Emmanuel Cerf has a goal: “200 boats and 20 countries.” It’s stated so, right there on the custom business card he hands me at St. Petersburg, Florida’s North Park where nearly 40 A Class catamaran are being assembled for this weekend’s Helly Hansen NOOD Regatta St. Petersburg. Here, on the grassy bayside lawn, boats, masts and trailers are strewn about, and Cerf is making the rounds, greeting sailors as they arrive, making sure all is OK.

Soft-spoken, with a warm, welcoming and twinkling smile, he has quick answers for anyone who approaches: boat logistics, parking, parties, and parts, you name it, Cerf can help. He’s an unsung puppeteer of A class sailing, and his focus this weekend is not on his own sailing, but rather as the organizing force behind the 2020 A Class World Championship in St. Petersburg. He has high-level meetings with city officials coming up and he has to strengthen his pitch.

Cerf, who’s one of the principles of a local family-owned mechanical engineering and packaging business, is also a notorious charitable fundraiser in the city. “My wife and I jokingly called the ‘beggars of St. Petersburg,’” he says, “because we’re always asking for money for this and that.”

Nowadays, he’s shoring up support of his big dream regatta. “My priority is on the 2020 Worlds, so the sailing is secondary for me right now,” Cerf says. “It takes so much work to organize a worlds, to make it very successful, but this will be very successful.”

Success, he says, will be nothing short of a world championship the likes the class has never before seen. He wants it to have the same energy and excitement he gets when sailing an A class cat. “When I first saw one, I was like ‘Wow. That looks like too much fun. I’m going to have one in a year.’

True to his word, he did buy one, and he vividly remembers his first regatta, or rather seeing a lot of the bottom of his boat. Undeterred, he’s since become a fine A class catamaran sailor, an importer, and one of its greatest champions. “They’re hard to sail fast, but they’re easy to sail,” he says.

And while the experience of sailing an A class catamaran from out on the trapeze alone, gliding across the bay on a 165-pound craft is second to none, Cerf says it’s the people he’s befriended in the class that excite him today. These are his people, I’m told, and he treats them as family. He’s known to buy regatta social tickets for all the sailors, just make sure everyone can get into to the regatta’s nightly parties.

“It’s a great mix of sailors, from teens to 85-year-old guys,” Cerf says. “I bought my first boat from a guy who is 82 and still goes out on the boat. The young guys foil very well, but the older guys in the classics are actually more competitive than the foilers. It’s an amazing group and it shows anyone can sail the boat.”

As importer of eXploder A cats, Cerf is the man to turn to for parts and spares, especially in a pinch. Mike Krantz, a cat-sailing fanatic from Lake Lanier, Georgia, can share plenty examples of Cerf’s generosity and his importance to the growth and sustainability of A Class catamaran sailing in the Southeast. As Krantz and a team of sailors unload six boats from a trailer under the warm Florida sun, he takes a break to share just one: “When we were heading to Australia for the Worlds we knew the manufacturer was going to be short on spares,” Krantz tells me. “So, Emmanuel, out of the goodness of his heart, emptied out his warehouse and gave us all his spare foils, rudders and parts, and put them in container, sent us off to Australia and told us to just settle up when we got back.”

Cerf loves his city and all its cultural offerings, and has a vision to integrate its fast-paced waterfront development for his world championship. Between North Park where the A cats assemble and launch and St. Petersburg YC to the south, sits the city’s monumental New Pier development, which is schedule to be completed by early 2020.

“The pier is key,” says Cerf, who envisions a world championship race village featuring sailing demos, a big screen with race videos and stage for the winner’s podium so competitors “can come in and talk about the sailing with people who’ve never sailed before.”

Cerf, however, is finding it increasingly difficult to work the cumbersome cogs of local government. Like his first outing in an A class cat, however, he remains undeterred. There are many hurdles, he says, especially when working with the city and the parks department for permitting and securing waterfront access, but knows people, including the current mayor, Rick Krisman, who sees as a strong ally for sailing events in St. Petersburg. Then, there’s the sponsorship, which he admits is a relentless pursuit. “I’ve been recruiting sponsors for a couple of years and now it’s in high gear because we need $100,000 to $200,000 to put on a great venue for the sailors,” Cerf says. “We want to do a race village like a mini America’s Cup here. Everything is possible so, hopefully we’ll have the America’s Cup of the A class.”

