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.

Collegiate keelboat ­sailing does not get nearly the amount of attention it deserves. While offshore teams were long seen as a secondary option for sailors either too big or not experienced enough to compete in dinghy fleets, several teams are shifting away from traditional collegiate dinghy sailing to focus on the growing number of competitive collegiate offshore regattas held across the country. In the 2022 college offshore season, a new squad made its mark on the world of collegiate keelboat sailing: the University of Wisconsin.

Wisconsin is an unlikely candidate to win in offshore sailing; as a club team that practices on an inland lake, the university is hard-pressed to match the resources of government-­funded teams, such as the US Naval Academy, or teams located near coastal sailing hotspots, like the College of Charleston or the University of Rhode Island. However, Wisconsin’s record speaks for itself: Having won the 2022 Intercollegiate Offshore Regatta in Larchmont, New York, and the 2022 Great Lakes Intercollegiate Offshore Regatta in Chicago, it is clear the big-boat Badgers are a force to be reckoned with.

“It’s been really cool to see the Midwest be represented in college offshore sailing,” University of Wisconsin team captain Kate Thickens says. “When I was a freshman, offshore sailing wasn’t cool. Now there are a lot more people on our team interested in sailing big boats, so we are going to as many offshore regattas as we can.”

Wisco’s development of its keelboat program represents a national effort to increase big-boat access to younger sailors. The Larchmont and Great Lakes Intercollegiate Offshore Regattas, hosted by the Storm Trysail Club, are one prong of a sport-wide approach to increasing youth keelboat participation. Over the past decade, regattas such as the Harbor Cup in Los Angeles, the South Carolina Offshore Regatta and the Lake Erie Intercollegiate Offshore Regatta have sprung up to support decades-old regattas such as the IOR series and the US Naval Academy’s Kennedy and McMillan cups in creating a year-round, competitive collegiate offshore racing circuit. The Intercollegiate Sailing Association, College Sailing’s governing body, is also taking steps to bring offshore sailing into collegiate sailing’s fold, now recognizing key offshore events such as the Los Angeles Harbor Cup and Southern Collegiate Offshore Regatta as ICSA events despite them not being hosted by universities.

The addition of collegiate big-boat sailing has allowed swaths of youth sailors who outgrew or lost interest in dinghy sailing to continue to compete at a high level. “Offshore is the land of the misfits,” Thickens says. “It’s a great option for people who are told that they are just too big for college sailing. Obviously, with dinghy sailing, people are very weight-conscious, so they don’t always want somebody that is 6-foot-4 in their boat. I think people like that have definitely found more of a home on the offshore team, where they aren’t being told that they [are] too big. In fact, people will say, ‘Wow, we want you as our mast guy or gal or trimmer because you’re taller and stronger.’”

Competing in a variety of boats during offshore regattas provides the opportunity for new keelboat sailors to learn the skills necessary to continue on after graduation. “A lot of the time, we’ve never even practiced with the exact group that is competing in the event because we’re still building our offshore team,” Thickens says. “I’d say the majority of our effort is toward bringing new sailors into keelboats and teaching people how a winch works or how to fly a spinnaker.”

Access to keelboats remains a challenge for most teams, while the traditional powerhouses of offshore sailing enjoy waterfront facilities with a variety of donated keelboats to train on. The Badgers practice once a week using the Hoofer Sailing Club’s Tartan 10s on inland Lake Mendota. Competing in boats ranging from J/70 sportboats to J/109s and Dehler Optima 101s, the team often does not have the opportunity to train in its class of boat until the day before the regatta. “One thing that helps us do well at events is having a full day of practice on the day before the regatta,” team helmsman Jack Schweda says. “A lot of the time, most or all of the crew hasn’t sailed that specific type of boat before, so the practice day is a huge help.”

What the Badgers lack in facilities, however, they make up for through community support, relying on alumni and friends of the team for coaching. “We’ve had a lot of good chalk talks in the past year or two from alumni and guest speakers,” Schweda says. “Everybody on the keelboat team comes to these chalk talks and learns about how each position works—even positions that they might not be doing. I think that helps because each sailor hears it all; when a sailor gets put on the roster doing a position they have never done before, at least they have been to those chalk talks where they’ve heard the information and can try to work toward doing a good job.”

Located hundreds of miles from the venues where they compete, team members drive through the night in their personal vehicles to sail against top teams. Managing logistical challenges that other teams take for granted brings the team together, Thickens says. “Our drive to regattas is normally anywhere between 15 to 17 hours in the car, but I honestly think that it’s a positive thing. Yes, we are tired, but the drive creates chemistry with the group. This sailing team is one big family—there is no other group of people that I’d rather be packed into a minivan with and be stuck in the back seat. As a freshman, it was really cool to be thrown into these vans with older people on the team and get to know them; there’s really no better way to get to know people.”

While Wisco has been unique in its success in the past year, it represents a growing number of club teams that are taking up offshore sailing and placing on the podium at the highest levels.

While Wisco has been unique in its success in the past year, it represents a growing number of club teams that are taking up offshore sailing and placing on the podium at the highest levels. The similarly club-funded and freshwater University of Toledo placed second in the 2022 Larchmont Intercollegiate Offshore Regatta’s J/105 fleet and won the PHRF A division of the 2022 Lake Erie Intercollegiate Offshore Regatta.

The rise of such teams affirms that collegiate offshore sailing now allows many new or club-status teams an opportunity to take their sailing programs to the next level. While the Navy-hosted McMillan and Kennedy cups still featured the same decadeslong champion keelboat teams, events such as the Larchmont and Great Lakes Intercollegiate Offshore Regattas saw a plethora of club and developing teams the likes of Virginia Tech, Ohio State and Syracuse.

Offshore sailing may also be the way forward for new teams looking to establish themselves in the realm of competitive collegiate sailing and provide opportunities for sailors to thrive in the sport as experienced keelboat crews. Connecting collegiate sailors with race-boat owners provides a viable and sustainable solution to supporting local racing scenes with a deeper and younger pool of available crews.

The post Wisconsin Sailing Goes Big 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.

At 05:20:28 UTC on April 2, in Itajaí, Brazil, Team Malizia—Boris Herrmann, Will Harris, Nico Lunven, Rosalin Kuiper and onboard reporter Antoine Auriol—glided across the finish line off Ocean Live Park to win Leg 3 of The Ocean Race, collecting 5 points in the process. The win comes on the 35th day of racing and after 14,714 nautical miles of intense, close-quarters racing. 

Early in the leg, it didn’t appear likely that we would see Team Malizia at the front of the fleet for the finish. Within days of the start in Cape Town the team discovered serious damage to the top of their mast and needed to devote nearly two full days to effecting difficult repairs at sea, with an uncertain result.

Meanwhile, Team Holcim-PRB had escaped from the rest of the fleet and was a full weather system and nearly 600 miles ahead. On board Malizia, the makeshift reinforcement of the top of the spar was successful and the chase was on. 

By the time the teams reached the Leg 3 scoring gate, Malizia had closed to less than 200 miles from Holcim-PRB, moving up into second place and collecting 4 points.

As the fleet raced south of New Zealand and into the southern depths of the Pacific Ocean, the game closed up significantly within 10 miles and exchanging the lead one to the other as they raced along the ice exclusion zone.

During one of the worst periods of the leg, with the boat lurching a violent sea state, Rosalin Kuiper was tossed from her bunk and suffered a head injury. With a focus on getting Rosie stabilized and recovering, the crew was taxed even more, down to a three-person watch rotation for the rest of the leg.

A day out from Cape Horn and Team Malizia had a narrow advantage of less than 30 miles, leading the fleet around the iconic passage and winning the Roaring Forties trophy in the process. 

The final push north was hard-fought. Team Holcim-PRB and Team Malizia were racing within in sight of each other – exchanging body blows all the way up the South American coast. 

The penultimate night – Friday night – was a battle through yet another fierce storm, with gusts of 50 knots screaming off the coast and whipping up the sea. Boris Herrmann and his crew on Team Malizia handled the conditions with aplomb, and emerged into the daybreak with a 60-mile lead after Holcim-PRB did a crash jibe overnight and suffered damage. This was the largest lead any team had enjoyed since New Zealand.

On the last day of the leg and into the final night at sea Team Malizia sailed fast and confident towards the finishing line, extending its lead to more than 80 miles and taking an historic win.

“Dreaming of doing The Ocean Race, and this amazing leg through the Southern Ocean, finishing it after all the trouble we had early on, and winning is amazing,” Herrmann said. “Four weeks ago, if I had been told ‘Repair your mast because you might win this leg’ I would have not believed it and said that’s not possible, we are too far behind and can’t push the boat anymore. But it worked out beyond our expectations.”

In fact, on the first days of Leg 3, it appeared as if the early race dominance of Kevin Escoffier’s Team Holcim-PRB was going to be repeated over the longest Leg in the history of The Ocean Race. 

Escoffier and his team were aggressive from the start gun for Leg 3 and eased away in tricky conditions to build a lead that would put them a full weather system and nearly 600 miles ahead.

But in doing so, they bumped up against a ridge of high pressure and very light winds that wouldn’t let them pass. The trailing boats made back nearly all the miles. 

“We saw quite early this was likely to happen,” Escoffier said dockside after securing second place. “But we kept pushing and pushing because we knew that getting out early could be important, especially for the scoring gate.”

As it turned out Team Holcim-PRB would score the maximum points at the gate, to remain perfect. But the rest of the fleet was back in touch and the lead would change often on the race to Cape Horn, where Malizia led, and again up into the south Atlantic. 

For Escoffier, the points gained on this Leg solidify his position at the top of the leaderboard. 

