If a formula exists for supercharging activity in a one‑design fleet, Ned Goss appears to have discovered it. Though he’s only been active in the Y-Flyer Class for a few years, his efforts to bolster turnout at a local regatta in Charleston, South Carolina, 18 months ago sparked a movement. Since then, local participation has trebled, and a new class builder has come forward with six boats on order and more to come.

So, how does a former pro sailor and speed ­merchant—Goss documented 36.5 knots aboard his Mach 2 Moth one afternoon in 2014 on Charleston Harbor, making him the fastest Moth sailor in the world—suddenly become the spark plug for an 80-year-old one-design class? As unlikely as that progression seems, it’s a morality tale for the sport—all about fun and family.

Designed in 1938 by Alvin Youngquist, of Toledo, Ohio, the uniquely identifiable Y-Flyer is an 18-foot hard-chined, scow-shaped, two-­person dinghy with fleets active throughout the southeastern, Midwestern, and northeastern US. There are pockets in Canada as well. Originally designed to be built at home out of plywood, the majority of Y-Flyers active today are molded in fiberglass. Fully rigged, these boats customarily weigh around 500 pounds (the class-required ­minimum weight) and carry a single-spreader mast supporting 161 square feet of sail area in a main and a jib. The Y-Flyer Class Association advertises its craft as “fun, versatile and family-­oriented.” It turns out, those are exactly the qualities that galvanized Goss’ interest.

Some people are described as a bundle of energy. Goss, a Connecticut-native-cum-South-Carolinian, is the exponential extension of that. He’s hyperkinetic, perpetually on the move. In Charleston, at the James Island YC Y-Flyer and Friends Regatta this fall—an event he co-founded—Goss drove the tractor to launch and haul boats while ­discussing equipment refinements with fellow competitors and alternately using his phone to manage the coming week’s schedule of sailing classes, exams and maintenance work at the College of Charleston’s sailing center, where he serves as dockmaster, head instructor and offshore sailing coach.

At 44, Goss has been sailing and sailboat ­racing most of his life. He’s bounced from Blue Jays to 420s, Fireballs, 49ers, Melges 24s, foiling Moths, and an assortment of keelboats. Throughout his time in this sport, he’s experienced periods that could best be described as burnout. And each time after a hiatus away from racing, he’s returned to competitive sailing with renewed energy.

“I’ve had a couple of episodes in my life,” he explains, “where the sailing I was doing became overly intense. In those moments, I just had to step away from the sport. And each time, after some reflection, I realized that the fun had gone out of it. I know now that what I really love is sailing with people. Sailing alone like you do in the Moth class just doesn’t satisfy me in a sustainable way. I love being around others who love sailing and openly sharing what they learn. In our Y-Flyer fleet, after every regatta we sit down and talk, and the newer competitors learn from the more seasoned Y sailors. That’s basically the ethos of this class. It really adds to the fun of racing, and it allows everyone to get better.”

This is exactly what Charleston’s Y-Flyer cohort experienced recently, and it all seems to trace back to one phone call.

In the weeks leading up to the 2020 edition of the James Island Open Regatta—a summertime staple—Goss determined that he and his wife, Jessica, would race their Y-Flyer. He’d had the boat for several years but only raced it occasionally.

“At the time,” Goss recalls, “I was looking for a two-person boat that wasn’t too technical so I could compete in it with my wife, who is a relative newcomer to the sport. We had the Y-Flyer, so that’s what we ­registered for the regatta.”

The problem was, only one other entry materialized in that class. That was about when Goss got a call from Jeff Woodard. He was a Hobie 20 racer, but local participation in that class had recently faltered. So, Woodard wondered if Goss could locate a Y-Flyer that he and his wife, Amy, could race in the regatta. As Goss tells the story, he got busy on the phone, and in little time he’d found four available boats.

“Bob Turner, who is the Y-Flyer class president, had an extra boat that he agreed to loan out,” Goss explains, “and I found three others. It wasn’t a problem finding people to race them because COVID had shut down so many sailing events that everyone was eager to get back on the water. Right out of the gate, we had eight boats registered for the regatta, and I think seven crews ended up competing. Half that fleet had never sailed a Y-Flyer before.”

That was the turning point. The momentum continued when the fleet began participating in the James Island Yacht Club’s weekly summer evening series. With four boats available each week as loaners, a number of different individuals got the chance to sample Y-Flyer racing over that summer. Sensing a chance to really spread the word, the Gosses did their best to connect these opportunities with local influencers, like Greg Fisher and Kevin Jewett, the former and current ­directors of the College of Charleston’s sailing program.

After one Thursday evening sailing with his wife, Jo Ann, Fisher seemed genuinely enthused. “It’s really exciting to see the rebirth of the Y class here in Charleston,” he says. “I think it’s the perfect boat to involve all levels and ages of sailors, and it seems like the class here has a great group of people working hard to help and encourage new participants. Jo Ann and I had a super time enjoying the fun, quick racing out there tonight. We’re actually talking about buying our own boat and getting involved full time.”

The fun that Fisher cites turned out to be infectious, and in short order, other local influencers got involved as well. Three-time Sunfish world champion David Loring actually grew up sailing Y-Flyers in Charleston, so he found a boat and joined in. And so did Will Hanckel, who took his first ride on a Y-Flyer at age 3 and can’t remember a time that there wasn’t one sitting in the family driveway. (Loring and Hanckel are both former junior and adult national champions in this class.)

And local one-design legend Lenny Krawcheck ­gravitated back to the class as well. As a teenager, he was the Y-Flyer junior national champion in 1959, and later won the national championship twice (’82 and ’94). For him, this resurgence in activity was almost nostalgic. Krawcheck recalls an era when there were 30-plus Y-Flyers racing regularly in Charleston.

Throughout the subsequent fall and winter—­customarily Charleston’s offseason—Goss and company kept the momentum humming by orchestrating a series of one-day regattas. In the aggregate, all of this activity didn’t go unnoticed. Jessica Goss was documenting it for the Y-Flyer class website with regular updates, and others, like the aforementioned Turner—the class president—were promoting it elsewhere. So, it wasn’t surprising that Charleston’s contingent was able to ­convince the national class officers to have the Y-Flyer molds shipped from New England down to Charleston, where Kurt Oberle, of High and Dry Boatworks, had agreed to become the new builder.

Oberle—more custom fabricator than boatbuilder—didn’t want to build the boats conventionally. What really cemented his interest in becoming the official class builder was the opportunity to implement a resin-infusion process.

“We’ve been working with infusion guru Phil Steggall from MJM Yachts,” Oberle explains. “Peter Johnstone was kind enough to loan him for this project. The toughest part has been setting up 30-year-old molds to work with resin infusion. At the moment, we’re sourcing all the materials to get started on the first boat. We’ve got six boats on order, and there’s potentially enough demand that we’ll build another six by the end of next year.”

Part of that demand is being driven by locals like David Hood, who borrowed a boat and raced most of the past summer with his two daughters—Saylor, 8, and Harbor, 6. Putting his boat away at the James Island YC after a breezy last day of the Y-Flyer and Friends Regatta, Hood seemed quite pleased.

“This is our first year in the Y,” he says, “and I’ve learned that it’s a pretty easy platform for a family like ours. I’ve raced Lightnings for years, but I think that boat would be too much for the girls right now. The Y is fun, and they seem to love it. It’s just so easy to get here, set up the rig, get the boat in the water, and 15 minutes later, we’re racing.”

What Hood identifies is a key aspect of the Y-Flyer’s longevity—its simplicity. That element means these boats are accessible to a wide array of sailors. The Y-Flyer can accommodate not just a broad spectrum of combined crew weights, but also a wide range of racing talent. Of the 13 boats on the water at this event, five were raced by family crews, and six had both males and females on board. But perhaps the most telling metric of all is the fact that the competitors’ ages ranged from 6 to 80.

Come June, the Y-Flyer National Championship regatta will take place on Lake Norman, North Carolina, a mere three hours up the road from Charleston. Goss intends to rally at least half a dozen Lowcountry boats to make the trip. Ideally, he says, all of them will place in the top 10. Regardless, he knows the ultimate measure won’t be trophies won; it will be in fun had. And that’s just how it ought to be in this sport.

The post Y Flyers of the South appeared first on Sailing World.

On June 21, 1976, there was a report buried deep on page 54 of The New York Times; the results of the US Olympic Sailing Trials. The standings in the three-man Soling keelboat competition might have come as a surprise to some; the winner was a 25-year-old Texan by the name of John Kolius, with his crew, Walter Glasgow and Richard Hoepfner. They had beaten (among others) Robbie Haines (with Lowell North aboard), Buddy Melges, Dave Curtis and Bill Buchan.

Kolius recalls the experience 44 years later: “The day after the trials, Melges said, ‘Come to Zenda, Wisconsin—let’s get you really going fast.’ That’s how it was. I was so lucky with mentors, so lucky. I beat this guy at his own game—barely in the last race—and the next day he says, ‘Come to Zenda… How’s that?’ That’s awesome!”

