

Reaching and downwind tactics

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

Reaching and downwind speed

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

Sail crossovers

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

Weight placement

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

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

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

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

Three hours after the start of the Fort Lauderdale to Key West Race, Cole Brauer decides to switch up the game plan. “We can’t race the same way as everyone else because we don’t have a full crew,” she vents. “I have to remind myself of that.”

For the past 20 miles, Brauer and her teammate, Cat Chimney, have been short-tacking the Class40 First Light down the Miami coast to avoid the Gulf Stream, which travels north at 4 knots. With a southeasterly breeze building offshore, they must balance current relief with stronger wind offshore, choosing when to tack toward the beach and when to head out for fresh breeze. But with every tack, the competition increases their lead. Class40s aren’t known for stellar upwind speed, and the fact that Brauer and Chimney are doublehanding only makes the maneuvers slower.

“The conditions aren’t the same for everyone all the time,” Chimney responds. “I’m happy for a split here if that’s what you want to do.”

This is the duo’s first race together, and they are still getting a feel for their roles on the boat. Before today, the two had cultivated a strong professional friendship racing against each other in Class40s, often helping each other fix things before the starts of big races. A few weeks before the Fort Lauderdale to Key West Race, the Magenta Project sent them to a training session on the Canadian Ocean Racing Team’s IMOCA 60, and they instantly hit it off as teammates, deciding then and there to do more doublehanded racing together.

“All right, let’s go for a tack,” Brauer says. “We’re not going to gain by following.”

They set up at the back of the boat, with Brauer breaking the jib from her seat at the helm and Chimney trimming the new sheet on the other side.

“OK, autopilot is off,” Brauer says, ­clicking the remote-control puck strung around her neck.

“Copy.”

“Three, two, one, tacking.”

The boat’s bow swings through the breeze, and soon enough they’re headed out to sea. “Nice tack, Cat,” Brauer says, settling the boat onto its new heading.

For Brauer, this race is the latest development in a relatively short career in pro sailing. At 100 pounds and 5-foot-nothing, Brauer is a small person with big aspirations, yet what she lacks in size she makes up for in grit. Beginning as a boat captain, the 28-year-old has become a fixture on various sailing circuits, from distance racing to Etchells, J/70s and Melges 24s. In some ways, she’s a ­typical sailing bum, living in a built-out van so she can go where the wind and the gigs take her. Her career has already had many twists and turns, and she has big plans.

Brauer came late to the sport as a walk-on crew at the University of Hawaii. “I remember when I got to that first practice, people were surprised I was a girl because of my first name,” she says. “By then I was used to it, though. People still think I’m a boy if they haven’t met me in person. It’s common in this business.”

After graduating as a three-time scholar athlete with a degree in food science with a focus in medicine, medical school seemed like a logical next step. But the 2018 Pacific Cup sent her down a different path. “It was my first big offshore race,” Brauer says, “and when we got within 25 miles of shore, I got a blip of cell service, called my mom, and told her I wasn’t going to med school. I was going to go sailing instead.”

Her parents were less than stoked about their daughter abandoning a medical career to bum around on boats, but Brauer stuck to her decision, spending the year after graduation as a detailer, scrubbing teak with toothbrushes and making little money for it. “I was kind of on the struggle bus,” she says. “I could barely pay rent.”

She moved back to her home port in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, to search for sailing jobs. She was coaching to get by when she met a boat captain named Tim Fetsch, who initially wanted nothing to do with her when she asked for an apprenticeship.

“I convinced him by telling him I was small. I fit into tiny spaces, and I’d do absolutely anything to get a job,” she says. After a few weeks of steady badgering, Fetsch relented and gave her a job working on a Swan 42, her first bit of real nipper work. She took up every task thrown her way, cleaning bilges so well you could eat off them, whatever she had to do to make sure she was going to have a job the next day.

Fetsch worked for the US Merchant Marine Academy Sailing Foundation, where he managed about a dozen boats for charters and racing. Brauer started going up and down the East Coast doing deliveries on random boats, from Melges 32s to 80-foot racer-cruisers. “Usually when you’re a nipper, you’re only working on one boat under one captain,” Brauer says. “And now I was working under one boat captain, but we had a bunch of boats that we were working on.”

Fetsch taught her everything she knows, from engines to electrical. He made her install her first 110-volt outlet on a Swan 66. He taught her to see every day as a tryout and to never get too comfortable in her position. “He was brutal,” Brauer says. “But he made sure I stayed honest, made sure I worked hard and never got cocky. Looking back, Tim is the best thing that’s happened to my career. I still use those lessons today.”

Brauer worked for Fetsch for a year and a half. One day, they were walking through New England Boatworks in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, when Brauer spotted a sorry-­looking Classe Mini 6.50 sitting on a trailer beneath a tarp in the boatyard. By then she’d been itching to get into singlehanded racing. She’d done some doublehanded offshore sailing in Hawaii, and she’d been doing doublehanded deliveries with Fetsch, but she wanted to take things to the next level. The Mini turned out to be a Foundation-owned boat, so she asked Fetsch if she could fix it up and campaign it.

Once again, he brushed her off, but Brauer remained persistent. Eventually, she finagled a deal with Warrior Sailing, also run through the USMMA Sailing Foundation, to refit the boat to take veterans out to learn the ropes of offshore sailing. “I don’t know if [the people at the foundation] completely believed I could do it,” Brauer says. “But they were like, ‘We’ll give her this boat and see how she does. She’ll probably give up eventually.’”

But Brauer didn’t give up. By then she’d started to have this insane idea. No American woman has ever raced singlehanded around the world, and she began to think she could be the first. “I get into a rhythm when I’m singlehanding,” Brauer says. “Everything just flows, and it works. I feel the boat, and the boat feels me. We kind of work as one, so I’m never really alone because I have the boat there.”

Eventually, she got the Mini completely refit and ready to do some serious offshore racing. But two weeks before the 2019 Bermuda 1-2, the foundation pulled its support, even though Brauer had paid the registration. “That absolutely crushed me,” she says. “I ended up stepping away from the boat after that.”

As fate would have it, she’d met Mike Hennessey on the dock earlier that season. Hennessey owned a Class40, Dragon, and Brauer started doing deliveries for him when his boat captain quit. Straight away, she badgered him for the job. “I could tell that Mike didn’t want me to take the job at first. I was 24, and I was a girl, and I was small. All these boat captains were big, 250-pound dudes in their 30s.”

Like others before him, Hennessy relented, and the two have been working together ever since. That isn’t to say it’s been an easy ride, however.

There’s a special kind of romance attached to shorthanded ocean racers, often viewed as brawny lone-wolf cowboy types who, for whatever reason, choose to battle their demons alone on the ocean rather than face them on land like the rest of us. Brauer doesn’t fit this mold. She’s good with people, even though she’s better with boats. She isn’t brawny by any means, and in cases where some men might force a repair or rigging job with brute strength, Brauer makes better use of her brain.