“We always said at the start of this leg that the first job is to get to Itajaí with the crew and the boat in good shape and we have done this,” he said. “To also get 9 out of 10 points for the leg is very good of course and sets us up well for the rest of the race.”

The post Team Malizia Secures Epic Leg 3 Win appeared first on Sailing World.

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.

In Sydney, Australia, it’s called a southerly change, and it does what it says on the tin. It’s a shift from a northeasterly summer sea breeze to a southerly wind, often driven by the arrival of a cold front and an ­associated low-­pressure ­system sweeping up from the Southern Ocean. The waves meet the shallowing floor of the Bass Strait, and the southerly wind meets the East Australian Current, flowing south at around 2 knots along Australia’s east coast. The combination can make the ocean off the southeastern tip of Australia one of the roughest pieces of water in the world. And as it’s about halfway between Sydney and Hobart, the words “southerly change” can have an ominous ring for sailors preparing for the start of the annual Sydney Hobart Yacht Race.

“When we saw the race [weather] briefing, it was a little bit fuzzy,” Hobart veteran John Quinn says. He had been speaking to me earlier this year but recalling events almost three decades ago, back in 1993. “It could have been tough; they were a bit uncertain.” The crew’s biggest concern the morning of the start was the new mainsail. “We were tossing up whether to use it or not, and we came to the decision to use it. As it turned out, the [southerly change and accompanying low-pressure system] was a lot worse than what we thought it was going to be.”

With winds reaching over 70 knots, it was equivalent to a low‑grade hurricane, and Quinn and the crew aboard his J/35, MEM, hit the full force of the storm in the Bass Strait on Monday night, December 27, 1993. Before midnight, a wave came out of nowhere. “It came from an odd direction. It was a big wave. Picked us up, threw us straight over on her side. We had three down below, fortunately. All of us on deck, I think bar one, went over the side. I got washed straight out of the cockpit. And when my weight hit the harness, it busted. It was a harness inside the jacket that had been well cared for; it must’ve split the webbing or whatever happened. But anyway, I ended up in the water,” Quinn says.

The crew hit the man-­overboard button and recorded the yacht’s position, which was transmitted with the mayday call, and the search started. The water temperature was about 18 degrees C. The predicted time to exhaustion and unconsciousness is between two and seven hours at that temperature, with the outside survival time at 40 hours. It was the only thing he had going for him. “We’re talking about seas of on average 8 meters, and they’re breaking,” Quinn says. “So, the chances of seeing one individual off a yacht in that sort of condition in the middle of the night—and it was in the middle of the night—are sweet f— all.”

It was around 5 a.m. on Tuesday morning when the oil tanker Ampol Sarel arrived at the search zone. The captain, Bernie Holmes, started at the original point where Quinn had gone overboard, then shut down the engines and let the ship drift downwind. He turned on all the lights so she would coast silently through the search area lit up like a Christmas tree.

Brent Shaw, a seaman aboard the tanker, heard Quinn’s cries. “I was on the wing of the bridge, portside lookout, wearing my raincoat and rain hat when I thought I heard a scream,” he told reporters. “With all the wind and rain, I wasn’t sure, so I took off my hat, and then I positively heard the scream. I directed my searchlight toward the area—and there he was, waving and screaming.”

Quinn was about 20 meters away from the 100,000-ton tanker. “The scary part was we spotted him, and then he drifted out of the searchlight, and then he was in the dark again,” Shaw said.

The Ampol Sarel crew radioed to other search boats that they had seen Quinn, and one that heard the message was the 40-footer Atara. Its crew had already had their own share of adventure that night. One of the crew was 21-year-old Tom Braidwood, who would go on to a career with America’s Cup and Volvo Ocean Race teams. “It got to that stage where you couldn’t see the waves in the troughs. The white foam was filling all the troughs up. And the only way we knew—you’d hear the wave coming like a train and you’d be like, ‘Here we go.’” 

Eventually, one of those waves had rumbled in and hit the sails of Atara with such force that it snapped the rig. They cut it away, but not before it smashed a hole in the hull. Atara was now in serious trouble. They started pulling the bunks off the side of the boat and using them to try to shore up the structure because it was caving in under the wave motion. It was at this moment that they heard about Quinn and diverted to the search area—even as they struggled to keep their own boat afloat.

“We got to the area, and we’re all on deck with torches down each side of the boat. And we’re motoring around and next thing you know, we saw him and it was like… Talk about the luckiest guy on Earth. Well, unlucky falling in, but…”

They struggled to get him out of the water, lost him once, and had to do a couple of passes to get back to him. “He was drifting on and off the boat, and it’s hard to keep him there,” Braidwood says. “I had a harness on, so I turned around to the guys and said, ‘I’m going to go get him.’ I had my harness tied to a rope as well. I dove in and swam out to him. And as soon as I got him, it was like, uuuuhhhh, you know, like ­complete collapse.”

Braidwood got him back to the boat, and after an immense struggle, they got him on board. “We dragged him down below, and he was hypothermic because all he had on was thermals and a dinghy vest, like a little life jacket, a bit padded. That’s the thing that saved his life, you know, because he didn’t have a jacket, a wet-weather jacket, or anything.”

I first heard this story in Sydney, not long after that Hobart, which I had raced aboard Syd Fischer’s 50-foot Ragamuffin. It took me nearly 30 years to get around to tracking down Quinn and asking him what he was doing in the water in hurricane conditions with no life jacket on.

The flotation vest Quinn was wearing enabled him to handle the breaking waves—so long as he was strong enough to keep himself afloat with its limited support.

Quinn was no naive newbie to sailing, neither the Hobart nor the risks. He was brought up in Sydney and spent his childhood in and around the water. “I did my first Hobart race at the age of 21, so I started ocean racing probably about the age of 18,” he told me. By the time he was in his late 20s, he was part owner of a 33-footer, his first ocean racing boat, and over the next two decades he upgraded a couple of times, did a lot more Hobarts, and then bought MEM.

“I had on a Musto flotation vest. They were more for warmth, but they gave you a little bit of flotation. I also had on a normal jacket, but it was weighing me down, so I got rid of it. And I had sea boots on, which I got rid of.”

But what about the life jacket? “We had normal life jackets. You remember how bulky those things were. You can’t get around the boat on them. They’re terrible things.”

The life jackets on board MEM were of the type that relies on closed-cell ­polyethylene foam for buoyancy. They were big and could be awkward to wear, and made it difficult to move around the boat. So, Quinn decided not to wear it—despite the fact that if ever there was a time to be wearing a life jacket, this was it.

“We were relying on our safety harnesses really. You don’t expect to end up in the water if you’re using a safety harness, not when you’re clipped on,” he says.

He chose the harness as his personal safety gear, and now the harness had failed him.

He tried a couple of ­survival techniques he had picked up, including sealing the foul-weather jacket and filling it with air to provide buoyancy. “There’s no way that that will work in real life,” he says.

He also tried pulling into a fetal position to protect himself as the waves hit him. “That was one of the worst ideas they ever came up with because you get one of these waves that picks you up and it chucks you around—you get a roller coming up, and it just picks you up and it just throws you. I mean, it’ll throw a 4-ton yacht. I tried that first, decided that was a really bad idea.”

The problem was the breaking waves, the dangerous part being the white water. “What I ended up doing was […] what we always used to do when the waves came at us when we were surfing: I just dived under it. The flotation vest wasn’t so buoyant that it stopped me [from] doing that, so I was able to get through them. I was looking around for lights all the time, of course. Doing a fair bit of praying, remembering all the fine things at home, and wondering what the hell I’m doing there, that sort of stuff.”

This technique would have been impossible in one of the life jackets aboard MEM. “[They’re] very buoyant—I would’ve hated to have been out there with one of those things on,” he says.

Crew Overboard: Four Recovery Methods

The ­flotation vest Quinn was wearing enabled him to handle the breaking waves—so long as he was strong enough to keep himself afloat with its limited support. “I was getting toward the end of it. I’d been through the shakes. I started to shiver and shake pretty badly, and the shakes were just going, and then all of a sudden, I saw all these lights, and I swam toward the lights. As it turned out, it was a great big oil tanker, and she was coming down at me. And I yelled, and then I realized this thing’s going to run over the top of me, so I ended up swimming away.”

There was another bad moment when the Ampol Sarel’s searchlight lost him. “No sooner had the light gone off me and I remember going, ‘Oh, s—,’ and looking around, and then I saw the port and ­starboard lights of Atara.”

It was 5:09 a.m. when Quinn was pulled out of the water, five hours and 27 minutes after he went overboard.

“How could anyone do that?” Braidwood asks, reflecting on Quinn’s feat of endurance. Exhausted and hypothermic, the crew of Atara got him into a bunk with one of the only crew who was still dry. “We had the space blankets around him, jamming cups of tea into him,” as they resumed the passage home, Braidwood says. They were ready for this—they had the equipment and knew what to do.

Quinn was lucky—lucky the flotation vest had allowed him to handle the waves, lucky to be found before he ran out of the strength needed to help its limited buoyancy keep him afloat, and lucky to be found by a well-crewed and prepared boat. But again, only just… “Atara was in a total mess,” Quinn says. “I don’t know what they were doing there. The mast had come down. She was totally delaminated. I mean, she was a total wreck.”

Braidwood was just as aware of the frailty of their position. “I remember he came to, and he just turns around and he goes, ‘Oh, thanks guys. Thanks fellas.’ You know, and I turned around and I said, ‘Well, don’t thank us yet mate because your ambulance is about to sink.’”

The indomitable streak that had got Quinn to that point came out in his reply. “When they told me that the ambulance wasn’t in too good a shape, I think I said something rude. Like, ‘Can I wait for the next one?’