Most of the top Soling sailors had a few years on Kolius (the younger Robbie Haines being the exception), and given the age gap and their stellar reputations, it would have been easy to have been over-awed.

“It’s part self-confidence, it’s part arrogance, and it was part naivete because I was too young to be scared,” Kolius says.

There were no mind games?

“If there were, I was too stupid to figure it out,” he says. “I was just racing sailboats. I really was fast and really could get the most out of a boat.”

The boatspeed was enough for a ­silver medal in a desperately tight Olympic regatta, with less than a point between the top three boats at the finish. Kolius had come a long way in a short time, but none of it would have happened if his two older sisters hadn’t tried sailing at a Girl Scouts camp.

“I’m thinking my father must have had a bad day at the golf course,” Kolius says. “All of a sudden, he just decided to take up a different sport. As soon as they finished that camp, my dad said this looks like a great thing for the family and bought an O’Day Day Sailer. And that’s kind of how we all started together. And I really took to it. I just loved it.”

The family joined the Houston YC, and after a year of sailing the Day Sailer, Kolius’ parents bought him a Sunfish to start racing. He had the kind of sailing education that doesn’t happen so much in these days of junior fleets and intensive coaching.

“I was a yacht-club rat. I would hang out at the club, and if anybody was going sailing and we weren’t, I was begging for a ride. And there were a lot of wonderful people.”

He crewed on everything he could and raced Sunfish in mixed fleets of juniors and adults. “So, you were getting your butt kicked by grown-ups from the get-go. You got your training through the adults that decided to take you under their wing.”

RELATED: My Class, My Story: The Sunfish

Success came early in the local classes, and with the support of his parents, Kolius entered the Sears Cup and qualified for the finals in San Francisco Bay. Racing with Jay and Dan Williams, the team didn’t have a good first day; they struggled to cope with the current, hit a mark in one race, and were dead last in the other—at which point, his father intervened. “He just came down on us that night and said: ‘You guys need to start really sailing or we’re going to go home. I’m not going to sit here and have to watch this.’”

The boys took it on board, and the next day it blew hard. “It was perfect for our experience, where we came from,” Kolius says. They walked out winners.

Kolius went on to win the Mallory Cup in 1971 and then quickly moved into the Olympic Soling class, coming ninth at the Olympic trials a year later. On the way home, Kolius and his crew made a commitment to do it properly for 1976. “We trained five days a week, basically out of the yacht club, for the last two years before the trials.”

After Olympic silver, Kolius kept up the momentum on to the biggest stage of all: the America’s Cup: “I immediately went into the sailmaking industry. I’d already dabbled. I worked for Buddy [Melges] for a season. I worked for Hans Fogh in Toronto for a season.”

Kolius then started the first of his businesses—an Ulmer Sails franchise, eventually becoming a partner before leaving—and won the J/24 World Championship in 1979 and 1981.

The J/24, he says, was a stepping stone to bigger boats, which then led to some of the first IOR 50-footers, and from there to the biggest show of all. It was 1983, and Dennis Conner and Tom Blackaller were locked in a battle to win the New York YC’s America’s Cup defense trials. Blackaller had built a new boat and was sailing it in Newport against the two-time Cup winner Courageous, using the old boat as a trial horse.

“Blackaller felt like Courageous wasn’t pushing him hard enough, and he invited me to come up and do the mainsheet for starters. I was doing the mainsheet, and the gentleman that was steering the Courageous got sick. And so, they put me on the helm, and he put [Paul] Cayard on the mainsheet, over from his boat. And basically, for a week we kicked Tom’s ass. And once again, I was just too young, too stupid to know that I wasn’t supposed to be there.”

When the program moved to California for winter training, Kolius was made skipper of Courageous. He got to choose some of his crew, and the boat was promoted from trial horse to stablemate. “I got to bring John Bertrand with me,” he says. “John and I, we sailed a whole lot together. It was a lot of fun. He’s as calm as I am uncalm.”

And then they were back in Newport for a Cup summer that will probably never be surpassed.

“We surprised a lot of people. We did a lot of work to that boat, the boys. We longboarded the Courageous. The whole team got up there in the wintertime, but that made us even closer together. We ­overachieved, there’s no question of that.”

The overachievement attracted a lot of attention, particularly in the light of Conner’s failure to hold onto the Cup. Kolius was appointed skipper of America II, the New York YC’s challenger in Fremantle, Australia, in 1987. After an excellent start in the first two round robins, the boat missed the cut for the semifinals by a point, after a desperately narrow defeat to New Zealand.

“It was horrible; it was a very, very quiet tow-in,” Kolius says. “I did not achieve what I wanted to do in the America’s Cup in the end. It seemed like I had a very difficult time managing the fundraising and the sailing. We had really good teams. We had really good sails. We were not ever very fast. We just couldn’t get the right platform no matter how hard we tried. Unfortunately, the America’s Cup is pretty much all about the platform in the end. And I got nobody to blame but myself; it just didn’t work out. We had a whole bunch of people give us a whole bunch of money, and we did not win. So, it was not a ­wonderful experience.”

While it was a setback, the 1988 Deed of Gift match and prolonged subsequent court action gave Kolius an opportunity to resume his sailing career outside the Cup. During this period, his name was rarely out of the sailing magazines. He won the Bermuda Gold Cup and the New Zealand open match race title in 1988, the IOR 50-footer World Cup title in 1990 with Abracadabra, and again in 1992 with Champosa VII, along with an Admiral’s Cup win in 1997.

A lot of this racing was funded by private owners, particularly Dr. James Andrews, perhaps the most feted sports surgeon in the United States. “I sailed on Abracadabra for years, and Dr. Andrews would open his checkbook. He wanted to win. He knew if he wanted to play the game in the [IOR] 50-foot class, he had to pay the boys, pay the boat captain, pay the sailmaker. He spent a lot of money.”

Kolius recalls a day in San Francisco when a Sports Illustrated reporter asked Andrews why he paid for the program but didn’t drive the boat.

“We had never spoken about that, ever,” Kolius says. “I thought I was providing him with what he wanted, and maybe I was, and sometimes maybe I was providing him what I really wanted… I’m not really sure. But bless his soul, he said, ‘I have enough money that I could probably buy a Triple-A baseball team, but they’re not going to let me play second base.’ That was his philosophy.

“[The owners] are part of the team, and I think that’s the way a lot of those people were feeling. Now, did we burn them out during that time? There’re a lot of people out there that are willing to put up the nut to get a team started, but the vision has to be realistic. There has to be alternate methods of income for the owners. How are you going to make your money back? That’s what it needs, being an investment instead of an expenditure.”

There has been no shortage of sailing events seeking a paying audience to make it an investment. In that period of the late 1990s, it was the Ultimate 30 class of which Kolius was a part. Now an almost forgotten footnote to the long history of professional sailing circuits, it had all the usual trappings: prize money and short-course racing; in this case, in dinghy-style 30-foot boats with an open-design rule. The Ultimate 30s were like magnesium—they flared brightly when they hit the water, and then went out quickly.

“We keep shooting ourselves in the foot—I think, personally—by continuing to push the design program. If you’re going to have true professional sailing, pick a boat and let the crews fight it out. Sailing continues to try to sell the design of sailing boats—sell the concept of sailing—when it should be selling the team aspect of sailing and selling the characters that are in the sport. It’s cheaper. I can tell you that for sure.”

When the America’s Cup did come back to life in 1992, Kolius was a part of it with Paul Cayard’s Il Moro de Venezia challenge. They were defeated in the America’s Cup final by America Cubed. “I helped Paul, did some coaching, more or less crew coaching and crew-management-type coaching, and also sailed the second boat,” Kolius says. He then worked with the America Cubed Foundation to coach the Mighty Mary team in 1995.

“I did a better job, I feel like, of being a coach when I was with Paul—and I coached the women’s team a little bit. I felt like I did a better job doing that than I did being the skipper and fundraiser, whatever, of the America II program and the Hawaii program.”

The Hawaii program was Aloha Racing, also backed by Andrews and sponsored by HealthSouth. They came ninth in the round robins of the 2000 Louis Vuitton Cup, and it was Kolius’ final Cup appearance. “I was pretty well burned to a crisp after 2000,” he says. So, he returned to his roots, the place where his love of sailing had started.

Kolius went Sunfish sailing—the boat had been a big part of both his and his wife Joanne’s life, and he came in second at the Worlds in 2002. (Joanne’s best result is seventh.) He also did some J/80 sailing with Caleb Borchers and three members of the sailing team from La Porte High School in Texas, where Joanne was principal. He then got together a team of his old Cup crewmates. “It was fun, but then all of a sudden it was too serious because ‘we gotta win.’ The girls [from La Porte] always kept you level,” he says.

It felt like something had fundamentally shifted in his relationship with the sport. “I think my horizon was shortening after the America’s Cup in 2000,” he says. “I got mentored by a whole bunch of wonderful people; it’s the only reason I got where I was. And so, after 2000, I thought, well man, maybe I need to do a better job of doing the same thing. And so, that’s kind of where that led into having the kids crew [the J/80], and into teaching sailing at the high school level, down here in Florida.”