“You’re always going to have a tool, even if it’s the wrong tool,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll use a winch handle instead of a screwdriver if I have to.”

She plans her day to the minute, not the hour, and every task she does has a procedure, usually sketched out in long and detailed lists. Her life is not about gazing at sunsets or counting shooting stars, but about engines and electrical, and hauling sails around with halyards because she isn’t physically strong enough to do it by hand. It’s about climbing into the rudder compartment when the autopilot jams and pressing her back against the bulkhead to wriggle loose the ram from the tiller bar while the boat lays over with the kite still up, then having to go back on deck and wrangle in the pieces of a freshly broken tack clutch without getting her teeth knocked in. It’s about sitting in a harness with her legs falling asleep because she has a job to do up the mast, fighting the urge to let herself off the hook and go back down because there’s no shot she’s climbing back up to do it later, not when it’s blowing 20 knots with zero-degree temperatures. It’s about knowing that whatever comes her way, no one is there to save her if she fails.

All these lessons came into use when Brauer and Hennessy lost their rig in the 2022 Caribbean 600. They’d installed brand-new rigging before completing the eight-day delivery to Antigua, but “the ­problem with brand-new equipment is you’re going to have teething pains,” Brauer says. “It’s the same with a brand-new engine. You have to stop every few miles and make sure everything is working properly. You trust but verify, and in this case, I didn’t verify.”

After rounding St. Barts during the race, Brauer went below to rest before she planned to hoist the Code 5. She thought they’d hit a weird wave when Hennessy began yelling, “Rig down, rig down!” Before going below, the sun was behind the mainsail, but when she glanced topside, the shade had completely vanished. When she came up, the rig had toppled over to one side. They lashed the boom to the boat and tried to get the main down, but Class40 mains have luff cars and full-length ­battens. The only way they could have taken it off would have been to get in the water and unwind the battens. Jumping into the ocean was not an option, and the sound of carbon and fiberglass crunching became debilitating. Brauer had never heard anything like it, and to this day, it is the worst sound she’s ever heard. When one of the winches they were using to keep the mast in the boat started pulling off the deck, they knew they were running low on options.

“Mike and I made the quick decision that we were going to lose the rig,” Brauer says.

The two began cutting halyards and unpinning side stays, trying to save anything they could salvage. “I had gone over my safety procedures for so long,” Brauer says, “so I knew where the bolt cutters were. I knew where the knives were.”

Brauer had to hit the last turnbuckle with a hammer when it got to the final thread, and after cutting more lines, they picked everything up and threw it overboard.

They’ve rebounded in a big way, however. Hennessy ended up replacing everything and getting Dragon race-ready before deciding to build a brand-new Class40 to race in France this summer. He sold Dragon to Frederick K.W. Day, owner of the Class40 Longbow, who renamed the boat First Light. Day still allows Brauer to race it as their sparring partner, with the Fort Lauderdale to Key West Race serving as their first outing together.

By the time Brauer and Chimney reach the finish, the sun has been up for two hours. The two didn’t end up finishing as strong as they’d hoped, but the main goal for this race was to arrive in one piece and see how they vibe as a team. In that sense, the test was successful, and morale is high as they tie First Light to the dock.

“What Cole is doing is really unique for her age,” says Chimney, who is eight years her senior. “She’s come into this at a really important time for women in sailing, and she deserves a lot of respect for leveraging it the way she has. These opportunities weren’t available or the culture wasn’t right when I was her age doing similar things.

“Everybody navigates pro sailing in ­different ways,” Chimney continues. “There’s no science behind it. It’s not like you go to college for four years and come out with a career-track job. It’s all about putting yourself in the right place with the right people and doing the best you can, and I think Cole is crushing it in that sense.”

Although she’s got some sweet gigs for the time being, Brauer has her mind set on a solo circumnavigation. She has a designer in mind to one day build an IMOCA 60 to fit her size, and in the meantime, she’ll use the Class40to rack up miles. She will continue to ignore those who doubt her because deep down, only she knows what she’s capable of. She could have taken a different path, could have gone to medical school and worked a nine-to-five, could have lived in a house instead of a van. But there’s a moment she is constantly pursuing, a moment she relishes. It’s those first few seconds after making the correct decision to do a sail change, when the wind does what it’s supposed to and the boat picks up speed, when the sail fills and the autopilot catches and the hull surfs down a wave. This is the feeling she’s chasing. This is the place she calls home, and home is wherever the wind and determination will take her.

The post Onboard With Cole Brauer appeared first on Sailing World.

For sailing fans visiting from ­outside France, the Route du Rhum is a cultural shock, barely to be believed even once seen. It is France’s oldest singlehanded race, first held in 1978, and run every four years from St. Malo in northern France 3,500 miles across the North Atlantic to Guadeloupe. The fleet of 138 boats that assembled for the start in November 2022 was incredible, with an estimated value of 260 million euros—from the implausible 100-foot Ultime trimarans to a record fleet of 38 IMOCA 60s and a similarly impressive fleet of 55 Class40s. Dock sides are crammed with spectators, many hoping to catch a glimpse of the top skippers—some are genuine sports stars. Had the 2022 start not been delayed, French President Emmanuel Macron was to have attended. It’s that much of a big deal.

In the days and hours before the Route du Rhum started, more than 1 million people passed through its race village in St. Malo. In this environment, even non-French amateurs, such as the two US Class40 skippers, Alex Mehran and Greg Leonard, gained celebrity status with relentless autograph signing, selfies with fans and press interviews. Usually outshone by the bigger, higher-profile boats, the Class40 is the most successful 40-footer of all time. While the Farr 40 never topped more than 40 boats at a world championship, this is the second Route du Rhum in which more than 50 participated. To date, 192 Class40 hull numbers have been allocated.

While “Open 40s” once competed in the OSTAR and Around Alone, the Class40 came about independently. Born in France in the early 2000s, two designs defined the class: the Pogo 40 and the Jumbo 40. But the success and longevity of the Class40 is due to its highly constrictive box rule, drafted by a group that includes wise French sailor and journalist Patrice Carpentier, which remains robust 18 years on.

The box rule’s basic parameters are a maximum length overall of 39 feet, 11 inches; max beam of 14 feet, 9 inches; draft of 9 feet, 10 inches; average freeboard of 3 feet, 6 inches; max mast height of 62 feet, 4 inches; max working sail area of 1,238 square feet; minimum displacement at 10,097 pounds; and max water ballast of 1,653 pounds per side. Most brutal are the materials limitations: Carbon fiber, aramid, honeycomb cores and pre-preg resin are forbidden from the construction of the hull, deck, interior structure and fittings; go down below on one and, joyously, thanks to the GRP construction, it is not coffin black.