“The first thing I did when I came back was I threw out all the life jackets,” he says. “And I put inflatable life jackets on board the boat for everybody. Because inflatable life jackets allow you to control your buoyancy in the same way as a diver can control their buoyancy. And that I regard as absolutely critical because I think with a full life jacket [and] those waves picking you up, I don’t think you’d last very long.

“I made a number of fundamental mistakes,” he continues. “The first thing is that I shouldn’t have been racing a boat that night in the Sydney to Hobart Race. [It’s] a beautiful little coastal racing boat, the J/35, magnificent little boat, but [it’s] not designed to go into that sort of weather. The second mistake I made was when I realized we were going into that sort of weather, I should have pulled the plug and just simply peacefully sailed into Twofold Bay. Shouldn’t have allowed myself to get out of control, I know better than that. They were the two fundamental mistakes.”

These mistakes all had a theme. We could call it ­overconfidence—a deep belief that things were going to be all right, that nothing really bad was going to happen. It allows us to do things that, in hindsight, particularly after our luck has run out, seem reckless. At one point in the worst of the weather during that Hobart, I had unclipped my harness on the weather rail and slid down across the aft deck to get to the leeward runner. My luck held and I got away with it, but not everyone does.

There is an innate bias to overconfidence in all of us, and it’s so hard to overcome because it’s instinctive—we don’t stop to think things through properly.

It would only have taken a moment’s pause to realize how foolish it was to be sliding around the open aft deck of a 50-footer without being clipped. I did not pause. I just acted because I had this inner innate confidence that it would be all right. This instinctive overconfidence is a cognitive bias. These biases (and there are many of them) are hard-wired ­predispositions to types of behavior. The head of the TED organization, Chris Anderson, interviewed Daniel Kahneman (the Nobel Prize winner who, along with Amos Tversky, was responsible for the original work on cognitive bias) and asked if Kahneman could inject one idea into the minds of millions of people, what would that idea be? Kahneman replied, “Overconfidence is really the enemy of good thinking, and I wish that humility about our beliefs could spread.”

There is an innate bias to overconfidence in all of us, and it’s so hard to overcome because it’s instinctive—we don’t stop to think things through properly. In the conclusion to his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman says: “Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues. I have improved only in my ability to recognize situations in which errors are likely. And I have made much more progress in recognizing the error of others than my own.”

Despite Daniel Kahneman’s pessimism—and speaking as someone who has made some bad choices—I’m going to keep trying to do better. It’s surprising how often we can mitigate risks with little more than a moment’s thought. It can be as simple as putting a strobe light in the pocket of your foul-weather gear. Or as simple as throwing a shovel and a couple of blankets in the back of the car at the start of the winter.

There are a few strategies we can employ to help us overcome the pernicious bias of overconfidence, ways to learn to slow down and pay better attention. One of them is to build habits to review risk whenever there’s time to do so. I sailed in the 1993 Hobart Race with Neal McDonald, who went on to sail with six Volvo Ocean Race teams, twice as skipper, leading Assa Abloy to a second-place finish. He developed the habit of playing a “what if” game during any pause in the action. At any moment, he could start a pop quiz: “What do we do if that sail breaks?” or “What’s the repair if the ­steering gear fails?”

McDonald was constantly looking for solutions to ­problems he did not yet have, and it’s a powerful tool in raising everyone’s awareness of risk. A more formal mechanism that does much the same job is the pre-­mortem, an idea that came from research psychologist Gary Klein. The principle is straightforward: Before any major decision goes forward, all the people involved in it gather for a pre-mortem in which they project forward a year after the decision was enacted. The basis for the meeting is that the decision was a disaster, and everyone must explain why. Klein thinks that it works because it frees people to speak up about the weaknesses of a project or plan.

While McDonald’s “what if” game and the pre-mortem are good at revealing what might otherwise be hidden risks—like the bulky life jackets—there is another strategy that can force a rethink on what’s an acceptable risk and what’s not. This one was prevalent within the OneWorld America’s Cup team in the early 2000s, where almost any assertion could be met with the riposte, “You wanna put some money on that?” And I can tell you, the prospect of losing cold, hard cash forces one to reconsider any misguided ­optimism very quickly.

Annie Duke, a former professional poker player, goes into this strategy in some detail in her book Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts. Along with Don Moore’s Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely, it’s an excellent book to help understand our disposition for risk-taking—no bad thing when you consider the consequences of hauling up an anchor or untying the dock lines. For all its wonder and immense beauty, the sea is fundamentally hostile to human life; without the support of a ship or boat, our survival has a limited time horizon. If you’re not ­convinced, just ask John Quinn.

The post How John Quinn Didn’t Drown appeared first on Sailing World.

An excerpt from By Roger Vaughan’s novel “Coming About.”

The video re-ran several times a year in Andy’s dreams. It was always the same, down to the last detail, and it never failed to leave him with a hollow, perplexed feeling. If the conditions were right it could play in broad daylight, as it did this particular July afternoon, induced by the monotony of riding the rail of his father’s boat. Worthy, a competitive fifty-footer, was sailing upwind in a vacillating but strong flow of warm breeze, the hull rising and falling with a slow, roller-coaster rhythm through the big ground swells off Newport, Rhode Island. Such conditions provoked either seasickness or ennui. Andy and the rest of the crew were facing westward into a late-afternoon sun that had dropped out of the high overcast and was turning the water’s surface into a million sparkling, hypnotic diamonds. The soft, white-noise wash of water against the hull as the boat slid down the backsides of the broad swells helped bring on Andy’s reverie. His head drooped against the lifelines. His eyes closed.

It was ten years ago. Andy and his friend Robby were fourteen, goofing on their mountain bikes at the 57th Street entrance to Manhattan’s Central Park, waiting for Mitchell Thomas, Andy’s father. And there came the great man, on cue, promptly at six thirty p.m., dapper as hell on his spotless, dark-green Raleigh three-speed he’d special-ordered from England, the one with the enclosed metal chain guard, chromed brake rods, narrow fenders pinstriped in gold, and natty wicker basket. His Mark Cross briefcase with his Brooks Brothers suit jacket neatly folded on top were strapped to the rear carrier. His necktie bearing the burgee of the New York Yacht Club had been flipped over his shoulder by the headwind.

Every time he saw Mitchell this way Andy felt as if he were watching one of those TV commercials where a period person was presented in black and white against a contemporary scene in color. Not a hair on Mitchell’s head as much as fluttered in the breeze. Mitchell may as well have been a paid actor for all the paternal connection he inspired in Andy at these times.

Mitchell didn’t stop, didn’t speak, just nodded to the boys with his habitual, all-purpose executive grin, and rode into the park. The boys fell in behind him like dogs at heel. Robby peeled off at 72nd Street, heading for his family’s apartment on the East Side. Andy got distracted by irresistible, off-path opportunities, skidding through some soft new landscaping, jumping off a wall, and crashing through a hedge and nearly running over a couple entwined behind it until he heard Mitchell’s angry shout. He turned his bike sharply and quickly caught up to his father.

Mitchell seemed more upset than usual about Andy fooling around on his daily ride home. Something had to be bugging him. What a jerk, his father. How could this man even be his father? “Keep up,” Mitchell warned in that terse way of his. Keep up. Yeah, right. Hey Mr. Movie Guy on your stupid three-speed, you keep up! Andy pulled a wheelie and took off, leaving his father shouting after him. There would be hell to pay, but his mother would intervene, as usual. Even at fourteen, Andy understood that Mitchell didn’t dare mess with his mom. It was her company, her money. Andy would speed around the pedestrian tunnel up ahead and lie in wait for his father, give him a scare. The predator in the park.

Tucked behind a big tree, Andy waited. But Mitchell didn’t come out of the tunnel. Maybe he’d taken a different route? Not Mitchell. Andy thought he heard voices; it sounded like an argument but it was hard to be sure against the dull jungle roar of the city that invaded the park. Then he did hear someone yell. Twice. It was Mitchell’s voice, for sure, only he couldn’t make out the word. It did sound like one word, repeated. But the gunshot, amplified by the tunnel, was unmistakable. It sent a chill up Andy’s spine, momentarily freezing him to the big oak tree. Two guys emerged from the tunnel on the run, split up, and disappeared into the gathering dusk. Andy waited, fear constricting his chest. He jumped when a squirrel scampered away above him. It took all his will to leave the protection of the old oak, and not to pedal full speed toward the West Side and home. He coasted cautiously down the slight incline and into the tunnel.

Mitchell was on his knees in the semi-darkness, the precious Raleigh down at a bad angle beside him. He was clutching his right forearm. When he looked up, his face was drawn with pain and shock. When he saw Andy, the pain mixed with rage. Andy was fixed on the blood seeping between Mitchell’s fingers, slick and dark. Andy’s throat was dry. He felt sick.

Mitchell struggled to his feet, sputtering incoherently. Andy’s rising nausea combined with his fear to freeze him in place. His feet felt glued to the damp concrete of the tunnel floor. He watched his father struggle to regain his feet and stagger toward him, maniacal in his disarray, howling with force that spewed saliva. Andy felt it on his face. “You . . . bastard!” Mitchell screamed at him, the veins in his neck like ropes. The word was expelled with such power that it blew past Mitchell’s vocal chords as part screech. “You BASTARD!” Mitchell half turned away only to snap back, his left hand releasing the fresh wound just long enough to smack Andy on the side of his head with a savage growl and all the strength he could muster.

Still astride his bike, Andy went down, little points of light twinkling behind his eyes. He hadn’t seen the hand that felled him, he had been so intently focused on the blood-soaked shirtsleeve covering where the bullet had entered. Luckily for Andy, Mitchell’s wild swing had only partially connected, but it had left blood on his face. His father’s blood.