In 2011, he sold the sailing business he had started in Texas in the 1990s and took a year off with Joanne to go fishing in the Bahamas. “And then, it was just like there’s no going back…”

There was one thing that might have got him back into a topflight boat. “I loved, love, love offshore racing,” Kolius says. “That was actually more fun to me than the buoy racing or the match racing, to be honest. What I should have done, I should have gone into the singlehanded around-the-world stuff because I would’ve had a great time doing that, but I didn’t do it.”

He says he did try to get on Cayard’s team (EF Language, Whitbread winner in 1997-98), however. “I didn’t beg, but I hinted a couple of times, and he didn’t take the hint, so I dropped it. I should’ve begged because I would’ve loved to have done it. I’m not sure he would have taken me, but maybe, and by that time the America’s Cup came up and I had to choose, and I did what I did. I think if those type of events (Admiral’s Cup) were still happening, I would have hung around for longer than I did. I was tired of being a manager. I wanted to be a sailor again.”

These days, Kolius has found a new outlet: “My wife and I like sport fishing. We got into sport fishing because when I retired from sailing, the odds on my wife—who is also extremely competitive and also a good sailor—the odds on us retiring to a sailboat was zero. We would be at each other’s throat the whole time, but we both love the ocean. So, what are you going to do? We’re not trawler people, so we decided to try sport fishing. It’s just like back to the same mentor thing; the boys that were really good would take us—because we’re just mom and pop sport fishing—but they would take us under their wing and teach us their techniques.”

While John Kolius might have wrapped up his sailing career, he did find the good life, or perhaps the good life finally found him.

The post The Rise and Fall of John Kolius appeared first on Sailing World.

Real change takes time, that much we know. Yet the rate at which the sport of competitive sailing has advanced over the past two decades is truly mind-blowing. In a blink, we’ve gone from displacement sailing to sportboat planing and now foiling crafts of all types and sizes. While our equipment evolves rapidly, however, our social initiatives seem to crawl at an agonizingly slow pace. What I’m referring to here is diversity, equity and inclusion in sailboat racing, and this is especially true in professional sailing.

Yes, there are more and greater opportunities for women at the Olympic level as new disciplines like kiting and coed classes continue to shift the gender balance. Never before have there been so many inspirational and talented female skippers and crew in the shorthanded and around-the-world racing scenes, and with certain one-design classes like the IC37 forcing change by requiring female crewmembers, we are indeed inching closer to being a better reflection of the real world. But we’re not there yet—not even close.

I’m regularly reminded of this when I see photos from awards ceremonies of the big-boat grand-prix events. Take the superyachts and maxis, for example, where there are big budgets, big crews and even bigger opportunities for women, but it’s still a big party of day-rate dudes. Gray-bearded grizzlies too, the lot of them. And what of other higher-­profile ­professional sailing circuits that claim to be progressive? Top of mind, the foiling GC32 class? More bros. The 44Cup? Same. The 52 Super Series? Yep.

SailGP? Well, sort of, but full credit to that circuit for committing to the effort. For the entirety of season two, all SailGP teams had females on their rosters as mandated by the league’s Women’s Pathway Program, but they barely sailed in actual races. Thankfully, for the one windy penultimate event of the season in Spain, the female sailor athletes got their debut in the main event; some were more active than others in the jump seat of the F50 foiling catamarans, chipping into the tactical comms. Others seemed, for the most part, along for the rip and ride.

“With the addition of a new crewmember as a new standard and light-wind configuration, WPP athletes are now able to gain the valuable experience needed to race the high-flying, high-speed F50s,” SailGP said ahead of the Spanish event, but in previous back-to-back light-wind regattas, teams raced with three crew instead of the regular five.

I never could get a straight answer as to why, but for 2022’s season three, we’re told the default light-wind crew configuration will now be four-up, including one female. I suppose that’s better, but really? Why only the light-air races? I don’t buy the experience cop-out because plenty of the “developing” teams over the first two seasons plugged male sailors into roles with now equal or less experience, and I’m pretty sure turning knobs on the foil controller does not require a whole lot of muscle mass. It takes experience. And experience in big breeze. Hopefully, by the time we get to season four, there will be a female or two on every boat, in every race, regardless of wind strength. [Editor’s Note: According to SailGP, for Season 3, all teams will now race with a four-person crew in light winds and a six-person crew in stronger winds, including one female.]

Access to the starting lineups of such big-league teams will be reserved for the boys for a while, and that’s especially true for the America’s Cup. The revised AC75 class rule defines eight sailors on board, and I’d bet that each afterguard trio (helmsman, main trimmer and flight controller) will be exclusively male in 2024. The other five crew will either be male champion cyclists with watermelon quads or world-caliber rowers with apelike arms. (No disrespect to any of these athletes; they put in the hard work too.)

So, to include females in sailing’s pinnacle event, they’ve instead put a Women’s America’s Cup regatta into the protocol (as well as one for youth), which will be sailed in the new AC40 class. This is great news, but even this event has a giant asterisk: It’s a requirement of entry for each challenger to sail in the women’s AC “if it is held.” That’s a big if, and as we saw with AC36, the highly anticipated Youth America’s Cup never happened, no thanks to COVID-19.

So, again, there is progress at the top of the sport—baby steps as they may be—but what is truly heartening is the changing landscape at the wider base of sailing, where the rest of us play. But here too there is much work to be done on the pro-sailing gender front, and even more so with the slow-moving diversity shift.

RELATED: Women’s Invitational Shines in San Diego

It’s impossible to say or to quantify how many more young adult women are sailing keelboats professionally after college. At every regatta I sailed in 2021 there were more women, but I’m quite sure none, if any, were getting paid. Professional sailor and multiple world champion Willem Van Waay came to the same conclusion after the most recent J/70 World Championship in California. Not only were there few women among hundreds of men, he says, but there were practically no paid females in a class chock full of pros. The reality, he says, is that only guys like him have the opportunity to learn all the tricks of the boat through experience and paychecks, while perfectly good female sailors are recruited not for their skills but because of their weight. Owners and fellow pros, Van Waay says, need to step up to get more women more paid gigs in the class.

“In the J/70 class especially, the main trimmer/tactician spot is taken by the guy pros, and those guys have always been given the opportunities that women haven’t been given,” Van Waay says. “Because of this, they’re now the stars and making great money.”

The best way to force change, he says, is for there to be a class where there are unlimited pros, but “you have to have two men and two women, and the owner has to drive. Then, all of a sudden, an owner who buys a boat has to find two women—not the lightest women, but the best women.”

Van Waay pitched us on trying his idea at the Helly Hansen NOOD St. Petersburg next February, and we happily accepted. To be eligible for the J/70 class’s Mixed-Plus trophy, the crew composition can only have two adult males (over 21), and only one adult male can be a pro. The Mixed-Plus division will be scored as a subdivision of the fleet.

“I’ve had so many women come up to me that want to do it, and I think it will be popular,” Van Waay adds. “Those [owners] who do this will get the top women, the right pros and be ready. They will beat the all-dude teams that just want to sail that way, and that’s what we want to happen. We want the women to do well and win. I think with that there will be some obvious results for potential change for women to get more opportunities.”

I’m with Willem and SailGP. Let’s stop talking about it and make it ­happen.

The post Top Females Limited Access Top Pro Gigs appeared first on Sailing World.

Kathleen Tocke is curled up in the bottom of the Snipe, ­thinking she might die, fearful she might not. The supercrew had a bad reaction to seafood, and to say she is not at her best is to put it kindly. While Tocke rides out her problema estomacal during a fortunate postponement at the Snipe Western Hemispheres, her skipper Ernesto Rodriguez relaxes in the cockpit, hiking boots off, bare feet up, ghosting around the starting area. He has no doubt Tocke will rally when the time comes.

After an hour delay, the breeze fills, the AP comes down, and Tocke rises from her death bed. Soon enough, she’s hiking off her toes and executing roll tacks, roll jibes and pole sets with explosive power punctuated by her flying ponytail. The team posts a 1-2 for the day and moves up the leader board.

Regarding her super-human motivation, Tocke later chuckles, “I just hike harder so it will be over faster.”

Rodriguez has seen Tocke in similar circumstances in the past, which is why he was never concerned. With a laugh, he says, “I knew when the sequence started, she would transform into another beast.”

In the Snipe class, 2021 is the year of Rodriguez and Tocke. They’ve been on fire, winning the Snipe North Americans, the Snipe European Championship and the Snipe US Nationals. For good measure, Tocke won the Snipe US Women’s Nationals, ­crewing for skipper Rachel Bryer.

Coming from behind is one of Tocke’s favorite topics. “Our best races were those we climbed from the abyss. Ernesto doesn’t give up. No matter how much pain we’re in, we just keep going.”

For his part, Rodriguez agrees. Of all the wins of the past year, his favorite was the Europeans. “We were the only US team there,” he says. “We felt like we had a target on our backs.”

