At the 2019 Snipe Worlds in Ilhabela, Brazil, I’d heard a lot about the Brazilian sailor with the nickname “Gigante.” Given the crew is usually the smaller of a Snipe team, and with a name like that, I’d always assumed he was the bigger of the two when I saw them together. Two months later, however, as we walk side by side across the parking lot of the Nassau Yacht Club in the Bahamas, we’re practically eye to eye. It’s Brazilian sarcasm, he tells me, with an engaging grin. “I’ve always been small, since I was a child. So, it’s a kind of joke.”

Henrique “Gigante” Haddad, the relatively unknown 32-year-old Snipe World champion, groomed in the rich South American one-design sailing scene, is one of several rookies in the Bahamas attempting to make a name for himself among the elite of the once-Olympic Star Class. He’s an invited guest at the annual Star Sailors League Finals, and on the day we meet for a late-afternoon coffee, he’s not only survived the qualifying races, but he’s soared into the top 10. Admittedly, he’s not much of a Star sailor, but over the past few days, he’s proved himself plenty capable of competing with the other invited skippers, as well as the legitimate giants of the Star class. For the regatta, the diminutive skipper teamed up with crew and countryman Henry Boening. Where Haddad lacks street cred in the Star, Boening is highly decorated. “Magilla,” as he’s known, has twice finished second in the SSL Finals, as well as the 2019 Star World Championship.

The Star Sailors League Finals is an invitation-only regatta, contested in Star boats. Its stated goal is far more inclusive than the choice of boat might suggest: to celebrate the champions, or the “stars,” of sailing and also to “­create those of tomorrow.” That’s how the tomorrow guys like Haddad get their invites. The League Finals are four days of racing on Montagu Bay, where 23 teams are winnowed to 10. On the last race day, three knockout races determined the final four, and after that, it’s a one‑race‑wins-it-all shootout.

The first pool of coveted invitations goes to sailors at the top of a league-managed global-ranking list, which is updated weekly and includes more than 50,000 sailors from 36 classes and disciplines. The next group of invited skippers have either recently won a major event or hail from a developing country (or both), ensuring a range of experience. For this 2019 edition, Haddad is one of them. The other rookies are Oskari Muhonen, a Finn sailor from Finland; Jee-min Ha, a Laser Olympian from Korea; and Ricardo Fabini, a Snipe champion from Uruguay. All three are paired with a competitive Star crew from a different country. New boat, new teammate, sometimes ­drastically different native tongues…what could possibly go wrong? Star boats are notoriously difficult to sail, so the class veterans have a definite advantage—even though some of their Olympic medals and gold-star emblems were won before three of these 2019 ­newbies were born.

Haddad is a full-time sailor who represented Brazil at the Rio Olympics in the 470, finishing 23rd of 26 teams. The 470 is a boat he says is “like a drug,” one he genuinely enjoys racing, and while he hopes to compete in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, a disappointing pre-Olympic result this past summer has led him into racing other boats. “What helped me is that I sailed a lot this year,” he tells me, his brown eyes locked on mine, his smile mixing matter-of-fact with a dose of humility.

In September 2019, he and his teammates finished 13th at the J/70 Worlds, and then shortly thereafter, with only a few weeks of practice, he won the Snipe Worlds. There were plenty of Snipe class legends there too, including Haddad’s Olympic coach, Alexandre Paradeda—the 2001 Snipe World champion—and his Olympic 470 teammate Bruno Bethlem, himself a two-time world champion Snipe skipper. Beating his tuning partners, who he likens to older brothers, was fulfilling, he says. “It means I learned a lot with them, and I have a lot of respect.”

Unlike the other SSL Final rookies, Haddad lives in a ­country rich with Star sailing royalty and traditions. Brazil is home to the supremely talented Grael family (Torben and Lars in the Star, Martine in the 49erFX), as well as the most successful Star crew in the world, Bruno Prada. Haddad says Prada was instrumental in getting him up to speed in the Star, but even after enlisting Boening, who sails out of the same yacht club in Rio de Janeiro, he didn’t think they should even bother to practice ahead of the event in the Bahamas. “Let’s go there and have fun,” he remembers telling Boening, “because I thought it was almost impossible to be ­competitive at my weight.”

For the record, he’s roughly 143 pounds wet.

“The 470 guys who come [to the SSL], they have a lot of ­difficulty,” he says, “but Bruno told me that the races would be inside [Montagu Bay], where it’s going to be shifty. Magilla said I could be competitive, so then I asked him, ‘OK, how many days you can spend with me?’ And he said, ‘About 20.’”