Carbon fiber is permitted for the mast, boom and ­bowsprit, while standing rigging must be steel rod. Sails are limited to eight, and all but two and the heavy-weather jib must be polyester and nylon. A single fixed keel and as many as two rudders are permitted, but daggerboards and foils are banned, as are canting, rotating masts, mast jacks, and adjustable or removable forestays. However, complex kick-up rudders are permitted. (Although their effectiveness to kick up in a collision is allegedly dubious.) Over the years, displacement and average freeboard have slightly reduced, but the biggest rule amendment has limited “how scow” Class40 hull shapes can be. While the latest foiling Protos in the Classe Mini (the “flying bathtubs”) are fully flat-bowed, Class40 has two max beam limits just short of the bow to prevent this. Naturally, costs have risen, but the rule has successfully limited them; today, a top Class40 costs 700,000 to 800,000 euros.

Those sailing the Class40s in the early days were a mix of pros and amateurs. Today professionals on sponsored boats are the majority. As for aspirant French pro sailors, the Class40 has become a significant stepping stone between from the Classe Mini and Figaro circuits to the IMOCA.

As skipper of Groupe SNEF, leading Mini and Figaro skipper Xavier Macaire says: “The transatlantic races like this [Route du Rhum] are very interesting to us, and the boat is not very expensive. The Class40 is easy to maintain and prepare, and is not a complicated boat like an IMOCA where you need 12 guys. With this, you need two or three, not full time. It is an easy, fast boat.”

With more top pros like Macaire joining, 30 new Class40s have been launched in the last four-year cycle. The most recent Route du Rhum podium, for example, comprised two-time Solitaire du Figaro winner Yoann Richomme (Paprec Arkea) and Mini Transat winners Corentin Douguet (Queguiner-Innoveo) and Ambrogio Beccaria (Allagrande Pirelli) of Italy.

Of the French classes, the Class40 and the Mini remain the most cosmopolitan, with entries from other European countries, notably Italy at present, while the United States, Australia and South Africa were also represented in the Route du Rhum. Far from being put off by the pro element, Americans Alex Mehran and Greg Leonard were thrilled to be on the same starting line. “It is such a privilege to race against some of the top offshore sailors in the world,” says Leonard, who hails from Florida. “It is like playing football against a first team in the NFL—it is that level of quality. There are not that many sports you can do that in.”

Both American skippers came to the Route du Rhum from similar paths. With his Mach 40.3 Kite, Leonard is a professional economist originally from Texas. He campaigned a J/120 for many years with his remarkable son Hannes, who raced his first doublehanded overnighter with his father at age 13. Now 18 and with thousands of race miles under his belt, both in the US and Europe, he is a Class40 expert. For his father, the Route du Rhum was his first singlehanded race.

Over the years, several top shorthanded sailors, notably British Vendée Globe skippers Mike Golding and Miranda Merron, have raced with him, also coaching him. He is very enthusiastic about the Class40: “They are beautiful boats, such fun to sail. When we delivered her to St. Malo, we had 28 to 40 knots just aft of the beam, and we just hung in the low 20s boatspeed, and it was finger-light steering.”

Mehran skippers Polka Dot, which has the perfect pedigree, being Yoann Richomme’s 2018 Route du Rhum winner—a Lift V1 design. Growing up as part of the St. Francis YC Laser squad and subsequently a Brown collegiate sailor, he met Welsh Class40 designer Merfyn Owen in 2009 and raced one of his designs. Remarkably, he won his first major singlehanded race, the 2009 Bermuda 1-2. He subsequently graduated to an Owen Clarke-designed Open 50, in which he set a record in 2012’s singlehanded Transpac. He then went off, had four kids, and developed his commercial real estate business before getting the itch once more last year. He competed ­doublehanded with Owen in the 2021 Transat Jacques Vabre on an old Class40, but as Mehran puts it, “We needed to get ­something scow.”

He too has been receiving coaching from Merron and Golding, among others. According to Mehran, one of the most difficult things to explain to those back home is less the offshore-racing fever that afflicts French fans, but that their skippers are not multimillionaires. Instead, they come from a wide age group and all have commercial backing to either buy a secondhand boat or—if they are higher-­profile, more accomplished or just plain lucky—build a new one. So, returning to the Route du Rhum podium, Paprec’s business is waste disposal (admittedly, its owner races his own Wally 107), Arkea is banking and insurance, Queguiner is building materials, Innoveo is an app-­development platform, and Pirelli makes tires (its CEO has a Wally 145).

Over the last two decades, the Class40s themselves have evolved, despite Draconian design limitations. What started as cruiser-racers with fitted-out interiors became racer-cruisers and are now refined pure racers. They may not be black inside, but the build quality of the latest-generation designs is of the highest ­standard, and it seems no longer possible to buy a cruiser-racer.

A delight of the Class40 is that no one designer is dominant; eight different designs make up the 30 boats built over the last four years. Pogo Structures, last of the original builders, is on its fourth version of its Pogo 40, the S4, designed by Emirates Team New Zealand’s naval architect, Guillaume Verdier (who also designed Structures’ scow-bowed flying Proto Mini).

The man who developed the first blunt-fronted scow Mini, David Raison, produced the Max40, built by JPS in La Trinité-sur-Mer. Also built by JPS are Sam Manuard designs—the Mach 40.4, such as the 2021 Transat Jacques Vabre winner Redman, skippered by Antoine Carpentier (nephew of the original rule’s writer), and now its evolution, the Mach 40.5, of which two competed in the Route du Rhum.

In 2020, VPLP made its first foray into the class with the Clak 40, built by Multiplast, of which four raced in the Route du Rhum, the top finisher being Martin le Pape’s Fondation Stargardt. Etienne Bertrand, another successful Mini designer, had two Cape Racing Scow 40s in the race, while Allagrande Pirelli, believed to be the most expensive of the latest crop and campaigned by last year’s Mini Transat winner, Ambrogio Beccaria, is an all-Italian affair designed by Gianluca Guelfi and built by Sangiorgio Marine Shipyard in Genoa.

However, after the recent Route du Rhum, ­nosing in front in the design race is Marc Lombard with his Lift V2s, of which seven were racing, including Yoann Richomme’s winner, Paprec Arkea. Lombard is one of the longest continuous players in the Class40, and has worked with Tunisian manufacturer Akilaria on its RC1, RC2 and RC3 models since 2006, of which 38 were built. His latest designs have been the Lift, introduced in 2016; Veedol-AIC, one example, took Richomme to his first Route du Rhum victory. The Lifts were custom-built with a hull and deck made by Gepeto in Lorient, but finished off by the V1D2 yard in Caen, and were more precisely engineered and built than the Akilarias. They were superseded this cycle by the Lift V2, the most popular of the new Class40s, with seven competing.