After an OCS on the second day of that championship, the team had to be more conservative on the starting line. They relied on their speed, tactics and teamwork to win the event, which Tocke notes comes easily. “We’re really good friends,” she says. “He’s like a brother who’s also a pain in the neck. We don’t talk in the boat. I can anticipate if he’s going to tack or not. We only talk when we really need to. That really helps so we can focus on our jobs ­without having too much going on.”

It’s no secret that Rodriguez is supremely fit. Snipe builder Andy Pimental, of Jibe Tech, recalls a situp contest at a regatta where Rodriguez put everyone to shame. Tocke, however, believes a lot of people overlook his critical acumen on the racecourse.

“Ernesto can see wind other people don’t see,” she says. “It’s not just hiking around the racecourse. People hear his accent and they think, ‘Here’s this dude who goes to the gym.’ They have no idea the brain power inside that head.”

A lot of Rodriguez’s success in Snipes can be traced back to his Cuban upbringing, where he was a member of the national ­sailing team.

“In Cuba, we spent a lot of time sailing: five days a week, three hours a day for 10 years,” he says. “Being on the water that much at an early age, you develop a sense for what needs to be done, what is the maximum speed in the conditions. Those years in Cuba helped me, knowing I can get to another level, which translates to good results.”

There are a lot of different opinions with regard to which Snipe sails are best, which Snipe hulls are optimal, and what method is the ultimate to tune the unique 15-foot doublehander first built in 1931. There is no debate, however, with regard to the heart and soul of this class. Everyone agrees it’s National Sailing Hall of Famer Augie Diaz, who is known affectionately as “the Old Man.”

This old man, by the way, will sail circles around any unsuspecting whippersnapper in a Snipe.

Born in 1954, Diaz has a long list of accomplishments, ­including College Sailor of the Year, two-time Snipe World Champion, and 11-time Snipe US National Champion. He is the living, breathing embodiment of the Snipe class motto: “Serious sailing, serious fun.”

When asked why Rodriguez and Tocke sail so well, Diaz is ­animated and enthusiastic. “Oh my God, you must start with the fact that both are incredible athletes, strong and quick,” he says. “Then recognize they are both terrific sailors. Ernesto has a lot of time in the Laser, the purest form of racing. It’s mano a mano.”

Diaz has known Rodriguez since the younger sailor defected from Cuba in 1996. “Ernesto’s upbringing in Cuba, Laser sailing was very hard. Everyone in the Laser fleet worked against Ernesto, and because of that, he is very tough. Kathleen sailed with me for more than 10 years. Even though she won’t admit it, I taught her a few things. Kathleen was a figure skater. Figure skaters, ­gymnasts, those athletes do really well in the Snipe.”

While COVID-19 shut down a lot of major regattas in 2020, it created an opportunity for some Snipe sailors to train in Florida. Legendary Polish sailor Mateusz Kusznierewicz, who won a Finn Olympic gold medal and a Star World Championship, was staying at Diaz’s home in Miami when COVID-19 hit hard. Unable to leave the country, Kusznierewicz agreed to coach Rodriguez, Diaz and other Snipe sailors.

“We were going out in the afternoons, three, four, five times a week,” Diaz recalls.

In those tuning sessions, Rodriguez and Tocke laid a ­foundation for their performance in the year 2021. Rodriguez says Kusznierewicz did not give the team one magical piece of advice or a belt full of silver bullets. “It was a lot of small details that we went over,” Rodriguez says. “Small changes are the ones that make big differences for us.”

On the racecourse, Diaz wants to win just as much as anyone else, but he also wants the Snipe class to thrive. Countless sailors have entered the class through the Diaz borrow-a-boat program, including Rodriguez. “My father and I sponsored Ernesto in the Snipe class in 1997,” Diaz says. “We gave him a boat. He started sailing with us. My father and I are helping him get faster. And he gets faster and faster. And he’s beating us. But we still keep ­helping him.”

When asked how many Snipes he has loaned out over the decades, Diaz laughs and says, “Too many.” He notes: “I’ve gotten a lot out of the Snipe class. Even if I dedicated the rest of my life to giving back, I wouldn’t be able to give back enough.”

Getting young sailors into Snipes is one of the activities Diaz takes seriously. “I refer to them as red ants,” he says. “When you are on the racecourse, they are crawling all over you and they are biting you. It’s all these young guys kicking my butt. I love it. I love winning, but I like seeing the class do well even more than winning.”

While Rodriguez is quick on the racecourse, he is just as fast to offer advice to newcomers, especially those languishing in the middle of the fleet.

Building and sustaining the class may well be one of the most important things Tocke learned from her decade crewing for Diaz. The Snipe class opened a lot of doors in a lot of countries for Tocke, who points out that she did not grow up in a wealthy family. Rather, she grew up in a family that was head over heels in love with sailing. Because of that experience, she wants young people to have the same opportunities. She is quick to organize seminars, encourage newcomers, and host Snipe regattas for women.

Back on the course, the competition between the top teams is tight. No quarter is given. But unlike other classes where the exchanges can get chippy, there is a lot of respect. Rodriguez has a reputation for being a gentleman on and off the water.

“I think that friendships can be very competitive on the water,” he says. “But it is important to not breach the rules. I would never jeopardize my friendship with Augie over one race or one regatta, or one world championship. Our relationship off the water is more important to me than on the water. I cannot take credit for my behavior. I learned that from Augie. I was not brought up that way in Cuba. I’m glad that he is in my life. He is a good example for me and a lot of people in the class.”

Tocke and Rodriguez are, of course, both students of the game. One of the many reasons they have excelled this year is because the other sailors in the Snipe class have shared information with them and pushed them hard. They have had an amazing year, but they did not win all of their regattas. At the Western Hemispheres, Diaz and crew Barbara Brotons emerged victorious, as the Old Man should, with Rodriguez and Tocke right there cheering them on.

The post Snipe Sailing’s Generation Fast 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.

When Team USA left Tokyo empty-handed, we were reminded that Olympic sailing is one corner of our sport that can generate as much ­controversy—OK, almost as much—as America’s Cup. But Team USA is changing.

Oh, you’ve heard that one before?

Let’s give it a think. Paul Cayard is the latest hopeful to step up as executive director of US Olympic Sailing and talk transformation. He’s taking on a firing-line job with guaranteed slings and arrows, and few guaranteed rewards, and it’s a job that won’t pay what he could be pulling in elsewhere. But once upon a time, Cayard was the kid who took a business degree to prepare himself as a professional sailor. And he studied languages because the work is international. And when he became a top dog on America’s Cup teams, he hauled sails with the boys because that says team. Cayard is Mr. Credibility.

His assessment: “When the Olympic game was bring-your-own, the US kicked butt. Then ISAF changed the rules to allow corporate sponsors, and other countries embraced the change. That was 1989, and it was a quantum shift. Before, the only full professionals were the Eastern Bloc sailors who were ‘in the military.’ The US didn’t match that shift. Until recently, we still played bring-your-own. To go to the ’04 Games in Athens, I spent $250,000, and I could afford that because I had a career under my belt. Our young people today don’t have that luxury as they try to compete against someone like Iain Percy who, as a gold medalist, gets paid that much every year to sail for the UK, with funding through their national lottery.”

More money. More coaching. Yadda, yadda and, of course, that’s all on the agenda. But ask Cayard about practical steps and you get answers. They’re about developing robust structures to support young sailors as they grow, promoting opportunities to sail in Olympic classes, partnering with the college sailing system, and building strong Olympic-classes ­competition inside the USA.

Let’s take them one at a time.

The AmericaOne Foundation backed Cayard’s America’s Cup bid in New Zealand in 2000, then pivoted to other goals that are paying off now. Cayard says: “We were blessed to have the vision of Larry Finch, Doug Smith and ‘Buddha’ Bob Billingham to pick one piece of the puzzle and tackle it. You need a pipeline of talent, and there’s no switch you can throw to open that spigot. It takes time. We had seen the way other countries were developing youth sailors. That was not happening here, so AmericaOne partnered with US Sailing in 2014 to create Project Pipeline. Along with the Olympic Development Program, that has proven itself with successes at the youth Worlds level. In 2019, we had five golds in nine classes, and we were the top nation. Now we’re building on that. ODP in 2021 had 150 kids benefitting from Olympic-level coaching. We want to grow that number to 250 over the next seven years.”

The unique North American system of college sailing in (mostly) FJs and C420s gets fingered for sucking up talent while developing excellence—but in a limited range. It’s also noted for providing a compelling social experience but not turning out 20-somethings equipped for the complexities of an Olympic campaign. In Cayard’s view, addressing that by adding an optional high-
performance track shouldn’t be a problem at all. “Sailing is the only college sport that goes on all year,” he says. “Every other sport has a season. To me, nine months of tacking and jibing FJs is a waste of talent for top sailors. There should be options.