The funding necessary to launch Cerf’s world-class regatta may be the pressing challenge, but attracting up to 200 international competitors is not, he says. “Once sailors come to St. Pete, they love it here, but we do have to market it still and get sponsors. I want to hold the best regatta of any class, and we want to set the bar really high.”

Until then, he’s doing his thing at the NOOD. Being Emmanuel. Ensuring the sailors arriving from near and far have what they need. “It’s a fun group of people,” he says. “They’re customers, and customers want service. If you don’t have it, you can’t grow anything.”

The post Spark Plugs: The A Class’s Emmanuel Cerf appeared first on Sailing World.

John Schellenbach, a Tartan 10 skipper and longtime Chicago NOOD competitor had enough of his Windy City winter, never mind having survived a brutal polar vortex. He and about 20 other Chicago area sailors were itching to get south and get some sailboat racing in. They’d take anything, he says, and their search ultimately led the to a for-charter Beneteau 345 named Lunaly.

Schellenbach has no idea what shape it’s in, what makes it goes fast, or whether it’s fast at all. All he knows is he’s skippering a ship of hometown fools in the Helly Hansen NOOD Regatta St. Petersburg Regatta’s five-boat PHRF 3 division. “I’ll be honest. We’re coming down for the warmth,” Schellenbach says. “I don’t know anything about the boat, and in fact, I’ve never raced PHRF before.”

Thursday will be the team’s first practice in the boat, if all goes to plan, and then it’s right into the racing for the weekend, which early forecasts promise to be both windy and light, and possibly somewhere in between.

PHRF 3 is one of the regatta’s smaller fleets, but the total PHRF assemblage will feature an eclectic mix of modern and classic designs in PHRF 2 and PHRF 1 as well. With full attendance, PHRF will be the St. Petersburg NOOD’s busiest circle. The timers and scorers will certainly have their work cut out for them.

Mike Kayusa’s perennial PHRF 1 winner, the Farr 30, Raven, is absent from the entry list, opening the door for 2018’s runner up, Warrior, the Tripp 38 helmed by local PHRF stalwart Grant Dumas. He’s typically in the hunt, but there’s a tinge of uncertainty in his prediction: “As our local group evolves and boats come and go, things change,” Dumas says. “There are a few boats that are on the rise, and some with their game on, this year. While we’re usually strong, it’s been a learning year so far. We’ve had a couple of setbacks, and I will fess up to having some mental lapses, like not leaving the dock on time and missing starting sequences.”

Dumas is also without his long-term tactician, which is critical on a complicated boat like Warrior. “When there’s a strong personality in the tactical role, things tend to go well, when there’s a weakness in that role, there’s a lot of second guessing throughout the boat.”

There is the potential for chaos, he says, but when there is respect, “there is a calmness.”

To hopefully bring organization to the 12-man dance required during maneuvers, he’s recruited snowbird John Osborne, of Canada, an Olympic Tornado gold medalist from Montreal (1976) who sailed for England. “He was in town asking around and looking for a boat to sail on,” Dumas says. “We had a good time, he’s a super nice guy and has a low-key method about him.” Between Osborne, and friends flying in from out of town, Dumas hopes he can be pulled from him slump and regain Warrior’s winning form. “It will be nice to get a fresh perspective on stuff,” he says, “to have a new set of eyes.”

Another notable absence on the St. Petersburg NOOD scratch sheet is that of Al Minella’s J/111 Albondigas, which won five of seven races to snatch fleet honors in 2018. Opportunity is knocking for newcomer Ian Hill, from the Chesapeake Bay, whose team on Sitella had a stellar performance in the fleet at its midwinters in January. For the past few years, Hill has been successfully campaigning a much larger and more complex X-Yachts Xp44 in PHRF regattas along the East Coast, and is finding the lighter J/111 far easier to get around the course.