Even as he went down and before normal vision returned Andy was reflexively scrabbling away on hands and knees, dragging his bike, somehow getting it upright, running, jumping on one pedal and pushing hard, swinging into the saddle, bouncing once off the rough stone wall of the tunnel, pedaling with all he had along the familiar paths, his breath choked by sobs; hearing the crash, but never seeing the taxi that swerved into a parked car to miss him as he sprinted blindly out of the park onto Central Park West.

“Tacking.”

Mitchell’s voice brought Andy back with a start. The crewmen on either side of him chuckled. “Hey, jus’ grabbin’ a siesta,” one of them cracked as they jackknifed their legs in and scampered across the deck to the new high side as the boat changed tacks.

Andy had become a scruffy twenty-four-year-old. He was twenty pounds overweight with a habitually unkempt shock of thick dark hair. His clothes looked slept-in. He looked like a person with a habitual hangover. That was often the case. Mitchell’s crew was a spit-and-polish lot. They made the midshipmen aboard the Naval Academy boats look slightly tarnished. Andy would have stood out in any crowd. On this boat, he was a sore thumb.

Worthy was on the new tack for twenty minutes. But they were closing the layline, that imaginary path that would take them to the finish line on the other tack. Close also was Fetching, their main rival in this regatta. The two boats had been practically match racing all weekend. They’d split tacks as they’d entered the passage marked by Brenton Light. Fetching had chosen the east side, a move that would put it on starboard tack with right-of-way when they came together before the finish line. Whoever won that cross would take the race and the regatta. As Worthy tacked again, Andy heard the bowman announce that Fetching was also tacking.

Andy was the jib trimmer on the new tack. He took a third turn on the big winch drum and hauled hard and fast on the sheet. Given his slack look, his proficiency was surprising. “Trim,” he said quietly to the man on the coffee-grinder handles. “Stop.” Andy watched the jib, watched the speedo on the mast climbing quickly toward the optimum. “Three clicks, one more, stop.”

“Get it right,” Mitchell said from the wheel.

“It is.”

“It better be.”

Crewmen on the rail exchanged looks while Andy quietly simmered. Michell never stopped ragging Andy. The great Mitchell Thomas, hail fellow, captain of industry, excellent sailor. As the twentieth century drew to a close, he was one of the few amateurs who still steered his own boat and held his own in a fleet full of professionals. Good old Mitch. Good old son of a bitch was Andy’s version. Those who fawned over him should have to live just one day with him. They crewed for him for only one reason: he frequently won.

“Have we got them?”

Mitchell was addressing Andy, the only one on the lee side, the one with the best view of Fetching. The big genoa effectively blocked the view for the rest. For a moment, Mitchell silently cursed Rummans, his sailmaker and deck boss, for having assigned Andy to trim on the burdened port tack. Then he remembered. Jonesy, the regular port trimmer, had taken ill. Couldn’t make it. Better to have Andy there than some untested new guy. That was the theory anyway.

“No problem.”

“Get that weight outboard.” Mitchell addressed the crew in terse tones. “Let’s have it quiet.”

Intensity permeated the deck like heavy oil. There was no chatter from the railbirds. The mains’l trimmer’s eyes flicked from sail to instruments to sail. He took one click on the traveler, pulling the boom to windward maybe an inch. In the lulls, Andy eased the jib sheet an inch, called for a click or two of trim in the puffs.

“How we doing?” Mitchell stood erect, his face locked in concentration.

Andy said, “No problem.”

Sitting furthest forward on the rail, the bowman stretched himself forward to grab a quick look through the clear plastic window sewn into the genoa. “Close,” he muttered to no one in particular.

Andy heard him. “No problem.”

“By how much?” Mitchell demanded.
“Enough.”

Conley, the tactician, interrupted the edgy father–son exchange. “Are we good? If not we’ll tack early, lee-bow them, hope to give them some bad air, maybe pick up a header we can tack on. Better to cross them and then tack, pin them outside until we can lay the finish line.”

“We’re good.” Andy sounded confident.

Head down, the bowman stared into the bow wave under his feet, shook his head, started to speak, then decided to stay out of it. But he could feel it coming. It wouldn’t be the first time Andy and the old man had gotten it on.
“Starboard!”

The warning hail came from Fetching. The right-of-way boat always made a fuss trying to rattle the confidence of the crew hoping to cross. Making a close cross from the burdened position took a lot of cool, a lot of guts, and a keen eye. It was like running a stop sign when you knew a car was coming. The helmsman had to steer perfectly under pressure, maintaining the optimum combination of boat speed and heading. Large sailboats didn’t travel very fast, but they carried great momentum. Boats the size of Worthy and Fetching, with a combined weight of around 80,000 pounds, would be coming together at a closing speed of roughly twenty knots (twenty-three miles per hour). That was like two lightly loaded eighteen-wheelers colliding head-on when each was moving faster than ten miles an hour. Boats had no brakes. And the water they were moving through was an unstable platform. Misjudge a close cross, and the havoc of a collision was a good possibility. Damage could be extensive. The mast could come down. There could be serious injuries. The person making the call had to be very good, very confident in himself and in his helmsman. And vice versa.

A few moments passed. The only sounds were the slice of the cutwater and the eddies of water separating from the polished hull with a steady fizz.

“Starboard!” The hail was closer. This time there was more than a touch of frenzy in the call. And there were other voices chiming in, a sure sign that anxiety was becoming a factor aboard Fetching.

“Better tack!” Worthy’s bowman found his voice.

“Starboard! Hey! Starboardgoddammit! . . . STARBOARD . . . HEY!!”

Andy: “Tack, Mitchell. Tack! Tack now!”

“Don’t you tell me . . . Christ! . . . Tacking!” Cursing a blue streak, Mitchell Thomas drove the wheel down hard as he caught sight of Fetching coming into his path like a train, spinning Worthy on a dime to avoid the impending collision. The violent turn drastically reduced the boat’s forward motion. The crew sensed the crisis coming, and still used up valuable seconds getting off the rail and scrambling up the deck that was now tilted against them. Andy had to let the jib sheet run before the new trimmer was ready. It took precious seconds to overhaul the loose sheet and get the big jib in on the new tack. Worthy had avoided a collision, but it was a racing disaster.

Fetching passed by very close at full tilt, the wash of the hull frighteningly loud. Fetching’s skipper, Alistair Koonce, took a certain amount of pleasure cutting it as close as he dared, but he smartly eased his helm toward the wind five degrees to make sure he avoided Worthy, and so his mast would straighten up a bit and avoid slamming into Worthy’s now nearly upright rig. The sailors on both boats avoided one another’s eyes. No one on either boat said a word, except the outraged Mitchell Thomas, who kept up a vicious string of abuse directed at Andy, whose face remained impassive.

Koonce, a savvy New Zealand professional at the top of his game, let the hint of a smile cross his lips at the stream of invective coming from Worthy.

“Sounds like someone’s upset,” he said quietly. His crew, wound tight from the near miss, convulsed with laughter.

Koonce tacked for the finish line. With Worthy now tucked four boat-lengths behind them, and the finish less than a mile ahead, the race was over. Koonce and crew were winners, but they tended to business, watched the trim, tidied up lines and got ready to cross the line in style. Koonce gave the wheel to Rufus Samuels, the owner. Judd, Fetching’s tactician, a regular with Koonce, shook his head as Koonce sat down beside him.

“Why’s he do it? Why’s he take the kid? Why’s the kid go?”

Koonce shrugged. The race was history. He was already thinking about a beer, and other business.

“I know Deedee, Mrs. Thomas, Deedee Moss,” Rufus Samuels offered from behind the wheel. “She likes it that Andy sails on the boat. She insists, in fact. And since she is the majority stockholder in the company, well, let’s just say Mitchell has always been a realist.” Samuels paused. He chuckled, happily patted the wheel. “Our good luck. I thought they might have crossed us back there.”

The post Bad Call appeared first on Sailing World.

Ahead, through bleary eyes, the lights of the Mackinac Bridge float on the horizon like a mirage. The twinkling blob is a distant target in the pitch-black night, the next waypoint on our 280-mile race from boisterous Chicago to sleepy Mackinac Island. All around us are blinking lights: reds, greens and whites of channel markers and the slower boats we’re creaming past at what sure feels like 15 knots. My co-skipper and I are sleep-deprived, hungry and thirsty for beer, and while we can’t yet smell the horse piss, we’re closing in on the finish at a wicked pace.

My concentration flicks between the bow, its angle to the waves, and the tightly curled luff of our bone-white masthead spinnaker. Standing so I can see better, my left foot is braced against the foot chock, tingling and numb. My right knee is bent, pressed against the side deck and the coaming, and my waist is wedged against the lifeline padding. When the load on the rudder lightens, I allow the tiller to glide away. The boat turns toward the wind, the luff flicks as the boat accelerates, and water jets across the foredeck.

The boat begins to surf, and the ­rudders howl like a banshee and then go quiet as froth tumbles out from the transom. A stronger gust tickles the hair on the back of my neck. I exhale deeply to calm my nerves and say to myself, Don’t wipe out…don’t wipe out…

My mate for this blitz through the Straits of Mackinac is Andraž Mihelin. He’s behind me, sitting wedged into the pushpit while navigating through a maze of markers using only his iPhone. He knows we’re pushing the boat and its runnerless carbon rig to a redline. This boat is his baby, and he knows better than anyone what will trigger a tantrum.

“Careful,” I hear him say to me. “You’re on the edge.”

Huh? On the edge?

I ponder that for a split second, afraid to ask what he means. Does my steering suck?