“We can leave spring sailing as it is, and when people get to Nationals in May—if they’ve spent time the previous year cross-training in a 49er, FX or Nacra—that experience should be an asset. Then they get back into Olympic-class training in the summer with the option of continuing in the fall semester, and we can have an intercollegiate Olympic-classes regatta in Miami at the winter break. After that, it’s back to the familiar college format in spring to prove they haven’t forgotten how to sail FJs.”

Heh. Haven’t forgotten how to sail FJs…

Pulling this off may prove a mite more complicated than described, but we’ll come back to that. And it is important to be clear that, in Cayard’s vision, college sailing proceeds undisrupted. The people who belong in fall-semester college sailing have at it, while some of their team members go off on the Olympic track until the spring semester.

Eventually, the US ­sailing team might look more like the UK, with its oversupply of up-and-coming youth and its reliance on development squads. Mark Robinson, the UK team’s head of performance, comments: “Most countries would run squads if they could. It’s about having a team that can develop within itself.” Riding the same wavelength, Cayard says: “We’re a country that can build competent squads—our kite sailors are already there—and it is important to build those squads to make us more efficient with time and money. Athletes should train here, not abroad. This is a huge practical step. There are classes where, right now, we don’t have a depth of talent, so it makes no sense for someone looking to get competitive to fly to Kiel Week and finish 47th. That’s time and money wasted. There was a time when you could get great Olympic-class competition here, but not now. We have to rectify that. In Europe, you drive a couple of hours to a weekend regatta, and you’re competing against top sailors from who knows how many countries. We’ve grown from one Olympic-classes regatta in the US to three? Six? That’s a beginning.”

And that beginning provides a point to stop and catch a breath.

Cayard reflects: “It was not a foregone conclusion that I would take this on, but I’m emotionally invested. I am convinced that it is doable. There are these facts to address: An athlete can peak only two or three times per year. There is a science to that, and we need to apply the science. We need a coaching pipeline as well as a sailor pipeline. We need data and data analysis (there was a tech confab at Harken headquarters last fall) because we have to ask, will the best sailors move from the Nacra 15 to the Nacra 17 and blaze their own trail, or will they start from a higher level because we’re doing a better job of telling them what they need to know?

“I foresee a budget 50 percent bigger than in recent years,” Cayard says. “That will begin to provide better support for our frontline sailors. Right now, they spend too much time bartending at fundraisers to pay for coaching. The other component, and this is major, is to pull the trials back to the US. Would Kenny Keefe and I have gone to the 1984 trials if they had been in Holland or Japan? No. Would John Kostecki have gone to his trials if they were in New Zealand? No. And when you go overseas to sail a world championship that is part of your US trials, everything is skewed. You’re not sailing to win; you’re sailing to beat the other Americans. We can do better.”

Thank you, Paul. Now let’s weigh other perspectives regarding one item on your list because there is a long history of people, rightly or wrongly, looking at college sailing as a stumbling block to Olympic development.

Old Dominion University coach Mitch Brindley, who is also president of the Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association, sees “no definite plans for restructuring college sailing to accommodate the Olympic path. I’ve had one conversation with Cayard (at the time of this interview), but I look forward to more. We always try to work in concert with US Sailing’s Olympic efforts. As much as we’d love to sail skiffs and high-performance boats, the money for that is hard to come by. One of the beauties of college sailing is the relatively low cost of entry. That allows us to develop athletes who may not have had opportunities before.”

Per Cayard, an Olympic college track would be a bring-your-own-boat deal, at least for starters. And I don’t want to make it sound as if Brindley and Cayard are butting heads. What I think I hear from them is the bare beginning of a conversation in which the threads are not yet meeting in the middle.

Brindley wants you to know: “College sailing is successful, and we’re growing our number of varsity teams and full-time coaches. They raise the game, whether it’s happening at Tulane or Brown, both of which are relatively new as varsity teams. In any campus sport, only a few students matriculate to the Olympic movement, but with shorter races and more mixed racing, we see Olympic sailing in some aspects moving toward the college ­format. We’re glad to see them ­catching up.”

Good stinger, Mitch. And good reader, you will notice he left the door open. Regarding that door, Andrew Mollerus says, “I wish the high-­performance track had been around in my time,” meaning his years at Harvard, where he was a sailing team captain and All-American. Mollerus checked in from Marseilles, where he and Ian MacDiarmid were racing a 49er in the waters of the 2024 Games. His take: “Getting our top juniors into Olympic-class boats early is critical. The US is enjoying success at the youth level—thanks in large part to Leandro Spina and ODP—but there is a high attrition rate during and after college. Among all the possible remedies, the high-performance track that Paul proposes is the best solution.”

By way of counterpoint, in talking with college coaches, I encounter concerns about the logistics, including possible travel commitments for ­sailors who, more often than not, are academic high-achievers. “Just” sailing FJs is already a lot on top of classes and study. But it’s too early for debating because we don’t know what we’re debating beyond objections to the status quo and some big what-ifs. At a granular level, how might it affect teams to have a cadre of their (probably) most capable sailors jumping back into FJs and 420s for spring semester? Mollerus, a Phi Beta Kappa, believes: “The teams would benefit from an influx of lessons learned and technical skills that you don’t necessarily get from college sailing. As for Team USA, it’s impossible to change things overnight, but focusing the program on 2028, as they’re doing, is exactly right. We’re lucky that Cayard is driving this, given his level of respect and clout.”

And that’s where we came in. Among all of Cayard’s proposals for reinventing Team USA, building a high-performance track in college sailing is the most likely to provoke a lively conversation. So, wear your sunscreen. Strap on that PFD when the Y flag is flying. And hey, Paul—no ­pressure.

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The day was perfect for ­racing. With the wind out of the south at 15 knots, there was a spirited group of sailors striving to get their yachts to the finish line without leaving a second to spare on the racecourse. The course was a standard windward-leeward configuration, with 1.6-mile legs. After a below-average finish in the first race, our crew refocused and sailed exceptionally well for the next five races, achieving great starts, sailing on every favorable wind shift, and executing our boat handling with deft precision. We were doing everything we possibly could to ensure a corrected-time win.

But then, to our dismay, we watched our rivals round the final weather mark from well behind, set their spinnakers and jump on plane, cruising through our lee and sailing away, ­easily saving their time allowances and beating us on corrected time. Afterward, we analyzed every detail of every race, searching for ways to save even more time. Maybe we could have gained 20 seconds, but it never added up enough to make a difference. Eventually, it became clear to me that the handicap rating rule wasn’t working properly—certainly not for us, nor many other owners and teams that are becoming disheartened with the state of big-boat handicap ­racing.

This is, of course, not a new problem. The quest to assign fair handicap ratings to yachts of different shapes and sizes has been a challenge for more than a century. Looking back, a pattern seems to repeat every 20 years or so: A new rule emerges, designers and owners attempt to exploit every conceivable loophole, and inevitably the fleet dwindles as sailors become dissatisfied with the rule and walk away.

Big-boat handicap racing in North America is at a turning point once again. During my tenure at World Sailing, I was liaison to the Offshore and Oceanic Committee and the Offshore Racing Council. At US Sailing, I pushed the organization to improve its offshore regulatory operations. My perspectives, as a competitor and a board member, have always been aligned. In the United States, there is general dissatisfaction with our handicap rating rules, but what I have learned from current leaders about this situation is that help—and change—is on the way. To be successful, bold steps are in order.

Now, however, is not the time to create a new handicap rating rule. All the experts I’ve spoken to agree the preferred action is to improve the entry-level Performance Handicap Rating Factor system and work with the Offshore Racing Council, which manages ORC, to improve its rule for North American racing sailors. Creating a new handicap rule is an arduous process, and success is not a sure thing. There are many lessons from the past: In 1965, the Cruising Club of America and the Royal Ocean Racing Club collaborated on a new handicap rule for use in the Olympic Games. The Offshore Racing Council was formed to administer the new International Offshore Rule in 1969.

IOR was a vibrant rule because it was universally accepted and used internationally. In time, however, favor in IOR started to fade. Stan Honey, an authority on offshore racing and handicap systems, says American sailors became frustrated with the ORC in the 1980s for not fixing known problems with IOR. “ORC did not have the strength of character to maintain the IOR rule,” Honey says. “The technical committee was comprised of designers that had their own boats in build, so those guys didn’t want to change the rule to fix the problems.”

The IOR’s problem children—yachts with pinched ends—eventually killed the rule.

“The IOR would still be working if the ORC had fixed it,” Honey says, “but they didn’t. The boats got weird, and nobody liked them anymore.”

US yachtsmen then went and funded the development of the H. Irving Pratt Project and created a velocity prediction program (VPP) that became the Measurement Handicap Rule. The Pratt VPP is still the basis for handicapping rules in use today. The ORC used the basics of the MHS rule and created the International Measurement System, and soon enough, the same problems surfaced again.

“The ORC screwed it up again because it did not maintain it even though there was some great racing with the IMS rule,” Honey says. “When the loopholes got figured out, the technical committee did not fix the problems. So, the United States split off again, ­creating the Americap Rule and the Offshore Rating Rule.”