For Richomme, the Route du Rhum was a small distraction from having a new IMOCA built. He entered the Route du Rhum to defend his title and stay race-fit. If the first Lift was an early scow, the present one is at the limit, to the extent that it has a bump in the hull 2 meters aft from the bow at the limit of where the Class40 rule restricts the max beam to prevent such extreme scowness.

The scow bow provides more righting moment, but it also does interesting things to the boat’s hydrodynamics. “With a pointy bow, the keel is more angled and creates more drag,” explains Richomme, who is also a trained naval architect. “When a scow heels, the hull is almost parallel to the keel, so sometimes when we go over the waves, we can feel the keel shudder when it is producing lift. The chine is low and therefore very powerful, and when we heel, it makes for a very long waterline length. Also, we have very little rocker, whereas other [new] boats have a lot, which creates a lot of drag so they don’t accelerate so well when they heel.”

The Lift V2 “is a weapon reaching,” Richomme says. “We can hold the gennaker higher than we used to. Last time, I didn’t even take one. But with the power going up, so have the loads, and we are having problems with the hardware. I have broken two winches already.”

A downside of the big bow and straight chine is downwind, where the technique seems to be preventing the bow from immersing. Paprec Arkea is typically trimmed far aft, including the stack and the positioning of the 1,653 pounds of water ballast (most new boats have three tanks each side), while its engine is 19 inches farther aft, and the mast and keel 11 inches farther aft than they were on his previous boat. They are 77 pounds below the minimum weight, which Richomme admits may be too extreme—during training they broke a bulkhead.

Otherwise, their increased cockpit protection is most noticeable on all the new designs (although not to IMOCA degrees), while most have a central pit area with halyards fed aft from the mast down a tunnel running through the cabin. On Paprec Arkea, a pit winch is mounted just off the cockpit sole. With the main sheet and traveler lead there as well, Richomme can trim from inside the cabin.

Most extraordinary about the scows is how fast they are. Anglo-Frenchman Luke Berry, skipper of Lamotte-Module Création, graduated from a Manuard Mach 40.3 to a 40.5 this year and says: “It is a massive improvement both in speed and comfort. Reaching and downwind, we are 2 knots faster, which is extraordinary.”

The top speeds he has seen are 27 to 28 knots. “Most incredible are the average speeds—higher than 20.”

This effectively turns yacht-design theory on its head, with ­waterline length and hull speed having less effect upon defining the speed of a boat that spends so much time planing. On the Mach 40.5, the waterline is just 32 feet, with a length overall of 39 feet. Compared to the Lift V2, it has more rocker, supposedly making it better able to deal with waves.

Nowhere is the speed of the latest Class40s more apparent than where they finished in the Route du Rhum in comparison to the IMOCA fleet. Paprec Arkea arrived in Guadeloupe ahead of 13 IMOCAs, or one-third of the way up the IMOCA fleet. Richomme says he used to sail on a Lombard-designed IMOCA 20 years ago, when they would make 10.5 knots upwind. “On a reach, I reckon we are faster than them now. We can do 20 to 22 knots average speed.”

Ugly seems to be quick, but when it comes to the Class40, beauty is in the eye of the beholder of the trophy.

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Sailboat racing is all about choices. Go offshore or hug the coast? Change the jib now or wait till the turning mark? Do we spend the budget on new sails or a coach? Every choice is a risk. Get it right and you gain; get it wrong and you lose. But this is sailing, and there is an existential element to the sport that exists in few others; sometimes the choices are more serious, and coming last in the race is the least of your problems. Just such a decision came up on the third leg of the 2017-18 Volvo Ocean Race from Cape Town, South Africa, to Melbourne, Australia.

It was December 12, 2017, and the whole fleet was sailing east, tracking the movement of a low-pressure system, when another, more ominous feature appeared in the forecast. The charts showed a new storm growing with spectacular speed and violence. By the 13th, it would be a fully formed monster with winds up to 65 knots at its core, approaching the fleet from the northwest. If they held to the optimal course, it would chase them down and run them over. Or they could jibe and take a slower, more northerly route that would avoid the worst of the weather.

There were seven boats in the fleet. Two took the northern route: Turn the Tide on Plastic skippered by Dee Caffari, and Team Sun Hung Kai/Scallywag led by David Witt. In both cases, the boats had relatively in­­experienced crews (compared to the rest of the fleet) and not much training together as a group before the start of the race. In both cases, the decision to go north felt like the correct one. It was unlikely they would do better than sixth or seventh even if they had chosen to stay south. They could get that result by going north with much less risk of damage, and they might pick up a place if any of the boats that stayed south suffered damage in the storm.

The opposite was true for the top three boats on the overall scoreboard: Dongfeng Race Team, MAPFRE and Vestas 11th Hour Racing. They had previously taken all three podium places in the first two legs, and all three remained south. Once the storm passed, MAPFRE and Dongfeng Race Team led the fleet by over 50 miles. Vestas 11th Hour Racing was solidly in third place with a lead of more than 100 miles from the next boat. In all three cases, it looked like the right decision to stay south, and going north would have put them out of contention for the overall lead. They also had good reason to believe they could manage the conditions in the south and avoid a bad outcome.

This left two boats: Team Brunel and Team AkzoNobel. Neither crew lacked experience. Skippering Team Brunel was Bouwe Bekking, who was on his eighth attempt at winning the race. And while Team AkzoNobel’s skipper was a first-timer in the role, Simeon Tienpont had won a couple of America’s Cups and been around the world twice before. Tienpont’s crew also included Jules Salter, on his fourth race around the planet, already counting a second place and a win. Chris Nicholson, a six-time world champion, two-time Olympian for Australia, and a ­second-place finisher as skipper among his six previous races, was also on board.

The crews of Team AkzoNobel and Team Brunel nevertheless faced a more difficult choice than the others. On the one hand, they had every right to regard themselves as peers of those on Dongfeng Race Team and MAPFRE. On the other hand, Team Brunel’s crew had sailed together a lot less than those two boats, while Team AkzoNobel had management issues that had disrupted their preparation, which resulted in several changes to senior crew in the early legs. “You can’t instantly replace those people…” Salter said when I talked to him. “If you look at this race again and again, no one has thrown the boat together six months before the start and gone out and done really well.”

Despite this inauspicious background, Team AkzoNobel and Team Brunel both decided to stay south on the theoretically optimal course. By December 14, AkzoNobel was coming up fast on the invisible limit of the Ice Exclusion Zone (a line drawn by race officials to keep them out of known areas of icebergs). They were going to have to jibe in 35 to 40 knots of windspeed. Nicholson was steering, and with all nine of the crew in position and on deck, he went for it. “We had a bad one,” he said in a video to the race office afterward. “I thought we had a good wave to go down. I should have pulled out of doing it, and we probably would have broached, but it wouldn’t have been the outcome that we had…”

They broke battens and pulled the mast track away from the spar.