Finishing second at midwinters — in his first ever one-design regatta with the 111 — is a testament to Sitella’s crew’s ability to switch platforms. His crew list is half of what it used to be, he says, and his core crew stepped up to be part of the program. Conditions were perfect, mid-range, which helped, but he has no illusions of grandeur. “We had the most bullets, but we also had the most last places,” he says. “We have a lot to learn on the boat, but there is a lot of information out there, so we were able to get up to speed quickly.”

Also warming up at January’s J/Fest in St. Petersburg were the J/88s, including Andy and Sarah Graff’s Exile, from Chicago, who return to Tampa Bay for the NOOD this weekend to improve on their fifth-place midwinter finish. “The fleet was really tight and we were only was 8 points out of second,” Andy says. “We sailed well, but we made a lot of mistakes downwind.”

A torn spinnaker and mis-timing of their sets are problems Graff says they can rectify easily. That, and not being over early.

Warrior sails the NOOD

If Graff were to name a few of his competitors to keep tabs on, he says it would certainly be Mike Bruno’s Wings, second overall at the NOOD in 2018. “He’s shown to be one of the few boats that can come back well after being behind,” Graff says, “and that’s something we need to be good at, too.”

While the A Class Catamarans will be out in force, both traditional and foiling, and combine to make it the regatta’s largest one-design class in advance of their world championships in 2020, there continues to be strong turnouts in the St. Petersburg NOOD’s classic plastics like the traveling S27.9s and Lightnings, the later of which kicks off its winter circuit in Miami soon after the NOOD. Arriving among the Lightning caravan will be familiar faces, such as Ched Proctor, Tom Allen, Steven Davis, and Betsy Alison.

Betsy Alison? Five-time Rolex Yachtswoman of the Year and coach to Paralympic greats? Yes. That’s right. Alison is finally ditching her coaching RIB and jumping back into the boat in which she honed her skills as a teenager in New Jersey. “I’m back…in a boat,” Alison says. “It’s exciting.”

Alison, of Newport, Rhode Island, was eager to rejoin the Lightning fleet in 2018, but ankle surgery dashed those hopes. The St. Petersburg NOOD will be first time she’s raced one in years. She’ll be driving, with her friend and crew, Will Jeffers, bringing her back up to speed. “I’m lucky that Will loves to crew and he’s so good at it,” Alison says. “I think it will be fairly seamless, but who knows? It’s been a couple of years, so it may not be pretty, but it will be nice to get out of the cold and reconnect with friends I sailed with a long time ago.”

Racing for at the Helly Hansen NOOD Regatta in St. Petersburg kicks off on Friday, February 15th and continues through the weekend, with DragonForce remote control sailboat racing scheduled on Saturday night at the St. Petersburg YC’s Tiki Bar Pool.

Follow this space for stories, results, photos and videos, as well as on the NOOD social channels with #hhnood.

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Tom Allen is standing precariously on the bow of his Lighting in the middle of Miami’s Biscayne Bay. He has both hands on a spare piece of line that he’s wrapped around the tip of a bent spreader. Right about now, he’s hoping his Sperry Top-Siders have as much grip as advertised, as he is about to throw his weight backward in an attempt to straighten the stubborn piece of aluminum. After a few jerks of the line, the spreader straightens out nearly back to its original shape. Checking it will be another thing to add to Allen’s list when he gets off the water.

With the repair complete, Allen barely catches his breath before a competitor sails by in search of a toolbox. Allen’s includes everything short of a circular saw. He graciously passes it off. After the first race, yet another team sails by. They point to a large hole near the stern and ask Allen if it’s safe to continue racing. With no structural damage, they continue to race. In this breeze, taking on a little extra water doesn’t hurt.

Once racing is over and the fleet’s celebratory dinner begins, Allen is nowhere to be seen. He’s still in the parking lot putting the final touches on his repair. Most attendees are in cocktail attire but Allen is sporting a respirator and Tyvec suit. This is the second hole he’s repaired this week, and he’s determined for the team to make the starting line again tomorrow.

“He is so willing to put the class on his back, he can never do enough for you,” says Bill Faude, who balances Lightning sailing with his marketing duties at Harken. “There’s no arrogance in him whatsoever, and he’s always happy to help. If he didn’t do what he is willing to do, we wouldn’t go sailing.”