Today, several handicap ­rating rules are used in North America, including ORR, ORC, IRC (which is owned by the Royal Ocean Racing Club) and PHRF. That’s too many, and none are perfect.

Ed Cesare, chairman of New York YC’s Handicap Rating Rule and Measurement Committee, says the club used ORC broadly last summer for the first time and experienced a high level of disappointment from the fleet. “We received complaints about the quality and integrity of the certificates,” he says. “I am not at all comfortable that we are going to get to a good place with the ORC rule. They did a good job on marketing it, which led to unrealistic expectations about what the rule can do.”

Cesare and Larry Fox, representing the Storm Trysail Club, presented seven submissions via US Sailing to the ORC. The submissions asked to expand the wind range down to 4 knots; define the allowable use of unusual headsails (Code Zeros); and improve the way the VPP handles planing boats, adding more wind ranges from three groups to five. They also asked stability calculation questions, including a request to allow multiple standard ORC certificates at once for the same boat, and a request to examine the rated performance of unique boat types.

“All of [the submissions] were remanded to the technical ­committee,” he says.

The ORC’s response was the same when the United States was complaining about IOR and IMS in the 1980s and 1990s, Honey says. “It does not end well when you take that approach with American sailors.”

The ORC, he adds, needs to aggressively work to solve the problems and come up with a better rule, or at least a version of the rule that meets the needs of US sailors. “For 2022, the five wind-band scoring will help,” he says. “We think this will ameliorate the displacement-planing situation. It is in progress, and I hope the ORC will work with us.”

The United States has the third-highest number of ORC International certificates, so Cesare says his group will take action by putting yachts in appropriate classes. “The class breaks are going to be draconian,” he says. “If you have a 40-foot planing boat, you better get some of your friends to come or you are going to be ­racing by yourself.”

Dobbs Davis, chair of the ORC Promotion and Development Committee, has been championing the rule for many years. He is, of course, an enthusiastic supporter of the rule and says it works if the scoring is done properly. “Using ORC tools, we have multiple ways of scoring,” Davis says. “One of them is the wind triple-number system—low, medium and high [wind strength]. There are crossovers, which puts a burden on the race committee because they have to decide what is the low, medium or heavy wind. Basically, below 8 knots is low, 9 to 14 knots is medium, and above 14 knots is high.”

As far as dealing with the concerns of Cesare and Fox, Davis says the scoring works fine with planing boats—again, as long as the scoring is done properly. As to US Sailing’s other submissions, Davis says, race committees do need to establish accurate wind strengths to score boats correctly, but this is not easy. Some race committees will determine the wind strength before the race starts, and scoring with five wind ranges will make it worse. The ORC will not allow boats to have multiple certificates, he adds, “which would make it tough on our administrators. The ORC will not make estimates on stability. This is a safety issue.”

Matt Gallagher, an ORC member, past chair of the Chicago YC’s Race to Mackinac, and chair of US Sailing’s Offshore Racing Committee, says he’s committed to achieving two goals: “We want our members and racers to go offshore and do it with any rating rule our partner clubs choose to use, and then bring some stability to the rating rules and bring some focus back to PHRF. The base of the pyramid has been neglected for a while. We have to start growing that again.”

Gallagher is optimistic about the use of the ORC rule and says it’s one that needs attention and tweaking to make it more appropriate for the United States. “[The ORC is] going to have to pay more attention to us.”

Honey agrees: “PHRF should be cheap, cheerful and simple scoring,” he says. “People should understand that the most effective rating for their boat is in class scoring. Anything that changes a boat out of class scoring is going to be punished [with a higher handicap rating]. If you want to spend more money to perform better, put your money in new sails, coaches, a smooth bottom and stuff like that.”

As for the future, Honey has an interesting prediction: “A new rule will happen. The original VPP that came out of the Pratt Project is still the basis for the ORC. It is long in the tooth and old-fashioned. What is going to happen next is some graduate students are going to come up with some neural network-based rule. The timing will be just right in a year or two because people will be really frustrated with the ORC. It will start another 15- to 20-year cycle until people get tired of that rule.”

Until then, he says, US Sailing must focus on providing high-quality measurement services and supporting PHRF by providing a first-class online database with regional ratings and guidelines to help race committees manage local fleets. “PHRF should be kept at the entry level and use single time-on-time scoring,” Honey says. “Any event that wants to do wind-condition scoring should move on to another rule. Any sailor that wants to optimize their boat for different races should go do some different rule.”

A few venerable American races, such the Newport to Bermuda and the Transpacific Race, continue to use the ORR rule. However, in recent years, the Offshore Racing Association, which controls ORR, has struggled to keep its operation functioning. The ORC rule has a chance to be more broadly adopted domestically, but its managers need to work with American race organizers to improve the rule. PHRF has a promising future, but would be well-served to update its operations to make it easy to use. In our age of supercomputer technology, we have the capability to make improvements to handicap rating rules.

Honey suggests improvements can be made by using direct computational fluid dynamics for both hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, which is likely to be the first major improvement. The CFD would be incorporated in the rating calculator and run for each boat from the lines files and measurements. “The technology exists now and is becoming practical as computers become more powerful,” he says. “This would be a major step forward from the VPP in use now by ORC and ORR. I think ORC and ORR are considering such a development.”

US Sailing has hired veteran handicap rating administrator Jim Teeters to oversee the offshore office, and Alan Ostfield, US Sailing’s new CEO, has committed to hiring additional personnel to help Teeters get the operation running efficiently. To assist owners through the arduous measurement process, Honey is an advocate of using the Universal Measurement System, which allows boats to be measured once, with the measurement data used for any ­handicap rating rule.

Sailors and handicappers clearly don’t agree on what the ideal handicapping rule should be, but every sailor does want a fair chance of winning a race if they sail well. We all need to work together to make improvements so that when the wind is right and we sail a perfect race, we can be rewarded with the win.

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For a couple of years, I’d been watching the results for Club 420 racing, and two names always kept appearing at the top: Cordelia Burn and crew Sarah Moeder, from Bay Head YC in New Jersey. I really wanted to know how they managed to win almost every Club 420 event they entered, some by wide margins. Since they were an East Coast team and I coach on the West Coast, I’d never seen them race. But this past July, at the 2021 Club 420 Nationals in New Jersey, I got my chance.

There, I observed and got a few great videos of Burn and Moeder implementing their winning strategy, and as luck would have it, I got to coach our group of West Coast sailors along with coach Sarah Burn, Cordelia’s older sister, who also dominated the C420 class until she moved on to college. Sarah told me her younger sister was pretty conservative on the starting line, seldom started at an end, avoided major errors and was very fast. In watching them, that’s exactly what I saw.

We were coaching a big group of mostly West Coast sailors, which included the eventual winners of the event, Piper Holthus and Sophia Pearce, both on a team I started coaching during the pandemic called NB4T, or Newport Beach 420 Team, based out of Bahia Corinthian YC. Holthus and Pearce followed a similar starting strategy to Burn and Moeder: They were also really quick around the track and sailed super-smart upwind legs. After the first day, they were in the top of the fleet. In our evening debrief, Holthus, the skipper, provided a succinct explanation of their upwind sailing strategy that was nothing short of brilliant in its simplicity. Their decision-making mostly involved the compass headings and the crew calling ­percentages to layline.

Two teams, two great approaches. Here’s how Burn and Moeder managed the starts and Holthus and Pearce called the first upwind legs.

The Start

For this event, the 132-boat fleet was split into two groups, which meant there were 65 boats on the line. It was a big line, and before the start, Burn and Moeder hung out above the center of the starting line, near the gate area, about five boatlengths to windward. In that time, they looked upwind for pressure and did a few head-to-winds to keep track of the shifts. They’d already figured out the bearing of the starting line, and their wind checks were to figure out the favored end of the starting line and recognize which phase the wind was in. That helped them make a game plan for where they wanted to start and where they wanted to go on the first beat.

By being upwind of the starting line and out of the melee of boats going back and forth, Burn and Moeder had few distractions and were able to focus more on the wind, as well as get accurate head-to-wind numbers with no disturbance. They could also see up the course a lot better. Once they did their final upwind check, they bore away and sailed wing and wing, dead downwind, toward the starting line. Or, depending on where they wanted to start, they reached back down. As they came down, they looked for an open space in the section of the line in which they wanted to start, which was almost always just left or right of center, depending on their game plan. The cool thing is, being above the line looking down at the fleet, they could more easily see groups or clusters of boats. Their goal was to avoid those clusters.

As they got back to the line, there were around two and a half to three minutes before the start—plenty of time to get into the mix, do their own setup, and manage the congestion, avoiding crowds. One time, I saw a crowd form around them at about a minute left, and Burn simply bore away, jibed, sailed out of it, and ended up 20 yards to the right of where she had first set up, which was more open.

With this technique, don’t come down so late that you can’t find a space. You have to know when your fleet likes to set up. And remember, the more crowded the starting line, the sooner you have to come back and claim your spot. I call it “coveted real estate.” That might be when the line is a bit short for the number of boats racing, or possibly everyone wants to go right and is setting up in the upper half of the line, creating a crowd. You can learn this through experience with your fleet and real-time observation of its behavior. The more coveted the real estate, the sooner you’ve got to get to your area and stake your claim.