It could have been a lot worse, but it could also have been a lot better. “On another day, we might have just got away with it; we might only have broken a little bit of track and one batten, and thought, ‘Oh, that was a bit on the edge and off we go.’ I’ve done that before many times,” Salter said. Instead, a crippled Team AkzoNobel limped into Melbourne in last place, well over three days after the leader, and immediately started the next race—against time to get the boat repaired and ready before the start of the next leg.

Team Brunel fared much better than Team AkzoNobel—they kept it together through the storm and finished in fourth place, less than two hours behind Vestas 11th Hour Racing and just over a day ahead of Team Sun Hung Kai/Scallywag. Both Team Brunel and Team AkzoNobel chose the fastest, southerly route; one came fourth, the other seventh and last, but—and here’s the controversial part—there’s an argument to be made that both boats made the wrong decision and took an unnecessary risk. It worked out for Team Brunel, but that still doesn’t make it the right decision, and here’s why: The crews did not fully set what might be gained by their choice against what could be lost. In both cases, the potential losses of going south outweighed the potential gains.

The upside of staying south was limited.

Could either crew realistically hope to beat the better drilled and prepared Dongfeng Race Team, MAPFRE and Vestas 11th Hour Racing in those conditions? Maybe later in the race, yes. But on this first excursion into the Southern Ocean, it was unlikely they would suddenly make the jump to the podium that had eluded them in the first two legs.

So, if there was little to no chance of a third place or better, why not go north with Turn the Tide and Scallywag? They could expect to beat both of them on that same northern route, which meant they would finish fifth at worst, with every chance of moving higher should any of the leaders have a problem or break down in the storm. And if both Team Brunel and Team AkzoNobel had chosen to go north, they would have been racing for exactly the same fourth place that they were effectively contesting in the south, but in much milder conditions with much less risk of damage or worse.

When I put this to Salter, he wasn’t ­convinced—or maybe he was. “There is a balance—I think that showed in the next Southern Ocean leg, where we went a very similar way again, and we got to a point where we thought we’re just going to back off a bit here because we know what damage can do. We did, and we dropped back a bit, not a big distance, but 50 or 100 miles behind the leading group. And on the approach to Cape Horn, we gradually caught them all up again. MAPFRE broke the mast track and the mainsail, and Vestas lost the rig soon after that as well. So, you get yourself up to third by doing that. It’s just picking the right time to play that strategy—and offshore sailing is so much about that.”

These are tough calls, and often they are made on gut feel—or after a long discussion that the most articulate and opinionated can win on the strength of their hand-­waving skills alone. There is a better way, a way to make the decision more analytical using tools based on formal decision-­making systems. The “theory of expected value” assesses the value of all the possible outcomes for each decision and multiplies each of them by the likelihood (the probability) of those outcomes. The results of each of these multiplications [value (V) x probability (P)] are then added together to give the expected value (E) for that decision: E = (V1 x P1) + (V2 x P2) and so on.

Once all the expected values have been calculated, then the decision with the highest expected value is the one to go for. It sounds complicated, but an example will make it clearer. Let’s look at the strategic choices for Team AkzoNobel and Team Brunel as the storm approached. The value for the outcome (V) will be the points available for each position in the leg. These were scored in reverse, and this leg was worth double points, so the winner got 14 points, second place 12 points, and so on down to last place, which was worth two points.

We’re going to make a few assumptions to keep the analysis relatively simple. So, we’ll assume the rest of the fleet made the same choices they did in the race and finished the leg successfully. Two boats went north, both of whom Team Brunel and Team AkzoNobel will beat if they don’t suffer damage, while three boats went south, none of whom they will beat, damage or no damage.

On the southern route, the pairs best possible result was fourth, and that would have been worth eight points. A second potential outcome was seventh and two points, if they suffered sufficient damage to stop them racing competitively but not stop racing altogether. The final possibility was that they suffered more serious damage and were unable to finish the leg, and unable to start the next one. I’m going to give this outcome a score of minus four points, equating to zero points for Leg 3 and a loss of a potential fourth-place finish in the following leg. (The next leg was not double points, so fourth scored four points.)

I’m assessing the probability of them ­racing hard all the way to the finish (and scoring fourth) as 60 percent, suffering moderate damage and coming last as 30 percent, and suffering more serious damage as 10 percent. So, now we can prepare a table:

Southern Route

We could build a much more complex table listing more outcomes and their probabilities, but I think the approach is clear with just these three options. So, the expected value (E) is the sum of the gains from each of these outcomes:

E = (0.6 x 8) + (0.3 x 2) + (0.1 x -4) = 5

On the northern route, the best possible score was fifth, and that would have netted them six points, with the outcome for moderate damage again seventh and two points. The outcome for serious damage was also minus four points.

While it wasn’t guaranteed that they would successfully complete the leg on the northern route, the chances were a lot higher, and I’m going to call it 90 percent, with a 9 percent chance of moderate damage and a 1 percent chance of serious damage. So, the table for the northern route looks as such:

Northern Route

And the expected value will be:

E = (0.9 x 6) + (0.09 x 2) + (0.01 x -4) = 5.54

This analysis produces an expected value on the northern route of 5.54 points compared to 5 points on the southern route. So, any decision based on expected value would be in favor of the northern route, supporting the earlier conclusion.

Now, maybe others would score the probabilities of damage ­differently—and it’s worthwhile to play around with the numbers to see how the outcome changes—but there’s no doubt that the analysis helps to clarify the choices. We’ve swapped hand-waving for assigning probabilities, and that has to improve any discussion and any decision made.

An expected-value analysis can help in other areas of our ­complex sport. One of the big problems facing any race-boat ­campaign, be it an America’s Cup team or a small keelboat shooting for top 10 at the national championship, is there are more ways to improve performance than time or money to pursue them. It’s always hard to make decisions about where to put limited resources when the outcomes are uncertain, and expected value provides an analytical approach, calculating an expected cost for each unit of performance gain.

The process starts by creating a list of the performance projects that are under consideration. For example, practicing for a weekend, buying new sails, or hiring a coach for the season. A simple version of the calculation would be to assess the potential speed improvement (this would be V) for three cases: the best outcome, worst outcome and most likely outcome for each option being considered. We would then assign a probability (P) to each of these possible outcomes and use these three pairs of numbers [speed improvement (V) and probability (P)] to calculate the expected value just as we did for the route choice ahead of the storm.