We’ve turned off the cockpit displays to save power, so I have no idea how fast we’re going or what direction the apparent wind is coming from, but it doesn’t matter. I’m sailing the 27-footer by feel, and I’m chuffed that I actually feel fully in control. The leeward rudder has a firm grip, and the boat, as the saying goes, feels as if it’s on rails. Tugging on the tiller keeps everything in balance.

“What do you mean by on the edge?” I ask him, without breaking my concentration on the bow.

“When there’s that much water coming across the deck, you’re on the edge,” he responds calmly. I hear what he’s saying, but I sure don’t feel as if I’m on the edge of anything, which is crazy because I’ve never driven a sportboat at such speed into the night—never mind with only two people and no one with a hand on the spinnaker sheet. If being on the edge means driving drunk on adrenaline and reckless confidence, well, bartender, give me another.

The finish line ahead of us is that of the 112th edition of Chicago Yacht Club’s Race to Mackinac, which is a big deal to the sailors of this giant freshwater playground. It’s the annual gem of the Great Lakes yachting calendar, a race that any Windy City sailor worth their weight in rum commits to every year—birth of a child or family ­wedding be damned.

The storied northbound race is not an easy test of skill and seamanship by any stretch, and that’s its appeal. There’s no one winning strategy (do you favor Wisconsin or Michigan this year?) and big weather comes fast and hard. Sometimes boats break or capsize, and the race is not without its fatalities. Its two- to three-day duration is just long enough to get knackered and feel as though you’ve accomplished something cool and a little bit dangerous, but it’s not too long as to leave you bored, sitting on the rail for days on end wishing you had a platter of piping hot chicken wings. There are quick ones and slow ones, and when it does come to a crawl, out come veracious lake flies, those nibbling nuances for which there is no known defense. They are the scourge of the race.

The fleet of this 2021 edition is smaller than some years past, but there are thousands of sailors itching to earn a new brag flag. This year’s scratch sheet runs the gamut, from an 86-footer to the grand-prix Great Lakes 52s, the ubiquitous Tartan 10s, and the two smallest boats of all: the Beneteau First 27SEs (Seascape Edition). I’m on one of them, racing in the doublehanded division against two 29-foot J/88s.

When I accepted an out-of-the-blue ­invitation to do the race with Mihelin, I did so without actually contemplating how small a 27-feet boat is relative to Lake Michigan. I also did not contemplate one important aspect of racing with only one other soul: Should one of us go overboard while the other is down below having a nap, the chance of survival is greatly reduced, especially when the water is cold. And this, I now understand, is why race organizers enforce the most comprehensive safety requirements of any race I’ve ever sailed. The must-have equipment for every boat is pages long, and every crewmember on every boat must be schooled in safety at sea.

Before the race, I had no safety qualifications, and I also neglected to disclose to Mihelin that I’d never once sailed a double­handed offshore distance race, nor doublehanded at night. I owned no safety equipment, except my PFD, and had not a single minute of safety training—online or in-person. Only after I complete my online classes do I realize how much I didn’t know, and while I should’ve been more at ease with my safety book smarts, the opposite happened: I got spooked with the thought of racing such a small and unknown craft on such a notorious stretch of water. With zero experience. With an unknown mate.

The mandatory equipment does get expensive, but I now own a top-shelf Mustang inflatable PFD and tether, an Ocean Signal AIS/DSC man-overboard ­beacon, an ACR personal EPIRB, a high-­quality headlamp, and a one-handed blunt-tip safety knife. Plus, I have a sample set of North Sails’ new top-shelf Gore-Tex foul-weather gear to keep me warm and dry. Having all the right gear, as the ­seminars preach, is half the battle.

Properly kitted, I feel more at ease when I arrive at the boat and assess its sea­worthiness for the first time. It could fit on the foredeck of Natalie J, the 52-footer next door. It’s definitely a sportboat built for two.

There are two other First 27SEs at the dock at Chicago’s Columbia YC. There’s a new one straight off a ship from the Seascape factory in Slovenia (which was supposed to be ours), one belonging to an owner from Texas who is relocating to the Great Lakes (we’re borrowing his), and the third is owned by local Mike Tuman, who prefers to solo his boat but is doing the race with Tit Plevnik from the Seascape team.

Mihelin is standing astride our little white boat, holding court. He’s only just arrived in Chicago, having conquered the US COVID‑19 foreign-entry maze. This is not Mihelin’s first Mac Race, though. In 2016, he won the doublehanded division with British solo sailor Phil Sharp and then raced with a crew of four in 2018. Both races were on the Seascape 27, as the First 27SE was called back in the days, an award-winning design from the boatbuilding company Mihelin founded in Slovenia with fellow sailor Kristian Hajnšek. Both gentlemen are disciples of Mini-class racing, having completed two Mini-Transat campaigns (from France to Brazil in crazy-fast 21-footers).

I will soon come to understand that Mihelin’s experiences from those ­intoxicating days of Mini racing define his character as well as his company. He preaches the tightknit community of Mini, the performance of Mini, and how Mini takes you light-years outside your comfort zone and then brings you back to a better place.

Such is the ethos of Seascape, which started in 2008 with a Mini-styled 18-footer and has grown to include a 24-, a 27- and a 14-footer. Along the way, and now several hundred boats later, Mihelin and his young and industrious employees have nurtured a devout clan of sailors in Europe, especially around the Adriatic and Baltic, where coastal racing in Seascapes is what the cool kids do. They’re also now kings of the Silver Rudder, which Mihelin explains to be the largest singlehanded distance race in the world, where as many as 450 sailors race 140 miles around the second-largest Danish island.

The Beneteau Group, I’m told, was impressed with the quality and ingenuity of Seascape’s Sam Manuard-designed boats and the whole Seascape schtick. The company came knocking a few years ago, keen to buy the brand, integrate it, and get back into the rank-and-file ­performance-sailing game with a new spin on its “First” lineage. Having finally figured out how to integrate the two companies, there is a long-term joint venture with Seascape overseeing Beneteau’s First and First Seascape Edition, including a weapon of a 36-footer that will debut by end of the year. Developing the new boat and the company behind it has all but consumed Mihelin, and when we finally meet in person, he confesses he hasn’t raced much lately—at least not at the level he used to. He admits to feeling unprepared, and he acknowledges we might not be competitive.

“I’m here for the adventure,” he says with a smile as we board the boat in unison. “I’m here to get outside my comfort zone, again. I need to do it. I miss it.”

Two days before our doublehanded ­division start, we dive right into our worklist, stripping the boat of clutter and sorting our safety gear before the inspector comes knocking. We pass, except for one thing: our safety-gear location map. The inspector asks where it is, and Mihelin points to a single hanging bag to starboard where all the gear is stowed. “It’s a small boat,” he says. “It’s all in here. Do we really need a map?”

Once cleared and done with the day’s boatwork, we cast lines and head out past the breakwater for our first sail together, hoisting the entire upwind inventory of new North Sails 3Di Raw to make sure it all fits. We have a full-battened main, an all-­purpose jib, a Code Zero and a bright-orange storm sail, which will double as a genoa staysail. We toss up the masthead spinnaker for good measure and leave the fractional below—that one will never see the light of day.

The exercise feels a bit rushed and ­chaotic, but it’s our only chance to feel each other out. My main concern is deciphering which ropes do what, but I discover the boat is nothing but simple and logical. Our only headsail is on a furler, so there will be no middle-of-the-night changes. The jib leads go up and down and in and out, and the asymmetric connects at the usual three places. Halyards and sail controls are all led to clutches on the coach roof—nothing fancy.

On the morning of the start, we meet early in a hotel room, connected on a laptop with a professional weather router in Europe who’s been crunching the models. For days, we have been glued to the Windy app on our phones, trying to predict the behavior of a high-pressure bubble that will be wobbling over the lake for the entire race. There will be a gradient. There will be sea breezes filling and land breezes draining. There will be upwind work to start, drifting in the middle, and a fresh VMG spinnaker run to the finish. There will be a little bit of everything our forecaster assures us as he shows limited routing options concentrated on the rhumbline. He warns us several times to be careful about getting too close to the shore at the wrong time of day. If we get stuck, we’ll be there for a while.

And with that advice in hand, we schlep our gear and a single food bag to the boat and take one last sweep through to ensure all is ready. We call our families and say our goodbyes before slipping lines and heading out for our 11 a.m. check-in. Without much time to waste, we loiter near the race-­committee boat and devise our strategy. The line is absurdly long for only four boats, so we agree to keep clear of the committee-boat magnets. The plan is to go east early, so we port-tack the start, harden up, and settle into a breezy and lumpy upwind groove.

Mihelin’s plan is to tack sometime after sunset, once we get our nose into the anticipated overnight shift. Everyone’s going the same way, and eventually we’re in among the Tartan 10s, lined with crews on the rail twiddling thumbs.

We skip dinner, but the family-size bag of GORP trail mix between my legs is all the gourmet I need. We trade places on the helm for pee breaks and backstretches, talking nonstop about family and work and our next challenge in life—deep stuff, right off the bat. We barely know each other, but we’re gabbing like a couple of frat brothers reunited after 20 years.

Once darkness comes, Mihelin insists we go straight into a two-hour watch system. He takes the first, and I settle in, my hand reaching into the feed bag and me choking down lukewarm sweetened Starbucks Via. I enjoy the silence, alone with my own thoughts of the days ahead and simply concentrating on keeping the boat tracking fast on course as the wind slowly veers and dies.

I wake Mihelin on schedule, and he steps on deck and jumps right into steering as if he’s been awake for an hour.

“I’ll leave you to it,” I say as I step below, strip out of my foul-weather gear, and collapse into the beanbag to leeward. With water sluicing past the hull inches from my ear, I plummet into the deepest sleep until I feel a tap on my leg, burst open my eyes, and only see a dark shadow through the companionway.