He had his first crack at the Star in November, only a month before the championship, he tells me. He pauses to sip his coffee, unaware that he’s crumbled my misconception that the Bahamian event was his first time in a Star boat. “I did two regattas at my club,” he says, “one with Magilla, and the other with Bruno.”

He reminds me that Rio de Janeiro’s 30-boat Star fleet is revered around the world. “Many guys enjoyed that I had this possibility, so they helped me a lot—sharing and helping me train, and giving me some tips about the boat. The Star fleet in Brazil, it is quite strong.”

Twenty days of practice in the boat is a drop in the bilge ­compared with the experience of Star sailing legends, but it was more than twice what the other three newbies managed—­combined. Without that practice, he says, his performance in Nassau would be “very bad, for sure.”

After three days of racing, however, he says he’s feeling really competitive and understands the boat. Haddad then credits his teammate for much of this new confidence. “Magilla, he has a really good feeling about the boat. He asks me: ‘How is the rudder? How is the pressure on the boat?’ So I tell him, and he is just ­working on that.”

Boening also explains what each change does to the boat. Haddad talks to him a bit about settings or mast rake, but in the end, Haddad has the last word: “I just tell him what I’m feeling.”

The Star is different from any other boat he’s sailed, but he refers to it as a big Snipe. “But [downwind in] a Snipe, when you put the bow up, the boat doesn’t go,” he says, while in the Star, “it helps to go up higher and then quite lower, and so on.” Initially, he also struggled to feel connected to the boat upwind because he had to lengthen his hiking straps so much to compensate for shorter legs.

Nevertheless, he expects that much of what he is learning in Nassau during the League Finals will eventually help him in the 470—and with every other boat too. “It’s really incredible to feel the boat, the pressure, the settings. Many friends say that the Star is the best school because it has a huge main, and that’s true. It is unbelievable how you can feel the pressure and then talk about it, with running backstays in our hands. It’s not easy to keep going fast, but it’s easy to feel when the boat is overpowered or not powered enough.”

Before qualifying for the Finals’ finals, Haddad is confident that he and Boening can remain in the top 10. “Each day I’m feeling better,” he admits. “I hope that tomorrow may be better…that it’s going to be easy.” He smiles to indicate this is more sarcasm.

Easy? Not a chance. Better? Yes. Much better. The young Brazilian skipper and his crew win the first race of the day and finish fifth in the 10-boat quarterfinals. They’re the only newbies to advance to the next round. The breeze drops for the one-race ­semifinals, the lightest conditions of the week, and after struggling with acceleration off the starting line, they finish last—cementing seventh overall. But the top-six teams, collectively, have won a total of nine Olympic medals and 14 world championships. The four finalists all have gold stars on their mainsails, indicating a previous Star world victory.

What is it like sailing against such a legendary lineup? Haddad says he doesn’t think about who he is racing against—at least not while he’s on the water. “Obviously, I ask Magilla where is some guy, but more to know about the course,” he says. “I don’t think, Who is this guy that’s next to us? I’m sailing, just like it was a nice night.”

Ashore, with all the sailors staying at the same hotel, it’s a ­different story. “When we have a breakfast together, or gather after sailing, we realize who we are sailing against,” Haddad says, his gaze wandering across the yacht club’s pool deck. The other teams have already returned to the hotel. “It’s really interesting to have ­breakfast with Hamish Pepper, also Mateusz and the others.”

When asked if he knew many of the legends before arriving here, he shakes his head. “Only the match-racing guys: Taylor Canfield, also Torvar Mirsky and Ian Williams. Oh, and Fabini, from the Snipe. The other guys—no, I didn’t.”

And then, brown eyes locking on me once again, he names an absent Star legend. “To be here with these kind of guys, for me it’s really interesting because my father is one of the best friends of Torben Grael.” Haddad’s father covered the two Olympic Games (1996 and 2004) as a journalist, when Grael won his two Star gold medals. “This is my memory from when I started sailing: It was just after the gold medal of Torben and Marcelo, and my father had just come back from the Olympic Games. So I grew up watching them. To be here, fighting with these guys in the Star class 20 years after, is something that for sure I never expected. Because of my weight, I couldn’t imagine one day to be sailing in Star.”