In this case, we can go a step further: By dividing the ­monetary cost of each option by its expected value, we can generate a cost-effectiveness ratio. This allows us to tackle the issue of balancing resources in a parallel way to balancing risks—and expected value can be just as useful in revealing the trade-offs. There are limitations to the approach; for instance, there is no allowance for how these gains will degrade with time. Nevertheless, it’s still a great way of tackling any problem where resources are being assigned in uncertain circumstances—just one of the many tough calls in sailing that the concept of expected value can help to illuminate.

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Ronnie Simpson—brimmed hat ­backward, eyes forward, a light touch on the tiller extension of his borrowed Open 50 Sparrow—is in his element. It’s a radiant September day with a pumping south­westerly raking Rhode Island Sound, and I’ve joined a pickup crew for a shakedown sail aboard the spartan 50-footer that he is just starting to get a feel for. “Learning,” he says repeatedly. “That’s what we’re doing here today. Learning.”

Sparrow is the latest handle for the well-traveled 50-footer, which began life as Newcastle Australia when Aussie Alan Nebauer commissioned it for the 1994‑95 BOC Challenge; it was rechristened Balance Bar after American Brad Van Liew took it for a second around-the-world spin in the Around Alone race four years later; it became Pegasus when tech mogul and sailing enthusiast Philippe Kahn took command shortly thereafter; and, ultimately, it was dubbed Sparrow after Simpson’s friend Whitall Stokes acquired it. Stokes still owns it, but he has basically given the keys to Simpson; the pair met while competing in the 2012 edition of the Singlehanded Transpac Race from San Francisco to Hawaii.

With Stokes’ blessing, Simpson has launched a bid to race Sparrow in the upcoming Global Solo Challenge, an eclectic, nonstop, singlehanded around-the-world contest scheduled to begin from A Coruña, Spain, in September 2023. For Simpson, however, racing in the GSC is hardly the point of the exercise—far from it. No, he is very clear this is a steppingstone to a much larger goal: to fulfill his longtime dream of nailing significant sponsorship for a full-on Vendée Globe campaign on a competitive IMOCA 60.

“If I’m being honest, I’m in way over my head financially,” Simpson tells me before we set sail. “I’m rolling the dice in a really huge manner. If doing (the GSC) on an Open 50 was the endgame, I probably wouldn’t be here. I consider this my shot for the Vendée. I don’t know why I’m so driven to do that race, but I wake up every day and I want to do it, and I go to sleep every night and I want to do it.”

Sparrow has a long and well-traveled history, but it pales to Simpson’s personal odyssey. Now 37, he has sailed more than 130,000 nautical miles and worked professionally as a racing sailor, delivery captain, charter captain, sailboat rigger and race-boat preparateur. Which is saying something, since he admits, “I never sailed a boat a day in my life until I was 23.” Which may never have happened had he not joined the Marine Corps and been nearly blown to bits in the Iraq War.

Which, indirectly, is how and why I met the man. A talented writer, long after his service he began submitting sailing articles to the magazine I was then working for, Cruising World, and I became his editor. His early submissions were pretty straightforward voyaging yarns, but his first major feature was a blockbuster, flagged on the publication’s November 2015 cover with this title: “From Fallujah to Fiji: An Iraq Veteran’s Odyssey of Redemption.”

A summary: Caught up in the patriotic fervor following 9/11, nine days after graduating from high school in Atlanta, Georgia, Simpson enlisted in the Corps, and on June 30, 2004, he was riding in a Humvee outside Fallujah when it came under heavy fire and a rocket-propelled grenade detonated just yards away. Simpson sustained major impact injuries to his body, brain and eyes, and inhaled enough of the explosion’s rapidly expanding gas to shred his left lung. He was put into a medically induced coma and woke up 18 days later—in San Antonio, Texas. He spent the next three years there, more or less recovering, but also feeling aimless and “unfulfilled.”

“I was rolling the dice in ways they should not be rolled,” he wrote. “Then one night, I discovered sailing on the internet. Within 90 days, I’d dropped out of college, quit my job, sold my house and, for $30,000, bought a 41-foot bluewater cruising boat in San Diego and moved aboard. I’d never before set foot on a sailboat, but I was resolved to sail around the world.”

In October 2008, he set forth by ­himself, bound for Hawaii. A little over a week later, he was rolled by Hurricane Norbert. He abandoned the boat and was picked up by a freighter that deposited him in the Chinese port of Shanghai. (“Twenty-one days across the Pacific!” he said.) He was out a boat, but he was also outward-bound on a cleansing adventure, which continued over the next seven months on a 9,000-mile bike trip through nine countries in Southeast Asia. For much of it, all he thought about was the Vendée Globe.

In August 2009, he flew back to California with $500 in his pocket and a single obsession in his mind: to race across oceans alone.

For $1,000, Simpson found a Cal 25 for the 2010 Singlehanded Transpac. Fatefully, a Vietnam veteran named Don Gray, who ran a nonprofit for wounded vets called Hope for the Warriors, offered him the use of his Mount Gay 30 for the race, which Simpson gratefully accepted. A repeat arrangement on a second boat called Warrior’s Wish, this time a Moore 24, was procured for the 2012 race (where he met Sparrow’s Stokes, then sailing a Tartan 10), aboard which Simpson won his class by a mere 90 minutes.

Next, he wrangled a writing assignment to cover that year’s start of the Vendée, and afterward traveled to Switzerland in hopes of making contacts to at least score a used Open 60 for the event’s next running. But he realized for the time being that raising the funds was a bridge too far, and he was itching to keep sailing. Returning to Hawaii, he landed a gig delivering a cruising boat back to the mainland, and then plonked down four of the five grand for a Cal 2-27 he found in Seattle that he named Mongo. He slapped on a solar panel and wind vane, and pointed the engineless 27-footer into the Pacific.

On his approach to Fiji in that summer of 2014, he notched an important anniversary. Precisely 10 years earlier, he had nearly lost his life in the desert. From Fallujah to Fiji indeed.

For the next several years, Simpson used both Fiji and Hawaii as bases of operation, surfing as much as possible. He upgraded his ride to a Peterson 34 called Quiver and continued to cruise the Pacific. Using the GI Bill, he earned his undergraduate degree in multimedia from Hawaii Pacific University. He handled press duties for events like the Pacific Cup and Transpac, and continued delivering yachts and racing offshore. Most importantly, he launched a business in Fiji running day charters and offering other watersports for the tourist set, which looked like a long-term plan for funding a Vendée campaign.

Until COVID-19 hit, and that scheme came to a sudden, crashing halt.

Simpson’s one tangible asset was Quiver, which he described as “all my eggs in one basket.” There was, however, no possible way to sell it in Fiji during a pandemic, so he hopped aboard, sheeted everything home, and spent 29 days hard on the trade winds to reach Honolulu, where he sold the 34-footer for $30,000. After yet another delivery to the mainland and a stint back in Hawaii running charters and earning his captain’s ticket, he flew to Los Angeles. There, he purchased a Peterson-designed Serendipity 43 cruising boat and signed up for the Baja Ha-Ha Cruisers Rally from San Diego to Mexico. His new plan was ultimately to return to Fiji and employ his new boat to relaunch his charter business.