Who is this? Where the hell am I?

I quickly realize it’s my watch. I slip my bibs back on and step into the cockpit, where Mihelin shows me our position on the small chart plotter on a swivel arm from inside the boat. We’re just off Little Sable Point, a few miles east of rhumbline and still following the master plan—all is right.

He disappears below, leaving me to stare in wonder at the stillness of the night, a low moon veiled by smoke from faraway fires in Canada. There is barely 5 knots of wind, and with the boat sitting upright on its lines, it’s impossible to get any feel from the rudders. I sense my driving is erratic, so I try to find a place to sit comfortably and not oversteer. Finally, I slide down to the cockpit floor and rest my hand on the tip of the tiller. From here, I can see the dimly lit displays and ­listen to the gurgle of the transom.

A few hours later, as we swap watches again, the breeze continues to drop. As I wrestle my jacket into a makeshift pillow, all I can hear is a faint trickle of water passing by, lulling me into a deep sleep again until I’m awoken by stomping on the foredeck. I hear a sail bag drag across the deck, and I wonder whether I should get up and help. But he already has autopilot assist. It’s his watch; he knows what he’s doing. If needs me, he’ll wake me, I think to myself before nodding off again.

Soon after, I get a tap on my leg again, and then rise through the companionway to admire the golden and placid morning light. We’re barely moving. The foredeck action, I now see, was Mihelin hoisting every upwind sail we have. A triple-headed setup fills the foretriangle, but the genoa staysail is gently flapping in the slot, so that ­eventually comes down. The Code Zero is not doing much, except adding a bunch of drag, so that is scuttled too. We’re back to jib only.

As the day drags on, we crawl along under beautiful blue skies. The flies appear at lunchtime with an appetite of their own. Nemo—our friends on the other Seascape—is west of rhumbline and behind by a good 6 miles or so according to the tracker. Exile, the lead J/88, is sneaking away, and the other is somewhere directly behind us.

While we scarf down prosciutto and warm cheese on torpedo buns, the wind frees enough for us to hedge toward the coastline for what we hope will be a few hours of sea-breeze boost, so we hoist and unfurl the Zero again, crack sheets, and enjoy our quickened pace. It’s a glory day of sailing, and for our first and only sunset dinner on board, Mihelin lights the new Jetboil we’re required to have. Within minutes, we’re slurping warm and salty soup while the autopilot steers us true.

After dinner, Mihelin excuses himself for a quick nap as we creep ever closer to the coast. At dusk, I have my eyes on a large expanse of slick water ahead near the shore. My gut tells me we better tack sooner than later, but it’s not a decision for me to make, so I wake Mihelin, who joins me on deck to witness boats ahead drifting listlessly back toward the middle of the lake into nothingness.

Soon, we’re drifting ourselves. A single knot of boatspeed is all we can muster. I see a sliver of a wind line ahead, and suggest we chase it and hope for the best. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we got one little zephyr to get out of here,” I say.

As if on command, a ribbon of breeze appears a few hundred yards ahead, so we carry on for another 20 minutes or so, enjoying our new speed and the heading breeze. Once we feel we’ve gotten the most out of it, we tack, running away from the shoreline at 4 knots. Behind us, the wind disappears. We laugh at our luck with the zephyr.

Once clear of Big Point Sable, Mihelin is confident in our course and returns below to finish his off watch, leaving me to the darkness again, in a surreal world of oily smooth water, abundant stars, and the hiss of water streaming from the transom. I feel as though I’m sailing across black ice, a magical experience that has me awestruck. I imagine myself a soloist in a Mini, letting the autopilot drive and soaking in every ­element of this unique moment.

Energized by my new surroundings, I’m tempted to carry on through the watch rotation, but I follow the code and eventually wake Mihelin, tapping his leg and delivering bad news: We’ve had a good pace over the past few hours, but we’re back to drifting.

The sun is soon up, hot and heavy, and the lake is a millpond again. Spinnakers hang limp on boats nearby. No one is moving, and ahead are Point Betsie and the Manitou Islands. As advised, we’ve kept our distance from Betsie, but not enough. To our west, Nemo is cruising past us at 5 knots to our 1, and over the next few hours, the tracker updates are depressing.

Our only hope is to chase what we think is a wind line to the northwest, so we abandon the rhumbline and crawl toward a faraway dark patch. Ripples finally appear in the late afternoon, and we set the masthead spinnaker for the first time. This is our moonshot. We know others are stuck near the coast, and out here in the middle there is no one with us. It’s possible we have sailed ourselves into oblivion. On the tracker, we’re last in our division by a good 6 miles.

We accept that there is no way in hell we’re going to win this race, but with the fresh new wind, a lazy following sea, and the finish line around the corner, the vibe subconsciously shifts. While we sail downwind, Mihelin tutors me on Slovenian culture, the young country’s history, and its competitive, adventurous and outdoorsy people. We share TED Talks nuggets and memorable sailing moments, and without even realizing it, we’re working the boat a lot harder, like two young sailors gleefully playing in the waves.

At one point, I enjoy a 9-knot surf and explode with delirious excitement.

“Beat that!” I challenge Mihelin, handing him the tiller extension.

He does, with a 10.2, and like a couple of dorks, we slap a high-five.

After a few more miles of this, we glide past Beaver Island as the sun sets and the southerly stirs tumbling whitecaps. Our sails are now fully loaded, and the boat gallops along at pace toward Grays Reef Lighthouse. Mihelin checks the tracker and reports we’ve actually closed on Nemo, shaving off a few miles. Maybe we have a shot at not being last.

So, we work the boat and sails a little harder, nail our first jibe of the entire race, and then start our exhilarating navigational slalom through the darkness, soaring out of my comfort zone and blissfully planing toward the lights of the Mackinac Bridge.

When we do finally pass under the metal-grated roadbed above, Mihelin rushes to snap a few blurry photos like a tourist refusing to pull over at the vista, and then two more smooth jibes later, we cross the finish line with a spotlight beam illuminating our port side. We’ve cut a 6-mile deficit to a mile or so, and hours down to merely 25 minutes to Nemo.

Mihelin reaches out to shake hands, but I’m too stunned to react. I’m not ready to stop. I can hear the raucous celebrations of cockpit rum squalls and the afterhours of the Pink Pony’s last call, but I’m feeling my inner Bernard Moitessier. It could be the adrenaline still coursing but, honestly, I just want Mihelin to put the spinnaker back up so we can keep on ripping into the ebony.

The post Mates of the Mac appeared first on Sailing World.

The final results of the 2020‑21 Vendée Globe will forever have Yannick Bestaven as champion of the most competitive singlehanded round-the-world race—ever. One position below Bestaven in the rankings sits 36-year-old Charlie Dalin, the first of 33 starters to cross the finish line in Les Sables-d’Olonne, France. He could have won. He should have won. But he didn’t. It was one cruel and unexpected windshift—mere miles from the finish line in Les Sables-d’Olonne—that denied him his holy grail of solo sailing.

Dalin’s ascent to the top ranks is an amazing example of the opportunities available to France’s elite singlehanded sailors. Dalin, as a young and eager sailor long ago, once helped me prepare for my Mini Transat ­campaign in 2003. I had no idea then that he would someday race an IMOCA 60—on foils even—in the Vendée Globe. We hadn’t spoken since the Transat, but when connected by Zoom a few weeks after the finish, he was rested and eager to share his story.

Q: How did this Vendée Globe opportunity come your way?

A: I had been working really hard for some years and having some success. I was involved with Ericsson, the winning Volvo Ocean Race team [in 2009], and that was a really great experience. Then I was in Australia helping to build a 100-foot ­racing trimaran. I raced primarily the Figaro from 2011 to 2018. I got pretty good at that game, and when Apivia decided to mount a Vendée Globe ­campaign, they chose me to skipper.

Q: What an incredible opportunity.

A: Yes, nobody would ever pass up that. They chose me even though I had never been on an IMOCA before last year. They let me be really involved in the design and development of the boat, and they had a lot of faith in me from the very beginning.

Q: I would say their faith was well-justified. I imagine your being a naval architect allowed you to influence and be involved in the design process?

A: I was quite involved in the design of almost every detail of Apivia. With Guillaume Verdier as lead architect, we were one of the first designs of the new-generation larger-foil IMOCAs. It was really exciting, with a lot of unknowns. There were so many decisions to make. Sometimes the VPP would say one thing, but we did not always trust that to be 100 percent true. For example, at the last possible moment, we decided to move the foils farther forward. It turned out to be good, but at the time, we did not know. I was really involved in the cockpit but also the deck plan, the sail plan, and really, everything.

Q: Right out of the box, the boat performed well, and you won the Transat Jacque Vabre.

A: The boat had only been in the water less than three months, so it was a very busy time. I sailed as much as I could, but we also needed some time for the team to really finish the boat. I would sail on the weekend, so the shore team could rest, then turn the boat over. Sometimes I would sail at night so they could work on the boat during the day. But everything went really well. What is the opposite of a viscous cycle?

Q: A virtuous cycle?

A: Yes, that’s it. We never had any major breakages, so we could keep on sailing and improving the boat. We still had a few issues in the TJV, but we had a kind doldrums passage and managed to win the race.

Q: There were two major storms that knocked out a lot of the newer boats early in the race.

A: Yes, it all happened quickly. I had a few issues but nothing major. By the time we got to the equator, there were only three new-generation boats near the top: Hugo Boss, LinkedOut and Apivia. Soon after Seb Simon and Alex Thomson were out, it was Thomas Ruyant and me. I was first into the Indian Ocean, and I started to go into more of a preservation mode, especially after Thomas had a problem with his port foil. Normally it is a big advantage to be first here.