And though he’s already shattered my misconceptions about his rookie status, something he says makes me certain that Haddad will live up to his nickname in the coming years. “I really enjoy sailing,” he says, eyes twinkling and grin stretching even wider than usual. “I pass almost 24 hours thinking about it, how to make things better and how to make the boat go fast. These days here are helping me a lot. And I’m sure that tomorrow, I’m going to feel even more comfortable than I am today.”

The post Rookie of the Star Sailors League appeared first on Sailing World.

It might be the first time I’ve laughed from absurdity, with uncontrollable amusement at my surroundings and the general state of things.

The instruments have us consistently zooming at 30-something knots, but it’s blowing only 20-something outside our vomit comet. We’re not surfing waves. The Atlantic is flat, and our performance is 100 percent by design. We are foiling through a dark, moonless night at optimal speed in optimal conditions somewhere off the coast of Brazil, bound for France.

It’s 2 a.m., and I’m lying on top of a pile of unclaimed gear bags and a thin foam pad that is supposed to be used on a bunk. But there is no bunk on this vessel, and there is nowhere else to go inside this 60-footer designed for one sailor. There are six of us, caged in a loud and crowded space not much bigger than a cargo van. For the past seven days, we’ve all tried every nook. This is where I’ve landed, sliding around on the top of a ballast tank like a puck on ice. Sleep is impossible. I start giggling. I can’t help it. The absurdity of it all is laughable.

Charlie Enright—lying next to me in the leeward bilge, nestled into a beanbag—is awake too, staring at the coachroof.

I’ve been through a lot with Charlie, but this is entirely new. The high-pitched whine of the foil next to my head echoes around the boat. It’s turbulent, like a jet engine, the hull violently slamming around as if driving on a potholed road back in Rhode Island. I wonder what exactly we are doing, how offshore sailing has evolved so quickly and so aggressively that we are now foiling across oceans. Only a few years ago, we were doing 19 knots in a Volvo 65 in these same conditions. And that felt fast.

Charlie, who had previously raced the boat doublehanded to Brazil during the Transat Jacques Vabre—for 14 days—must have heard my laughter because he grins, presumably familiar with my disorientation.

“The polars for the new set of foils show us in the 40s,” he says nonchalantly.

I stop laughing and shake my head, ­wondering what that actually means.

The new foils Charlie referred to will be fitted to the team’s current training boat, while the new boat that he and five other teammates will enter into the 2021 Ocean Race is being built. This edition of the round-the-world race will be contested with two fleets: Volvo 65s and IMOCA 60s. Charlie and his co-skipper, Mark Towill, twice sailed the Volvo Ocean Race with the 65—once with Alvimedica and once with Vestas 11th Hour Racing. This time, they’re gunning for the win with a state-of-the art IMOCA 60.

We’re on 11th Hour Racing’s 11.1, an older-generation IMOCA 60 purchased from singlehander Alex Thomson. Other than learning how to sleep, everyone on board is here to soak in the experience for the first time—to learn how to survive, how to push and how to exist.

This is a new style of boat requiring a new set of skills. Each of us, regardless of how many high-speed sea miles we have or don’t have, must now contemplate the foiling part of the equation: Angles and speeds are vastly different. Shorthanded sailing requires a new set of talents; everyone has to learn a lot about a lot—there are no traditional roles. We serve a new title sponsor requiring new priorities, and everyone feels an obligation to the larger global implications of sea and sustainability. We have an opportunity to make a difference in this world.

Besides the faces of my teammates, nothing feels familiar. We were in the midst of significant change, and the curve is rapidly shifting beneath us. Outside of a handful of French solo sailors, few people have come to terms with the sheer audacity of foiling across oceans. It is understandably difficult to comprehend—and even harder to achieve. But we have to start somewhere. We’re on a delivery of discovery.

Food is fuel, it’s as simple as that, so while it might seem mundane, the question of how much to have is taken seriously. Offshore sailors burn through insane calories, and nutrition goes hand in hand with performance. As a “media man,” food and supplies fall under my jurisdiction. I pick, pack and prep the meals because it’s a job nobody else wants. Fine by me—it gives me a “watch partner,” something to keep me honest and invested. It holds me to a routine. But this IMOCA 60 has no galley, sink or cooler, just a spigot and a few small containers. All of my old quantity-planning spreadsheets from previous races are for crews of 11 or nine, accounting for a full galley. Six people and a minimalist setup is all new to me.

For this delivery, we use freeze-dried meals, remnants from a past campaign, and each sailor decants each meal for him- or herself. This, however, produces a lot of waste, and we can’t be wasteful, so we must try to find another way forward. By the end of the delivery, I will have a much better understanding of how much food six people consume and, more important, what this group of individuals likes and dislikes. We are aiming to work with brands to eliminate extraneous packaging or, even better, eliminate plastic entirely. In the future, we will be trialing reusable silicone bags that hold one meal for six.