Once racing is over and the fleet’s celebratory dinner begins, Allen is nowhere to be seen. He’s still in the parking lot putting the final touches on his repair. Most attendees are in cocktail attire but Allen is sporting a respirator and Tyvec suit. This is the second hole he’s repaired this week, and he’s determined for the team to make the starting line again tomorrow.

“He is so willing to put the class on his back, he can never do enough for you,” says Bill Faude, who balances Lightning sailing with his marketing duties at Harken. “There’s no arrogance in him whatsoever, and he’s always happy to help. If he didn’t do what he is willing to do, we wouldn’t go sailing.”

“We teach them what is important about this class, not just that it’s an ugly square 19-foot flower box pounding the chop,” says Faude. “It’s a tribe and we welcome them. We hug them, we house them, we help them put their boat together, we pay for them to come to events.” Allen comes from a long lineage of Lightning sailors himself. His grandfather, then his mother and father were Lightning sailors. Tom Allen Senior was a renowned competitor and founder of Allen Boatworks and passed his love for the class to his son.

Allen’s own boat, No. 9, is a testament to that legacy. The original number nine was built by his father, then traded back to the shop when Allen was 14 years old. His father thought it would be good for Allen to learn how to take care of a wooden boat. Even as a youngster, Allen enjoyed having something unique to preserve. One night long ago, No. 9 was stolen from the backyard of Allen Boatworks by kids, allegedly on a mission to sink the boat. They launched it and threw boulders at it, until beating it into an irreparable state.

Ten years later, long after No. 9 was retired, the class changed its rules requiring sail numbers match hull numbers. Allen knew exactly what number his new boat would carry.

“I continued to use it because it was one of the early boats my father built out of wood,” he says. “I grew up sailing it, but also because I don’t like having to change numbers when I sell stuff. Now everybody knows me and they can find me easily.”

This is typical of Allen’s character: as a guy who makes himself readily available to anyone in the class when assistance is required. “He’s carved this alternative path from his father,” says Faude. “His father was a competitor first, but when you buy a boat from Tommy you get a fast boat and his nurturing spirit for the class.“

Everyone in Miami has benefitted from the Allen’s knowledge or experience one way or another Each morning before racing, his crew gets a head start rigging his boat while he races around helping competitors fix things or adjust their tune. It’s well-known that Allen usually forgets to invoice for his work. While the Lightning class may be his livelihood, it’s also his legacy.

“My grandfather and mother were great sailors but my father, who lived down the beach, no one in his family sailed,” says Allen, explaining the family’s roots in the class. “His father was a doctor, and a golfer, and he wanted my father to be a golfer. But he didn’t want to be a golfer, he was OK to hang around and play on the links and caddy for others but he wanted to go sailing, he saw all the boats out there and decided that was for him. He wanted that for a long time.”

Allen has school papers from when he was six years old, when he was learning to write cursive, and the penmanship is prophetic. “I wrote, ‘‘I want to be a boat builder.’”

After the Buffalo [New York] Canoe Club’s fleet of Knarrs were destroyed in a fire, the Lightning was introduced and Tom Allen Senior secured his place in the fleet. Allen Senior dominated the class, and eventually built himself a boat, despite having no formal knowledge of wood working. His first boat was fast, he won many races, and others soon took notice. Before long, Allen boat-works was born.

Allen Junior grew up around the shop, spending his summers working for his father and honing his own skills in the Lightning. “When I was a young kid, I didn’t learn to sail with my father because he had the pick of whoever he wanted to sail with. My mother was excellent, even my sister Jane, the eldest. I crewed for him a couple of times, but it wasn’t until I went out and learned to sail with someone else that I became good enough that I could crew for him.”

After earning his degree at Michigan State, Allen Junior joined his father in business but with a new philosophy of engineering boats to last so they could be passed along, designing not just for the initial owner, but for the second or the third owner as well.

When he was a kid, he says, he used to read all the magazines and he was struck by an advertisement for a Melges-built E Scow. The ad, he says, touted, “new and improved stiffness, a boat that will last for four years.”

“Back in the day, an E scow was 12 to 14 thousand dollars and a Lightning was six thousand. I was like, what do you mean, you have to replace it in 4 years?