Q: Not this year.

A: No, it was never good to be leading this race.

Q: Where were you when you heard about Kevin Escoffier sinking?

A: I was just about to go on video chat to celebrate being first into the Indian Ocean. Then we heard about Kevin, and nobody wanted to talk about that anymore. I was 350 miles downwind, so I was not in a position to help. But it was a super-stressful time, and finally we got news that Kevin had been rescued from his raft. But that incident really shocked me. I think it shocked the whole fleet.

Q: What an incredible rescue, so well-managed by the race officials and sailors standing by, and especially the actual ­rescue by Jean Le Cam.

A: Yes. Everyone did their job well. It took me a couple of days to really get back to full racing mode after that.

Q: And then disaster struck you.

A: Yes, it did. I started noticing some water leaking into my line tunnel, then I noticed it was coming from where the port foil bearing should be. It was gone. I sent a message to my shore team (legal under race rules for technical issues), and they got to work coming up with possible solutions. I had to slow the boat right down.

Q: Could you have sunk?

A: Yes, that was a possibility, but most likely I was out of the race. It was really devastating. But then my shore team came back with these intricate instructions, like a hundred steps, for a possible repair. I got to work and started building parts. I had to laminate a new bearing, using bits of foam, epoxy and carbon flat stock. I had to cut it with a crappy cordless grinder. It took forever. And I had to custom-fit each piece. When I had the parts made, I tacked onto port (away from the finish), heeled the boat over, and went over the side using a halyard. I had to fit all the parts pretty precisely. I was getting hammered by the waves. I nearly gave up. Finally, just as it was getting dark, I hammered in the last piece. Then I tacked back and rejoined the race.

Q: At this point, you are now behind Bestaven on Maitre Coq and Ruyant on LinkedOut, and your port foil is compromised.

Yes, but I was still racing, and there was 15,000 miles to go. I was not sure if the repair was strong enough, so we tested it hard that next day, and it seemed to hold.

Q: That is an unbelievable bit of seamanship.

A: It took every bit I had. I slept pretty hard for a couple of hours afterward.

Q: What is life like on board Apivia?

A: The biggest challenge when it is windy, or a challenging sea state, is to know how hard to push the boat. There is this constant desire to push harder, to go faster, to put up more sail. But if you break your boat, it is all in vain. So I am constantly asking if I am pushing too hard or too close to the limit. You have to be really disciplined because one mistake can be really costly. The motion of a semifoiling IMOCA 60 is also really hard at times. Because of the foil, the boat does not behave as you are used to with a normal boat. The timing of the hard crashes is really hard to predict, so you are always hanging onto something. Otherwise, you can get hurt really easily. The only safe place is in the bunk.

Q: Tell me about your routing? It looked like you were trying hard to minimize distance and tactical risk.

A: Yes, I spend hours in front of the computer—eight hours a day—running different routes, looking at different weather models, and evaluating the options. I mostly tried to sail my own race and not worry too much about the other boats. I started using a lot of ensemble routing so I could graphically see the range of options and assess the ­probabilities. I really got into it.

Q: What was it like to essentially restart the race with 4,000 miles remaining?

A: The race up the Atlantic had some very unsettled weather. After Cape Horn, Maitre Coq escaped with good wind and built a 450-mile lead off the coast of Brazil. But then he got trapped in light wind, and I was able to catch right up. However, six other boats did the same, so off Cabo Frio there were eight boats very close to each other. It was like a Figaro race. So I told myself to just sail it like a coastal race, and keep on pushing and make the right moves.

Unfortunately, my port foil was not fully working, so I was a lot slower on starboard tack than I should have been. And we had 14 days of starboard up the Atlantic. I had to find a whole new way to sail the boat. I figured out I could sail with a lot more heel, and change the stacking ballast completely. So I was able to find a way to go pretty fast, but I still gave up about 400 miles because of my limitation on starboard. It was frustrating, but I kept telling myself, All the boats have issues. Just keep going as fast as you can.

I had a good doldrums passage and got into the northeast trades, essentially even with Louis Burton on Bureau Vallee. He could not use full main, so he ended up farther north, which turned out to be OK. But I also had five boats right behind me and pushing hard.

Q: What was it like getting past Cape Finisterre?

A: That was probably the most intense 24 hours of sailing I have ever done. I decided on a routing that took me very close to the northeast corner of Spain. As I got closer to the coast, there was a lot of ship traffic and unlit fishing boats. The Bay of Biscay felt really small. My ­collision-avoidance system was not working, and my radar was also down, so I had to be very alert. I had to perform a series of jibes to take advantage of the wind bending around the coast. Each jibe takes about 40 minutes and uses a lot of energy, so I was getting pretty tired. Of course, I was passing through the most crowded part of the course at night. Then it started to get foggy, so that was really stressful as well. I did not sleep at all for 36 hours. I knew if I did this well, I could still win the race.

Once I got onto port tack and I was headed right for the finish at 20 knots, things were looking good, and I thought for few hours that I would win. But partway across Biscay, the wind shifted 10 degrees left, which favored the boats to the north, and meant I would still have to jibe for the finish. That wind shift cost me the race.

Q: How was it to cross the line first, but not win?

A: I said before the start that my goal was to cross the line first, and I achieved that. I know I sailed a good race. But Yannick Bestaven on Maitre Coq also sailed very well, and with the 10-hour time allowance he got for helping to save Kevin Escoffier, he beat me by two and a half hours…after 80 days.

Q: After he got ashore, Yannick came to you, and you had a long embrace. He said, “This year there are two winners of the Vendée Globe.”

A: Yes, those were kind words from him. I know we put together a very good campaign, and I sailed my boat as well as I could. I am happy with my race. But now I really want to go back in four years and win!

Q: And what’s until then?

A: It is a very exciting time to be a sailor. There are so many cool things going on that I really want to be a part of. My focus will continue to be the IMOCA for the next few years. I want to win the Route du Rhum. And I want to build a new IMOCA and come back and win the Vendée in 2024. After that, maybe multi­hulls. But who knows? I am very lucky to have these opportunities. I still love sailing as much as ever.

The post Interview with Around the World Racer Charlie Dalin appeared first on Sailing World.

Inside Building No. 5 at Safe Harbor New England Boatworks, Jocko Alpress stands on Running Tide’s new deck. When the boatyard is quiet, he can hear voices from the boat’s past. He was on the boat for seven years, with two owners. On this cold March day, however, quiet reflection isn’t an option for Alpress, who is on the team responsible for the Tide’s comprehensive refit. Those voices are inaudible over a cacophony of power tools as a small army of craftsmen swarm the vessel, which has been stripped to the bones and is in the ­process of being refaired, repainted, rerigged and reimagined.

Running Tide was built in 1970 by Jakob Isbrandtsen, a shipping magnate and passionate racer, who commissioned Sparkman & Stephens to design a yacht that could beat the likes of Windward Passage, Yankee Girl, Dora and Sorcery—all the hot boats of the day.

Isbrandtsen’s one requirement of Olin Stephens was that Running Tide be 45 feet on the waterline. With the assistance of one of his favorite crewmembers, Vic Romagna—who won the America’s Cup in 1962 aboard Weatherly and again in 1967 aboard Intrepid—Isbrandtsen created the deck layout.

“Nothing against Rod Stephens, but my father was never a fan of his [deck] designs because you were always tripping over sh-t,” says Isbrandtsen’s son, Hans.

The Huisman yard, in the Netherlands, built the aluminum ­vessel and then shipped it to City Island, New York, to rig the deck at Kretzer Boat Works under the watchful eye of Romagna. “Running Tide was one of the first stripped-out racers,” says Hans Isbrandtsen, whose father passed away in July 2018. “We did the deck layout to sail the boat with eight people. The idea was to have an easy-to-sail boat with people who knew what they were doing.”

Running Tide’s design was exceptional, as was the ­camaraderie of its crew. Before Isbrandtsen and his team would sail against the likes of Ted Turner, they squared off against Nazi Germany. Isbrandtsen, too young to enlist in the Navy, was the captain of the yawl Edlu, a 68-foot Sparkman & Stephens design, whose mission was to patrol for Nazi U-boats off Greenport, Long Island.

German U-boats could submerge for only eight hours before they had to surface and run their engines to recharge batteries. When Isbrandtsen and his crew, which included Romagna, spotted a U-boat, they called in air support to bomb them. They assured themselves that the Germans would not waste a torpedo on the likes of Edlu or the other sailing vessels patrolling 10-mile grids. Freighters and US Navy ships were the preferred targets.

The camaraderie and teamwork Isbrandtsen’s crew fostered during their submarine-hunting days was realized decades later when Isbrandtsen assembled the very same crew on Running Tide. They won countless regattas, including the 1971 Southern Ocean Racing Conference, as well as their class in the Bermuda Race. Their results are memorialized with trophies and silver dishes, but the comradeship is what crewmembers remember today.

Bizzy Monte-Sano, part of the team that competed in the Admiral’s Cup in 1963 aboard Windrose, recalls that after the regatta, the crew was relaxing in Isbrandtsen’s home in Cowes, England, when there was a knock on the door. In the vestibule, festooned in full yachting regalia, stood two emissaries of the Royal Yacht Squadron who cordially invited Isbrandtsen and his two watch captains to a cocktail party, the first time nonmembers had been invited to enter the Royal Yacht Squadron.

“It took seven of us to get the boat here, and we would all like to attend,” was Isbrandtsen’s reply, Monte-Sano says. The emissaries said such a thing was not possible, so Isbrandtsen then informed them that he had just checked his calendar and he was going to be busy on that particular evening.