And then he got that fateful call from his old mate, Whitall Stokes, and everything flew out the window.

Stokes had spent a good stretch of the COVID-19 years on his own excellent solo adventure, sailing Sparrow from the Pacific to the Atlantic via Cape Horn, a 17,000-­nautical mile voyage that concluded in Portland, Maine, at the Maine Yacht Center, a boatyard well-known in shorthanded circles for its exceptional refits and maintenance work. Stokes then put the boat up for sale. But finding scant interest, he decided to see if one of his mates might be interested in campaigning it. His first call was to Ryan Finn, fresh off a record-setting trip from New York to San Francisco on his proa, but he was already involved in another project. The second call was to Simpson, who did not need to be asked twice. “I immediately just said, ‘Yeah, I’m into it,’” he said.

Hasta la vista, Ha-Ha.

Right off the bat, Simpson sold the Serendipity 43 and launched a GoFundMe page that raised nearly $15,000 in a matter of hours, money that went directly into promotion and a website (ronnie​simpson​racing.com). He sailed to Newport, where we spent that epic afternoon putting Sparrow through the ringer, and then on to Annapolis, Maryland, for the US Sailboat Show, where he again put the boat on display. He scored some important sponsorships with New England Ropes, Ronstan and Wichard. He caught a plane to Amsterdam for the gigantic Marine Equipment Trade Show, the necessary hustle now in full flight.

What’s next? On to the Caribbean for a fully crewed entry in the Caribbean 600, then a qualifying Transatlantic sail to France, and the GSC in September, a unique event with a rolling start over 11 weeks for singlehanded boats from 32 to 55 feet. Hopefully, a tremendous race result attracts the notice of a deep-pocketed sponsor wishing to back a tenacious American competitor.

“I’m going to really try making this into a professional campaign,” he tells me. “I want to take everything I’ve learned from the French professionals and try to emulate that. I’m so incredibly grateful to Whitall for giving me this opportunity. Sometimes I curse him because it’s so stressful, but I’m just joking around. I’m so grateful.”

You could certainly say, in this latest chapter of what’s already a remarkable life story, Ronnie Simpson has hit the ground running. But the truth of the matter is, from the moment he landed at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune as a raw teenage recruit, he’s never, ever stopped pounding the pavement. That is a good thing because he has now stepped off on the ultramarathon of his life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thomas Ruyant won the IMOCA class in the 12th Route du Rhum-Destination Guadeloupe when he crossed the finish line off Pointe-à-Pitre at 06:51:25hrs UTC Monday November 21. His elapsed time of 11 days 17hours 36minutes 25seconds beats the course record for the class, which was 12d 04h 38min 55s, set in 2012 by Francois Gabart by 11hrs 02min 30secs.

The 41-year-old from Dunkirk adds the highly coveted solo Route du Rhum victory to the two-handed Transat Jacques Vabre race triumph he achieved a year ago with Morgan Lagravière on a similar course racing from Le Havre to Martinique.

Ruyant was tipped as solid podium contender when this legendary 3,542 miles course left Saint-Malo on Wednesday 9th November and many had him as the solo sailor most likely to break the recent winning run of the dominant Charlie Dalin (Apivia).

Although Dalin led the race from the start, and was 90 miles ahead during the passage of a ridge of light winds after the Azores, Ruyant broke west and outmaneuvered Dalin on Friday morning and took the lead which he held to the finish line this morning.

Winning from the biggest and most competitive IMOCA fleet ever assembled for a Route du Rhum, that included 38 boats and seven new builds starting from Saint-Malo, Ruyant extends an excellent record racing solo and two handed across the Atlantic, which started when he won the 2009 Mini Transat to Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. He also won the Transat AG2R in 2018 with Adrien Hardy in the Figaro.

“I make no secret of it, I am only here to win. That is all that interests me. I have one of the best boats in the fleet. There are newer boats on the start line but our 2019 Verdier design is fully optimized to the best level of development,” said Ruyant in Saint-Malo. Winning is a fitting farewell to Ruyant’s boat which he is replacing with a new IMOCA ahead of the 2024 Vendée Globe.

He was Dalin’s most dogged rival on the last Vendée ­Globe, tussling over the lead until Ruyant broke his port foil early in the Southern Ocean going on to finish sixth. Dalin was a little over seventeen miles behind this morning when Ruyant crossed the finish line to take the biggest victory of his career.

Swiss skipper Justine Mettraux (Teamwork.net) took seventh place in the IMOCA class when she crossed the finish line of the 12th Route du Rhum-Destination Guadeloupe at 02:41:35 UTC the following day. Racing on her first ever Route du Rhum, Mettraux, 35, is the first non-French skipper to finish in the IMOCA class and the first woman. 

Her elapsed time for the 3,542 miles course from Saint-Malo to Guadeloupe is 12 days 13hrs 26min 35sec. She finishes 19hrs 50mn 10sec after Ruyant.

On her first big solo transoceanic IMOCA race Mettraux, who sails the well optimised VPLP designed former Charal, has been with the leading group of boats since Cape Finisterre. She went furthest west at the Azores, passing between the islands, and has remained seventh since then, other than momentarily passing Maxime Sorel for sixth whilst the skipper of V&B Mayenne had pilot problems. 

Multi-talented Mettraux has graduated to the IMOCA through lake and inshore multihull racing, and the Figaro class, finishing seventh in 2017 and 11th in 2018 in La Solitaire du Figaro. She finished 6th in the Volvo Ocean Race with Team SCA in 2015, and won the race in 2018 with Route du Rhum Ultim class winner Charles Caudrelier onboard Dongfeng Race Team. In the last two years she has sailed thousands of training and racing miles on the IMOCAs of 11th Hour Racing with whom she will shortly race The Ocean Race. 

Welcomed into the dock at Pointe-à-Pitre’s Memorial ACTe at just before midnight local time by a strong Swiss contingent of family and friends, Mettraux looked tired after negotiating some big torrential rain squalls interspersed with light winds during the final miles round the island. 

“I am pretty broken right now,” declared Mettraux who has four siblings who are all professional sailors, all learning to sail on their native Lake Geneve. “Now I know why everyone talks about the end of this race. This is one of the biggest races you can do with a big story attached to it and even this time you hear about all the stuff that happens, people being rescued, there is a lot of history behind it and this one adds to it. I think the first bit with the fronts was pretty much what I expected but the second half was harder, tougher in the trade winds.

“The result is very positive and I see that there are still things to work on to progress and play more with the guys up front, which is very encouraging.”