One of the keys to ­starting in the middle of the line is you can’t be timid. It’s a mistake to start just right or left of center and be bow back or a little nervous about being over. That’s because, typically, one end is favored, and if you start bow back in the middle, you won’t have a decent race because you’re going to be too far behind those who started at the favored end. So, if you’re going to use this approach, be bold and push the line, making sure you have the confidence provided by a line sight, solid pings, or a great eye for seeing the starting line. Burn and Moeder did that, as did Holthus and Pearce.

You must also have good speed. If you do, you can give up a little starting-line bias by not being right at the favored end. In a 65-boat fleet, if the boat end is favored, position yourself slightly right of center in open space; if the pin is favored, set up slightly left of center in open space. It’s OK to let the open space dictate where you set up. Sometimes you can get a little closer to the favored end and that’s fine; sometimes you’re a little farther away. With solid boatspeed, you’ll make up some of the bias you’re giving up, and by starting in low congestion, your chances of a great start go up dramatically. This is a major key with this formula. You might not be winning races, but you increase your chances of solid single-digit finishes. Another way to look at it is that you are decreasing your chances of making major mistakes and finishing deep, such as trying to win the pin and getting caught in a pileup while the fleet sails on. Also, this conservative approach allows you to hedge, tactically. If you start at the pin, go left and the right pays, you will be deep. But if you start left of center, go left and the right pays, you are closer to midfleet when you start your comeback.

Once they started, both teams focused on sailing the long tack. In this regatta, it was often sailing straight—starboard was often long or at least neutral. But a couple of times there were big left shifts and port became long. By punching out a little bit at the start and being fast, if in a left phase, you can shortly get onto port tack. Then it’s just about locking it in and going fast.

Managing the Upwind Leg

After the first day of the regatta, Holthus and Pearce had all single-digit finishes, which in a 65-boat fleet is great, and they were tied for second overall. I asked them what they were doing upwind. Holthus said: “Coach, we started in low density, got on the long tack and focused on sailing fast. After the 50-50 midpoint, Sophia would start calling percentages to layline to help me know where we were on the course and how much time was left to layline. She would say, ‘40‑60, 30-70, 20-80,’ etc., and that information helped me determine what type of header we were willing to tack on. If we had plenty of time to layline, I would wait for a big header. If time was running out, I would tack on a smaller shift. Once on the new long tack, we repeated the process, maximizing speed toward the mark and minimizing ­maneuvers. That’s all we did.”

It sounded familiar because I have my buddy Erik Shampain call percentage to layline for me, as other tacticians have teammates do for them. It really helps the tactician place the boat on the course from a top-down view, without looking around too much. For example, dead center on the course, on starboard, is 50-50. That means 50 percent of the course is in front of you to the port tack layline, and if you were to tack, you would have 50 percent of the course in front of you to the starboard tack layline. If you were to plot your position on a grid system, you’d be in the center of the course, relative to the wind’s current phase. In other words, you might not be dead center geographically, but with the current wind direction, you’re equal distance from each layline.

Being 50-50 also means you have equal options: No tack is long, and you can sail straight or tack, depending on what side you like or what phase you are in—lifted or headed. If Holthus and Pearce got a big header at 50-50, they would tack, but if lifted, they would continue ­sailing straight.

Let’s follow them on a typical leg. They’ve gotten the start they wanted, and Pearce is now calling out the percentages and says, “40-60.” That means the other tack, port tack, is starting to become the long tack, but they still have 40 percent left to the port layline. If they were lifted at 40-60, they’d continue because they have time to wait for a nice header.

Pearce’s next call is “30-70.” Now Holthus is thinking, OK, if we get a header, we’re going to tack because the other tack is getting long. But we have a little time left to wait for a nice-size header. It’s a 15-degree oscillating day, and she’s ­waiting for a bigger shift.

Pearce soon says, “20-80.” Holthus is starting to itch to tack now. After being lifted for a long time, she is willing to tack on a smaller header just to head toward the mark again. So, they tack to port at 20-80, down 7 degrees from the all-time lift, which is actually just a neutral number. If they had been super-lifted and continued on starboard, they would have eventually reached 10-90. Then, even if they were still lifted, they should tack, leaving some real estate to play with and expecting the wind to shift back left at some point, lifting them up toward the mark on port. In an ideal world, you can tack in the 30-70 to 20-80 range to head the other way, but the shifts play a part in your decision, and sometimes you have to be patient, hoping for the header to come soon before you get too close to layline.

Being 50-50 also means you have equal options: No tack is long, and you can sail straight or tack, depending on what side you like or what phase you are in—lifted or headed.

In our example, Holthus and Pearce tacked at 20-80, which means that on port tack they’re now 80-20, the long tack toward the mark. Now while sailing on port tack the percentages start to change: 70-30, 60-40, 50-50, and then 40-60. In an ideal world, they could sail all the way to the starboard tack layline area, get a header and then tack, but that is rare. In this example, they get a big header when at 40-60, so they tack back to starboard to get on the long tack and stay in phase. One minute later, they get a big left shift, so they tack back, and that takes them to their final starboard layline call. They round the top mark a solid seventh. With great speed, patience and strong decision-making, they pass three boats over the next 20 minutes and finish fourth, a great keeper in a 65-boat fleet.

If you spend some time thinking about percentages to laylines, you will realize that if you get a header, it changes your distance to layline. Headers make the tack you are on shorter, heading you away from the mark, therefore putting you closer to layline. Lifts make your tack longer, which is why you sail them upwind. For example, if you are 40-60 and get a header, all of the sudden you are closer to layline and might be 30-70 or even 20-80, so you tack.

The girls executed the above strategy for the whole regatta, getting great starts, positioning themselves just to either side of center of the line in open space, and boldly pushed the starting line without being over. Then they simply sailed the numbers upwind using ­percentage-of-layline calls to help make decisions.

All of this came together in the final race. At the start, they liked the right side of the course where they saw more wind, and the wind shifts were in a left phase. Because of this, they started just right of center in a great hole, pushed the line, and shortly thereafter got onto the long port tack. After a solid first beat, they were in second at the top mark behind a boat that took a more aggressive approach and sent it hard right. They slowly reeled in the leader over the next lap in a dying breeze, and took the lead on the final run by getting low of the leader and jumping them on the final jibe into the leeward mark. Not looking back, they extended to win the race by more than 50 meters to top the 132-boat fleet and earn a national championship title. It was a beautiful way for Holthus to finish her Club 420 career before heading off to Georgetown, and it was an awesome win for her crew Pearce, who has been working harder than everyone on becoming the best crew possible throughout the pandemic.

I was so motivated by watching these phenomenal sailors’ simple strategy, I figured I would give it a try in the J/70 at the 45-boat J/70 Pre-Worlds and the 65-boat world championship a few weeks later in Marina Del Rey, California. Lo and behold, we had two great regattas, finishing first and
second, respectively. Thank you, ladies!

The post How to Win Your Next Race appeared first on Sailing World.

What would the America’s Cup be without its legendary Deed of Gift, the armies of lawyers, the backroom dealings, international intrigue and high-stakes innovation? It would be, of course, just another sailboat race. But the Cup, we know, is anything but ordinary. It was, therefore, not surprising when the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, Team New Zealand and its Challenger of Record, Royal Yacht Squadron Ltd. and their representative Team INEOS Britannia finally revealed the 37th America’s Cup Protocol in November, leaving more questions than answers—the biggest among them being where exactly the show would go on.

Auckland again? Maybe, but the New Zealanders are crying poor and shopping elsewhere for someone to foot the bill for their regatta in 2024. The small inner circle of teams continuing from the 36th edition, however, have fingers crossed the action will return to Waitematˉa Harbour. American Magic’s Terry Hutchinson, who is anxious to restart operations and blow the dust off millions of dollars’ worth of shrink-wrapped equipment and intellectual property, is keen on Auckland. 

As of the protocol’s release, however, American Magic was still without an official club, as was the squad of Stars+Stripes, who—for a fleeting moment—had secured the blessing of New York YC before flag officers hit the pause button on its Cup aspirations. Should either of these two would-be American challengers officially enter after December 1, stipulations outlined in the protocol and the updated AC75 class rule ­present a gigantic to-do list.

While the party line from Defender and Challenger of Record is that of cost savings, the protocol hints otherwise. To compete, each challenger must field one AC75 (new or used) and buy a new AC40 (or two), which would (or could) be used as a development platform before being returned to one-design form and repurposed for potential women’s and youth America’s Cup regattas. Teams may also be required to pony up for two hydrogen-powered foiling chase boats. Savings, says Team New Zealand’s Grant Dalton, will be through the implementation of shared recon, starting software and weather services, the details of which had not been outlined.