After his business came upon hard times in 1972, Isbrandtsen chartered Running Tide to Turner, who sailed it to victory in numerous races. After the charter period, Running Tide was auctioned off, and Albert Van Metre, a wealthy American developer, was the high bidder. Turner, the second-place bidder, wasn’t amused, so he purchased Lynn Williams’ yacht, Dora IV, and renamed it Tenacious. A rivalry was stoked, and Running Tide kept running, fueled by a new father-and-son team and a band of brothers.

John Marshall, East Coast manager of North Sails at the time, believes Running Tide had soul from the day she was drawn at Sparkman & Stephens. “The Van Metre family had a real reverence for Running Tide,” he says. “It wasn’t just a boat. It was an honor to own it and race it. Al Van Metre always struck a tough deal on a sail. But if I said, ‘Al, Running Tide needs a new genoa,’ he would say, ‘All right—you gotta strike a good price, but let’s do it.’ He never cut a corner to make that boat go better.”

Butch Ulmer, another sailmaker who made his hay in the ­heyday of offshore yacht racing, estimates he has sailed on more than 200 boats in his lifetime. Running Tide is his favorite. “There were a number of boats that could do everything well,” Ulmer says. “Running Tide was one of those. She was so well-laid-out.”

Van Metre, he says, was the quintessential high-class owner. Even in moments of chaos on deck, he would address the crew as “gentlemen” before he would request a change to the heavy-air jib. His son, Beau, was a good sailor too—a really good sailor, Ulmer says. “He didn’t play the owner’s son. I think Running Tide was, for the sake of a better analogy, the glue that kept Beau and his father together for a lot of years. Running Tide was common ground for both of them.”

During Ulmer’s time on Running Tide, the yacht had a reputation for going upwind well. Downwind, there was room for improvement, so he challenged one of his smartest sail designers, Owen Torrey, to come up with a better spinnaker design. Torrey, a Harvard and Columbia graduate who quit practicing law to become a sailmaker, had a keen mind. In those days, most people used a footlong slide rule, but Torrey’s was 3 feet because it provided him with greater accuracy. Torrey eventually ushered Ulmer to the loft’s roof in City Island. There, flying from the flag pole was a radial-head spinnaker that boasted a beautiful, round, full shape. “This is great, Owen,” Ulmer said. “How the hell did you come up with the design?”

In those days, navigators consulted with Bowditch tables, which were as thick as a dictionary. Torrey found a table that gave him the distance between meridians at a given latitude. He made the head of the spinnaker the north pole, the bottom of the head the equator, and the leeches the two corresponding meridians. The shape was so impressive, Van Metre promptly ordered a few spinnakers from Ulmer.

For 16 years, the Van Metre family and three generations of crew campaigned Running Tide hard. They sailed out of Annapolis, Maryland, in spring, Newport, Rhode Island, in summer, and then delivered it south for the SORC races. For Beau, the wins were ­exciting, but Running Tide was all about the journey.

By 1986, the young Van Metre retired from racing and sailed Running Tide to France with plans to cruise the Mediterranean and beyond. After the cruise was delayed due to Suez Canal construction, he sold the yacht. “The first guy I sold Running Tide to had the boat for 15 years,” he says. “I’d call every couple of years to see if he was interested in selling. The gentleman had the audacity to ask for $500,000,” Van Metre says, “but I sold him the boat for $175,000, so I thought that was ridiculous.”

Every year, friends racing in St. Tropez would send Van Metre photos of Running Tide. When he started thinking about getting back into sailing, his broker called the most recent owner and queried his interest in selling. The owner was 85, in poor health and ready to sell. The yacht, however, was in rough shape. The plywood deck was cracked, and down below, Van Metre was shocked to find the same cushions, the same gauges, and even the Igloo cooler he had placed on the boat some 35 years earlier.

Its deplorable state would not sway Van Metre’s mind, ­however. “I knew it needed to be gutted,” he says. “I thought it would be much better for me to own Running Tide and fix it up than to have ­someone else’s boat or to build a new one.”

For the refit, Van Metre tapped designer David Pedrick, who knows his way around Sparkman & Stephens yachts, having started his career with the firm in 1970, just about the time Running Tide was launched at Huisman. In Running Tide, Pedrick saw a classic Sparkman & Stephens design that was evolved from 12-Metre designs in general, and Intrepid in particular. “Intuitively, Olin thought about being friendly to the water,” Pedrick says. “He wanted to make it easy for the water to get around the boat.”

Continuous improvement was an ethos in the Sparkman & Stephens office. When Pedrick pulls out a book today with a line drawing of Running Tide, he is quick to note eraser marks over the rudder area. Stephens was always looking forward to the next great idea, never looking back, says Pedrick, so the responsibility of ­drafting Running Tide’s refit is one he does not take lightly.

“This is one of the most phenomenal, legendary yachts around to be brought back to better-than-original with modern equipment,” he says. “It’s more than a second life. This is a real rejuvenation.”

The goal of Running Tide’s extensive refit, which began in October 2019, is to preserve the yacht’s hard-racing soul, while modifying it so Van Metre can effortlessly daysail it with his wife and family—thus the installation of powered winches. The 2020 Bermuda Race was also on the boat’s reunion tour, but with the race’s cancellation in late March, Van Metre is suddenly afforded the luxury of two more years to whip it into racing shape. Given where they were with the refit in March, it would have been a ­miracle to cross the starting line in Bristol fashion.

Early on, the decision was made to preserve Running Tide’s 1982-era keel. It was “good enough,” Pedrick says. Changing the keel would be extremely expensive and would also surrender the boat’s age allowance. The eraser marks on the rudder of the original plan were there for a reason, so Pedrick focused on a new rudder. The old skeg-hung rudder was large, low aspect and heavy. The new rudder, a carbon spade hung from the hull, is 200 pounds lighter than the appendage it replaces.

The new rig, built by Offshore Spars, has a carbon standing-­rigging package that is one-third the weight of rod rigging. It is 10 feet taller than the original and will carry much more sail area. An additional 300 square feet or so puts the new inventory at 2,023 square feet of high-tech sail area—flatter, more powerful and far less likely to stretch than the Dacron of Tide’s early days.

As the vision for Running Tide 2.0 came into sharper focus, plans became shop drawings and shop drawings became hours upon hours of hard labor. For the craftsmen of New England Boatworks, the first back-breaking task was to strip Running Tide to bare hull. When Thomas MacBain, of NEB’s metal department, first saw the boat, he reached a different conclusion than Alpress. “I’m 33 years old. I didn’t know what Running Tide was,” he says. “I thought it was a pile of scrap until I saw the older guys taking pictures of it.”

After stripping paint and filler, the metal department ­determined that a few parts of the hull required patching, and the shaft log had to be replaced. Pedrick called for significant alterations: new chainplates and frames to support the rig’s higher loads, and the bustle—the area ahead of the rudder—needed to be streamlined.

The aluminum work requires a unique approach, says NEB master welder Abraham Sabala. “Welding it isn’t easy,” he says. “[Aluminum is] a softer material than steel. It heats up quickly and moves, so you have to control the material with jigs and stiffeners. You can’t afford to be off the target, as the margin is slim to none.”

A new ram mast step, engineered to take a 3-ton working load, was installed, as were extensive hydraulics for the push-button winches. Francis Meisenbach, a naval architect at Pedrick’s design firm, used to be a boatbuilder, so when he sends model drawings to Simon Day, an engineer at NEB, he checks their accuracy down to the millimeter. According to Meisenbach, “Slack bilge, long ­overhang boats like Running Tide don’t have a lot of volume. One of the challenges was fitting in the new amenities.”

Day’s job is to take the engineering drawings from Pedrick and Meisenbach, and turn them into construction plans his team can use to guide the build. “The best place for an engineer to be is upside down in the bilge with a tape measure,” Day says. “The ­tolerances on the new systems are tight.” As a young engineer, Day is intrigued by the cutting edge of the sport, but he also has great respect for the history: “Speed isn’t everything. Having a story behind what you are doing is almost as important, and in some ways, more.”

One guiding principle for everyone involved in the project is that Running Tide harken to its past but live in the present with modern technology. This required them to overcome the challenge of adding a furling boom and push-button winches. There was debate over how the winches should be powered. NEB rigging expert PJ Schaffer believed ­hydraulic was the way to go.

The philosophy behind the rigging, however, is old-school, Schaffer says. “Every good program I’ve been on, the simpler the boat, the better the program. My challenge was to make the boat convertible at the deck level. I want it to be clean so when it’s sitting at the dock and Beau is going cruising with his grandkids, it’s minimal. Two sheets and a mainsheet, you go. But it also needed to work for bluewater sailing and the Bermuda Race.”

Running Tide’s interior is being carefully crafted by Wayne Rego, a master joiner with hands the size of baseball mitts. The new plywood deck went on before the interior went in, so everything Rego and his team builds must first fit through the hatches. To make sure he is fulfilling Van Metre’s vision, Rego built mock-ups of the cabin sole that ranged from highly polished book-matched mahogany to hardwood with more grain. Van Metre chose the grainy wood with more character because it is in keeping with the spirit of the original.

While the team at NEB works on finishing the project throughout the spring, Van Metre is focused on his vision of eventually racing to Bermuda with his son and daughter. “They know the history,” he says, “but they haven’t experienced it.”

It’s March, however, and sailing days are still months away. With a moist southerly licking the outer walls of Building No. 5, Van Metre can practically taste his first summer outing. If all goes to plan, he’ll once again bury the rail of this iconic yacht, with Isbrandtsen, his father, and all those who sailed aboard Running Tide in its glory days, sitting on the weather rail in spirit.

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