Supplies are handled in a similar way. We’ve brought far more toilet paper, baby wipes, toothpaste, butane, etc., than we will need, but knowing how much we use in 15 days will allow me to understand how much of everything we will need come race day. It’s important to start building a food and supply list for a typical race leg.

Another great unknown is how much ­foul-weather gear we will need. Extra gear is slow, but so too is being cold, wet and tired. The Volvo 70s were light. The less you brought, the lighter the boat, the faster you could go. The Volvo 65s were heavy and needed righting moment. The more you brought, the more you could stack, the faster you could go. The IMOCA class is back to situation light. The foils provide so much righting moment, and flight is so essential, that being light could be everything. This means scrutinizing the necessity of things such as spare clothes and foul-weather gear. During this delivery, I put on my dry top only a few times, just to go out and take photos on deck. We can do most of the sailing from inside the cockpit, which is totally covered. Gone are the days of being pelted with water and slammed with waves. We seriously consider having communal gear, used in those possibly rare occasions where one or two of us has to venture outside our igloo. If we don’t absolutely need it, it stays off the boat.

Developing the ideal watch system is one of trial and error. We cheat a bit here. There are always two of us on deck, with four sailors running independent four-on/four-off watches and a single rotation every two hours. Charlie and I float. I obviously won’t be able to float when we get down to racing, so the number of available bodies actually drops to five. The watch system will need a lot of attention, but it feeds directly into the one burning question on everyone’s mind, especially after our Chinese jibe in the middle of the night: How much do we trust the autopilot?

It’s impossible to predict when the aged autopilot will decide to go on break, but it generally happens when you least expect it. Usually, by the time you figure out it’s not “doing its thing,” it’s already too late. This time, it’s a 2 a.m. carve-down that goes well past the point of no return. We jibe, the boom swings across, and the boat is on its side. The major problem is that the leeward rudder, which was our windward rudder, is in its raised position, and the windward rudder, which was in its down position, is useless. Standing in waist-deep water at the back of the boat, we struggle to wrestle the upright rudder to get it down; there are a lot of moving parts in the rudder system that make it difficult to move under load. Plus, we’ve never done this before, so it takes longer than it should. Eventually, Charlie is able to pull on the half-lowered rudder to bear away, it’s a quick reminder that we have lots to learn.

The autopilot is—for now—untrustworthy, at least to us.

Race organizers want to limit autopilot usage to maintain a clear point of differentiation with the rest of the offshore-racing world. The feasibility of that for five sailors is uncertain, however. We spent a lot of time under autopilot during our delivery sprint. Driving when you can’t see is really hard, and the IMOCA 60 is designed with autopilot in mind. Visibility is second. It gets more complicated too when we consider the race’s desire to attract existing Vendée Globe IMOCAs into the event. These boats are already fitted with autopilots, and asking teams to remove or nullify their ­systems—when they were fundamentally built around them—is difficult. There’s no question that the autopilot would be used, but there’s also no question the human hand would be faster, fatigue and visibility aside.

Fatigue is a big deal, by the way, and it comes with a lack of sleep. On this trip, we are scattered around inside like rolling pebbles. Every time I look, somebody is on the move, trying some other place, a different position—nothing works. Collectively, sleep is elusive, and it will be even more of an issue as the foils get bigger. The way the boat moves and the way it sounds when you’re foiling make sleep problematic. The singlehanded guys don’t use bunks, and there’s a decent chance we won’t either. That’s because berths take up a lot of space, and with the IMOCA 60, getting weight outboard is no longer a requirement. It’s more about fore-and-aft trim. I envision beanbag chairs and extreme exhaustion as the new norm, the price to pay for crossing oceans at 40 knots.

Remember, this is a fully crewed ­adventure on a boat made for one. The paradigm has shifted here. We are no longer defined by our position on the roster. We have to do practically everything. With so few people, one must be good at every position. Charlie, for example, can now repair a watermaker, navigate, and hoist a J3 from the pedestal or bow. Everyone needs to understand ­everything in a completely different way.