“I was stunned,” he says. “That was the change for me.”

Today he acknowledges his business is selling boats and repairing boats. Most of the guys in a small one-design fleet, their business is the fleet,” he says. “The class does much better, if you have a longer lasting boat that you don’t have to replace.”

When it comes down to it, Allen’s focus is at the heart of the class. Everything he does contributes to its longevity and health of its tribe. “The Lightning class is really good at it,” he says. “It’s not just helping people, it’s saying we care about you, we care you are having a good time. You really have to get people in young, so they will continue sailing. I don’t care if it’s a Lightning or something else, at least expose them to it.”

He’s witnessed numerous other classes die before their time. Once people stop buying new boats, he says, the class implodes.

However, as long as Allen Boat Co. exists, the Lightnings will certainly continue to see success. From straightening out an aluminum shroud to building new hulls, Tom Allen’s footing in the Lighting is sure.

The post The Lightning Rod appeared first on Sailing World.

So many years. So many races. So many faces. “Was he fast? I think so,” says Proctor. “I can’t remember, but I did sell some sails to him.”

But here they stand together at the St. Petersburg YC Sailing Center on the morning of the final day of the 2017 Helly Hansen NOOD Regatta in St. Petersburg. Proctor’s got at least four decades of Lightning sailing experience on him, but it’s Zonnenberg’s team that’s leading the class after two days and three light-air races. Proctor is lurking 5 points behind him on the scoreboard, and while praises the speed and smarts of Zonnenberg and his crew, in true Proctor fashion, he nonplussed of the day’s challenge ahead. He just has to win the race, and put a pile boats between him and kid.

He’s been there, done that.

The one thing Zonnenberg has never done, however, is pick the brain of the elder Proctor. So on this morning, while the race committee hoisted its postponement flag, he got his chance. And what was the first question he asked?

“So Ched…what lights your fire to go sailing after all these years?

“It’s the constant fascination of what little things make a sailboat go a little faster,” he says after a brief contemplation, “it’s a zone type thing . . . it’ a continuous fascination.”

Proctor’s been racing Lightnings since 1984, although he did some crewing in them back in the 70s, and his enduring attraction to the class is simple, he explains to Zonnenberg. “There are a lot of them, they’re essentially the same, and it is always good competition. It’s a nice simple boat, logistically. You show up at a regatta and be ready to sail in an hour. It’s also intellectually challenging. There’s a lot of tweaking and steering technique.”

When pressed to give St. Petersburg local his best advice, he only offers, “I don’t need to give him any speed tips, he’s been showing us a lesson in being in the right place at the right time.”

Zonnenberg is a case in point for the Lightning class’s continued efforts to get younger sailors into the boats, and for this reason, says Proctor, the class continues to appeal to new and returning Lightning sailors like Zonnenberg. “It’s a good design and works well in a variety of conditions —you can sail it in thin water and open oceans. When its blowing hard and when it’s tuned right it feels very fast upwind because of you have such control of the rig. The design hasn’t changed, but it has evolved to be a user friendly boat that can be easily tuned to any conditions.” When the Zonnenberg finally asks the thousand-dollar question of how best to sail the boat, Proctor is quick to answer: it’s all about heel angle.

“Because it’s a hard-chined boat,” he says, “if you change the heel angle a little bit, the shape of the boat that the water sees changes dramatically. That was the light that went off to me along time ago. I learned this from Bruce Goldsmith and I asked him questions all the time. And he explained to me that we can change the sail shapes and trim the sails, but all you really need to do is just change the heel of the boat. To me, that’s the most important thing. You have to be very aware in light conditions, it’s changing all the time.”

Taking his own advice to the racecourse today for the one and final race of the excruciatingly light winds on Tampa Bay, Proctor led at the first mark, but gave up his lead on the first run to another Lightning legacy skipper Steve Hayden on the first run. Hunting them down was Zonnenberg, who rounding the second weather mark inches behind Proctor. They battled to to the end, with Proctor nipping him at the finish.

Hayden won the race, and the ultimately the class and the regatta, but it was Zonnenberg who just barely beat the master at this own game. Until next time.

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