It’s early days yet, but as Hutchinson knows well enough, days pass quickly in the Cup game. “This is potentially a lot more complicated from a rules perspective than the last one was,” Hutchinson says. “On the surface, there are some parts that look good with the shared things, but then you have to nut into how they will be paid for and who’s controlling who gets what. I think there is a genuine attempt to make AC37 better than AC36, but only time will tell.”

The AC40, which is essentially supplied equipment, Hutchinson says, presents a unique challenge and an urgency to enter the regatta sooner than later as these will be allocated based on the order of entry. “You have to think hard about how it impacts your development,” he says. “For example, how is using Patriot (their second AC75 from the previous Cup) going to fit into the program? How much time and energy do we put into that boat to understand a third-generation boat, versus foil development for an AC40?”

An updated Version 2 of the AC75 Class Rule was simultaneously released with the protocol, and according to Daniel Bernasconi, TNZ’s technical director, the most notable updates are aimed at improving the boat’s takeoff speeds lower into the wind range with larger wingspans and deeper foils, as well as three fewer crew, hinting a possible return of cyclors—should any team want to go there again. Code Zeros are gone too.

The protocol also outlines restrictions on when AC75s can be sailed, with “existing teams” being allowed to sail their AC75s after mid-­September 2022. A new challenger with a secondhand AC75 would be allowed to sail its AC75 for 20 days starting in June. The crew nationality rule requires 100 percent of the race crew to either be a passport holder of the country of the team’s yacht club as of March 2022 or have been in the country in 2021.

There will be as many as three preliminary regattas; the first two will be raced in AC40s, and the third will be held at the match venue in AC75s. The Challenger Selection Series and the America’s Cup match will be held in 2024, with the match venue and approximate event dates to be announced by March 31, 2022.

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At the first weather mark of the final race of the 2021 ILYA Senior Fleet X Boat Championship on Pewaukee Lake, Wisconsin, hometown heroes Kamron Kaiser and Peter Goggins round somewhere in the midteens. They’re second overall in the standings, but regatta leader Henry Ackley, of Pine Lake, is having a shocker.

“Can you see him?” Kaiser asks his crew after the whisker pole is set.

“Not sure,” Goggins says. “Wait, there he is. He’s still going upwind.”

Halfway down the run, it’s clear Ackley is racing his throw-out, which means Goggins and Kaiser need to finish in the top four to win the regatta. With 47 boats clogging the Senior Fleet racecourse, and another 64 in Junior Fleet, Pewaukee Lake is a mess of mains and jibs, but for Kaiser and Goggins, the path to victory is clear.

“One boat at a time,” Kaiser says. “One boat at a time.”

Before the leeward mark, they rein in two boats. On the next beat, they navigate a light and fluky Pewaukee breeze, which at times feels more like playing checkers than sailboat racing. As they sail from puff to puff, they manage to leapfrog another clump of six boats. On the final downwind leg, they notice a bit of texture coming off the northern shoreline.

“See that?” Kaiser says. “It’s going to go right.”

Goggins agrees, and after reeling in two more boats, they round the gate ­seventh—a ­minute behind the fourth-place boat, which, along with the rest of the leading pack, sails blindly toward the left side of the course. But Kaiser and Goggins stick to their plan and dig into the right. Sure enough, the breeze fills in from the dock-cluttered shoreline, giving the duo a glory shift toward the top of the beat. Along the edges of the racecourse, families and friends watch with bated breath. In this part of the world, sailboat racing is a spectator sport, and as Kaiser and Goggins pass the committee to finish fourth—good enough to win the regatta—the spectator fleet erupts into a cacophony of horns and whoops.

“Way to go boys!”

“Nice job!”

“What a way to end it!”

Though the regatta comes down to the wire, 15-year-old Kaiser isn’t new to high-stakes moments. The year before, he won it all in the Junior Fleet, and coming into this event, Kaiser and Goggins, 11, had bagged two other X boat championships. But everyone knows the Class X Championship trophy, which has been raced for since 1940, is the most ­coveted prize of the season.

The X boat isn’t the flashiest youth race boat. At 470 pounds, it weighs about two and a half times more than a Club 420. The hull is wide with a rigid chine that gives it the look of a miniature Lightning. Downwind, a whisker pole is used to project the jib instead of hoisting a spinnaker, making for some less-than-thrilling runs, but what the X boat lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in simplicity.

Because it is slow to heel, learning the basics of steering, sail trim and weight placement become simple enough for a youth sailor to grasp. Most X boaters start crewing around age 10 to supplement their Optimist racing, which can be socially isolating. The X boat gives them an opportunity to enjoy the sport with another person, and because the ideal crew weight is so low, older skippers typically race with younger crewmembers, creating a mentorship unique to the class. This skipper-crew ­relationship can even be viewed as a sacred bond, with many duos remaining lifetime friends.

Cousins Jimmy Hughes and John Kotovic, from Minnetonka YC, are a prime example. This pair won the 64-boat Junior Fleet, which, with a younger crop of sailors, typically ­features similar-age teams.

“The X boat has been so much fun,” says 14-year-old Hughes. “I’ve sailed a couple Inlands with my dad on the A scow. They’ve won a couple times, which really helped me understand how a team has to come together to win.”

Unlike most X boat ­skippers, Hughes was forced to bypass the crewing phase of the progression. His victory at the Junior Inland marks a dramatic turnaround for the Lake Minnetonka X boat fleet, which was recently all but extinct. A dedicated group of parents brought the class back from the brink, and now, at nearly 20 club racers, it boasts one of the healthiest fleets in the Inland.

“I live about 20 seconds from Jimmy,” says 13-year-old Kotovic. “So, it’s easy for us to get out on the water. I’ve sailed a lot with my dad on the E boat, and he has taught me so much about how to be a good crew.”

Kotovic’s father, Rick, grew up sailing at Pine Lake and graduated into E scow racing on Pewaukee Lake. In 2002, he met his future wife, Nancy, at the ILYA Championships at Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

The Inland Lake Yachting Association has been fostering these types of relationships since its founding in 1897. For adult racers, the summer annual has provided ground for scow racing for more than 120 years. Today, the various ILYA championship regattas host some of the most competitive one-design racing in the country. Big fleets, big courses and big wind shifts are hallmarks of these annual affairs, and most importantly, there is something for everyone to enjoy. One of the most difficult aspects of the sport of sailing is creating a progression for sailors to begin at a young age and continue racing into adulthood. With the Inland, there is always something for developing sailors.

Beginning in the Optimist, they can progress to the X boat, MC scow, C scow, E scow, and eventually the 38-foot A scow. With the recent addition of the Melges 15, the gap between the X boat and the more high-octane E scow is bridged, which should see even more youth development in these traditionally adult-­oriented one-design classes. “My mom and my sister race the Melges 15,” Hughes says. “Those are really fast compared to the X boat. The downwinds are so much fun.”

Racing in the Midwest isn’t just about getting to play with flashy new toys, however. It’s about family, friendships, and an overall sense of regional community that keeps sailors young and old returning. This is where the X boat truly shines. Every ILYA lake boat has a designated letter displayed at the top of its mainsails: M for Minnetonka, V for Pewaukee, I for Geneva. The X boat is the first class in which sailors get to display their letters proudly. Many of them will continue to use the same sail numbers into adulthood, giving them a unique sense of personal identity. X boat sailors don’t only learn the basics of championship racing, they learn how to ­operate inside an intergenerational community of sailors.

“My parents met sailing X boats,” Kaiser says. “My mom sailed on Pewaukee, and my dad sailed on Beaver. My grandparents also met that way. My grandma raced X boats and then MCs, and my grandpa raced X boats and then Cs.”

Like those before him, Kaiser is already stepping into bigger and faster boats. “I’ve been racing on the E and the MC,” he says. “I just started skippering a Melges 17 too. There’s something to race almost every night on Pewaukee Lake, so it’s been fun to check out other boats.”

And then there’s the silver. As competitors and parents gather around the flagpole on the lawn of the Pewaukee YC for the awards ceremony, nearly two dozen perpetual trophies line a long white tablecloth with the words “Inland Lake Yachting Association: 1897”inscribed in red lettering. This annual ritual has been repeated since 1940, and by now, X boat sailors are competing for the same hardware their parents and grandparents once did. In 1968, the X fleet had become so large that regatta organizers decided to split it into Junior and Senior divisions. Kaiser will be the ninth sailor to have his name inscribed on both Junior and Senior trophies, and if he continues his current trajectory, this won’t be the last time he gives a speech in front of this crowd.

Though these silver trophies serve as official record, the true legacy of ILYA X boat racing lives on in the memories of those who have sailed them: the countless mornings going down to the dock and rigging up with a sibling or neighbor, the painful moments in the parking lot learning how to trailer a boat for the first time from an overwhelmed parent or coach, road trips through the American heartland watching rows and rows of cornfields blur by the window—all in anticipation of arriving at some small inland lake to rekindle friendships from the summer before. Most kids who sail X boats never win a regatta, but a competitive round of volleyball or one good shift on the racecourse is enough to keep them coming back for more. All these memories, from the barbecues to the racing, are something they will share with their kids one day, and so the progression continues.

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