As first female, Mettraux leads an exceptional performance of the top women racing in the IMOCA class, with Isabel Joschke (MACSF) lying in ninth and due to finish early Tuesday morning, local time, and Britain’s tenth placed Pip Hare (Medallia) expected in the early afternoon. 

Mettraux commented, “That is cool. Pip is not far behind and it is nice to see us all sailing well and doing well.”

Her seventh place is all the more impressive given that she has only had three months of solo preparation with Jérémie Beyou’s former Charal, training under the umbrella of his Beyou Racing.

“For me this race is the next step, having been part of La Solitaire and The Ocean Race this is another race but for me with very short preparation it was a bit special. I was thinking, ‘OK if you can make it and finish that is a big milestone’. For the short season I have had and also the program I had with 11th Hour Racing to manage to be the start of the race, to do it, and to finish well is great. It has been a pretty busy year and it is only getting busier.”

Her success today will compensate for disappointment on last year’s Transat Jacques Vabre when she and co-skipper Simon Fisher lost their mast off the NW of Spain. 

“I was thinking about that a lot, when you are sailing on your own and the conditions are the same, then you can’t help yourself.”

The post Ruyant Leads IMOCA Fleet into Rhum Finish; Mettraux first female skipper appeared first on Sailing World.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There was a long oily swell and very little wind,” Harold Cudmore recalled more than 40 years later. “We realized there was bad weather coming. So, we had the last supper because we weren’t going to eat again. We headed into nightfall… We were going to get a beating. The glass was falling something like three millibars an hour.”

It was mid-August 1979, and an unsuspecting fleet of more than 300 hundred boats was headed for the Fastnet Rock off the southern tip of Ireland. They were all racing in the Royal Ocean Racing Club’s biennial classic, the Fastnet Race. In the space of the next 24 hours, 24 crews would abandon ship, battered by 60-knot winds and 40-foot breaking waves. Eighteen lives were lost among those who were competing and those who came to rescue them. It was the greatest tragedy in modern sailboat-racing history.

At the time, I was a young dinghy sailor racing out of a small, unfashionable club a long way from Cowes and the Solent, the hub of British ocean racing. The only story that reached me from that storm was triumphant, not tragic, and its star was Harold Cudmore. An Irishman, Cudmore carved a stellar career across several decades, encompassing wins at world championships and the America’s Cup, when he was part of Bill Koch’s successful defense in 1992.

In 1979, Cudmore was racing with his countrymen as a ­tactician on a 44-foot yacht called Golden Apple of the Sun in the Irish Admiral’s Cup team. Golden Apple was, as Harold put it, “one of the glamour boats of the year,” and it was turning out to be a good year. At the start of the Fastnet, the Irish were leading 18 other national teams.

Early on the morning of August 14, with the storm reaching its peak, Golden Apple of the Sun was the first of the Admiral’s Cup yachts around the Fastnet Rock. The boat turned for the Scilly Islands in a world of monstrous waves and howling spray, and when the wind shifted far enough aft, the crew hoisted the spinnaker. Cudmore took some precautions: He had a man strapped to the mast armed with a flare gun. The instructions were simple. If the helm started to lose control, shoot the flare through the spinnaker.

The appeal to a teenage boy disconnected from the tragic realities of that storm is obvious. What nerve, what bravado. Men and women were abandoning yachts all over the Western Approaches, and here was the piratical Cudmore, hurtling through this awesome storm with the spinnaker set and only a flare gun to separate death from glory.

A few years later, I started my pro sailing career with Cudmore’s 1987 British America’s Cup team, and then we raced the Fastnet together in 1989. We even rounded the legendary lighthouse on another wild, black night—but I only recently got around to asking him about the 1979 race.

“We got around the rock, and it was 52 knots across the deck. I remember looking at the dials as we rounded,” he told me. “We were over-­canvassed, we had two reefs in the main. We speared off, and fairly shortly afterwards, when it began to really kick in, we dropped the mainsail. Later we dropped the jib and replaced it with the storm jib. [The wind] was west and then round to northwest. We ended up running back to the Scillys.”

This was the moment for the spinnaker. “We survived the night driving pretty hard, and then come morning it began to ease up and the sea began to build some length into it, and so it was less threatening,” Cudmore continued. “We put the main back up, and I remember saying to the guys, ‘We’re down to 35 knots, we should put the spinnaker up.’ It was the only time—you know what I’m like in a boat—the only time I had a strike. ‘We will not!’ So, we settled for a boomed-out number-two jib. The guys were up on deck to do that when the rudder broke.”

It was the end of their Fastnet. There had been no spinnaker, no flare gun. The crew of Golden Apple had eventually chosen to take a proffered lift ashore with a helicopter that was finishing operations for the day. “The only thing of note that came from that was the note we left on the chart table saying, ‘Gone for lunch,’” Cudmore added. The yacht was later safely recovered, but they were done—the race, the Admiral’s Cup, all gone.

When they were running before a storm, the skippers were said to have chained a man to the main mast, armed with an ax to cut the halyards if the helmsman lost control. If there was one thing that boats built to the International Offshore Rule didn’t need with the spinnaker up, it was extra weight near the bow.

I told Cudmore the story I’d heard more than four decades ago, and his reaction was immediate. “That’s an old story that dates a generation before my time. I heard the story back when I was a kid. It’s an apocryphal story,” he said, before explaining further. “I think the story related back to after the second World War, when you could buy these Very pistols, and the word was…that if you were caught with a sail up in heavy conditions and the halyard jams, what do you do? You fire a Very pistol into the sail—seamanship in the 1950s!”

I did some research, and the story has even older antecedents, back with the clipper ships. When they were running before a storm, the skippers were said to have chained a man to the main mast, armed with an ax to cut the halyards if the helmsman lost control. If anything, the story about the square rigger is more plausible. If there was one thing that boats built to the International Offshore Rule didn’t need with the spinnaker up, it was extra weight near the bow. I suspect that this knowledge, once acquired, was the reason I took so long to talk to Harold Cudmore about it—why wreck a great tale with the truth?

John Rousmaniere’s book Fastnet, Force 10 is probably the most authoritative account of the storm, and he tells of the need for the survivors to talk it down, to somehow “inoculate ourselves against the awareness that, at its worst, the storm was much more dangerous than, say, the 1972 Bermuda Race gale, and that there had been excellent reason to be frightened.” So, was the sailing community reaching for a time-honored myth and recasting it to feel more comfortable with the ferocious challenge of that storm?

If so, there is a reason to puncture these tall tales of daring with a cold dose of reality. In reshaping the experience in this way, the flare-gun story feeds our natural overconfidence and makes these storms less frightening. The effect might be slight, but no one should be going out there without fully understanding what they might be taking on. “It was a pretty wild night, no doubt about it,” Cudmore told me, 40 years too late. “I would be terrified if I was out there today, knowing what I know.”

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