The IMOCAs might be 60 feet long, but in terms of usable interior, they are actually much smaller. With the high speeds these boats maintain and their unpredictable mannerisms, no one risks going forward on deck or down below. If you must do something out of the cockpit, we must either turn downwind or slow down. Things that were traditionally forward, such as the plumbed head, would be unusable at speed, so it simply doesn’t exist on the boat. Instead, we use a rubber bucket placed in the bilge. Private moments are always in close proximity to someone else. It’s uncomfortable to start, and uncomfortable to finish, but there is no better solution.

We’re uncertain how hard our boat can be pushed, and consequently, we’re just getting to know its potential. In the Vendée Globe, solo sailors spend most of their time throttling back and letting the autopilot lead because they are designed to be ultralight for the midlatitudes and reefed for the extremes. We, on the other hand, will inevitably spend most of our time throttling forward, with both hands on the helm. Class rules state that the rig and keel must be one-design, but their actual limits are largely unknown. We will add fiber optics to our mast and foils to start visualizing stresses in real time. With a full crew pushing the boat beyond known limits, we could be faster, but we also might be at risk of breaking the boat. We are cautious on our way north, but relative to other IMOCAs around us, also delivering to France, we feel fast.

We arrive after 14 days on board. Our bodies are wrecked, on account of little sleep and much discomfort. These boats will be difficult to race and endure, but we have started learning—and acclimating. For a collection of veterans used to having a lot of the answers, there is much uncertainty.

It’s this adventure into the unknown that attracts us to this next Ocean Race. We have a blank slate. What better way to begin than with a 15-day trans-Atlantic bringing us through almost every climate and every condition? Deep summer to deep winter. Sailing upwind, across the wind and downwind. Through the trade winds, the Doldrums and the Bay of Biscay.

As we debrief in Lorient, following the long and varied trip with an unfamiliar craft, it really feels like a wildly new chapter in a repetitive book. Exciting, revolutionary adventures are ahead.

The post IMOCA 60 School appeared first on Sailing World.

There is an eye-opening video clip posted online from the last day of the 2019 Moth Worlds in Perth, Australia. The drone follows Tom Slingsby as he tears across the finish line, winning the whole enchilada with two races to spare. In a class now populated with high-net, young professional sailors, to win 12 straight races is mind-blowing alone, but the most incredible part of this visual is the outrageous speed. Slingsby’s foils are just shy of perching the surface; there’s minuscule drag, there’s a slight twitch on the helm, and his go-for-it hiking posture is inspiring. In 20-plus knots of breeze, Slingsby, in this moment, and the entire week, is redlining his torpedo-shaped Exocet Moth. Talk about sending it.

This is a big deal. Slingsby and the rest of the top 10 at the worlds were doing nearly 20 knots upwind, a 2-knot ­difference from a year earlier. Downwind, they’re pushing 30. It’s hard to imagine so much progression can come out of such a small package, but the Moth—which has influenced modern foiling, from the America’s Cup to the little productions Skeeta and UFO, and even windfoiling—is still the highest-profile foiler on the planet. This, despite being crazy expensive at $30,000 for a new boat.

This is also a big deal because the class continues to push the high-performance fringe of the sport, from foil technology and design to sailing techniques. Incremental changes that have added up to the gains Slingsby and his buddies demonstrate have come from deck-sweeping sails, “aero packages” that reduce wind drag, and ever-shrinking foil shapes.

But let’s be real. Who can actually do what gold medalist and Cup winner Slingsby does? Very few. First, the cost of a new—or even a good used boat—is ridiculous. And the time commitment? From my two years of Moth sailing, I know the investment in time on the water alone. Simply learning how to jibe (for me, more than 21 sessions of extended lunch breaks and evening sessions) is impossible for most working folk. And don’t even mention the amount of time it takes to set up, tweak, and repair these intricate and delicate carbon machines.

Despite all these barriers, however, the class continues to grow internationally, with 122 competitors signing on to be part of Slingsby’s Southern Hemisphere Slaying. There are rank-and-file American sailors who have accepted that racing a Moth is worth every penny and minute they can muster to get around the racecourse. It’s just super-addictive, and yes, where there’s a will there’s a way to do it at your own pace and within your own budget.

Dan Flanigan, one of the few Americans to compete in the Perth Worlds, says, “If you sail once a month, it will take five years to get around the course.” He was 79th of 122 —and pumped with his finish.

Flanigan, 28, is an ­engineer and recently started his own engineering, design and build company called Kroova, in San Diego. He kept an educational and witty log of his first worlds experience in Australia. It was classic Mothie: “I had some control issues (read: multiple pitch poles and crashes)…I told my fiancé I was currently 32 out of 60 in the Silver Fleet, and from 34th on, it was DNFs and UFDs. ‘What a weird class,’ she said. I couldn’t agree more!”

Flanigan’s self-­deprecating tone is common language in a scene where the learning curve is so steep, so demoralizing, that to simply survive the process is a badge of honor. It’s entry into a community that knows the regular feeling of dopamine releases while screaming along on every downwind leg. Flanigan knew he was progressing when he reported he was 30th of 60—but ­remember, the DNFs started at 47.

“It was functionally too early for my first worlds,” says Flanigan, who since this past winter has been practicing after work and on weekends with 10 or so Moth sailors in San Diego. “For most people at their first worlds, the minimum sailing time has been two years. If I could let go of the feeling of being beat, I would improve quicker than the guys around me.”

Such an attitude allows him to keep an eye on the prize: progression.

Progression is a big buzzword in Moth sailing. It’s challenging to simply trim in the sail and get underway, then there’s perfecting your turns, there’s knowing your controls and shifting through those gears rapidly into and out of a tack, which, by the way, is the Holy Grail for those in the middle to bottom half of the fleet. “Once you get your first foiling tacks,” Flanigan says, “it’s a huge drug, a chemical reaction that ­happens inside you.”

About half of the silver fleet at the worlds had the “ability” to foil tack. Moth sailing is an endless progression, and Flanigan and others simply enjoy stumbling down the rocky path. “It’s easy to say, ‘Don’t focus on the results,’ but it’s hard to feel that. With the time you spend, you want to do well,” Flanigan says.

When he had a good race, he would round a mark with a whole new group of competitors. “I thought, This is a massive improvement. I made five foiling tacks the whole regatta, but it was huge gains.”

Flanigan’s goal, of course, is to “learn the boat as fast as possible, with having a job, a functional relationship—while being completely obsessed—and sail the boat as fast as possible.” He hopes five years of this approach will give him the skills to compete at the worlds each year, the rewards, he says, of hard work and commitment to fitness.

But Flanigan is not there yet. He’s on the steep end of the curve. His professional skills, though, make him a keen observer of the progression at the top of the worlds fleet. “Aero is getting more and more important as apparent windspeed gets above 30 knots upwind,” he says. Flanigan is using a Mach2, upgraded with the ubiquitous bow sprit that holds the wand out farther for steadier ride-height ­control in choppy conditions. The Mach 2.5 has no compression struts at the mast step, allowing deck-sweeping sails to take a more refined shape. Wing bars are now flared down at the back side to line up better with apparent wind while sailing upwind. “They’re playing with lift and righting moment,” he says, referring to the leeward wing bar lifting and the weather wing bar pulling down.

Although Slingsby and ­others in the top 20 raced their Exocet Moths, from Britain, and the once-dominant Mach2 is regularly in the hunt for titles, there are more new designs than ever, allowing for fine-tuning to the sailor’s weight and strength. Matt Chew, of Australia, was eighth in a Paul Bieker-designed Moth. Bieker is an innovator who has created a flush-deck Moth that has so little area for its width, many say it looks way too long to be class legal. There’s a lot less aero drag, but the new deck-sweeper sail also has no impediments such as a raised forward deck to get in the way of a perfectly fair shape. The Bieker’s flat top helps advance the deck-­sweeping concept. The effect of the new sail design is twofold: The end-plate effect reduces drag; and the lower center of effort allows for increased drive force for the same righting moment.

Because the boats are going faster, the foil shapes are changing too. Luka Damic has quickly dominated in this space with his Swift Foils, which were on the majority of the top 10. The chord lengths on the vertical foils are shorter and, especially where they meet the horizontal element, are much thinner. When you see Slingsby riding ridiculously high, he is ­trying to get every milli­meter of his vertical appendage out of the water—to reduce drag. When you’re going 30-plus knots, a few less millimeters of vertical foil in the water is a big reduction in hydrodynamic drag.

The breeding pool for American Moth sailors has been small and continues to be a moving target. Two winter series, one in Southern California and one in the Florida Keys, are really the only gatherings where racing Moths is a “thing.” But these and other pockets of Moths might be breeding something even ­better: stoked sailors.

“Personally, I had lost the joy in sailing,” says Helena Scutt, an Olympian who stopped a Nacra 17 campaign last year and then decided to focus on her engineering career. “Last year I started a journey with the Moth to put the fun back in sailing. I never want to lose that again.”

Scutt purchased an Exocet during her campaign, believing her foiling skills would translate to Nacra sailing. The campaign is over, and now she’s trying to get better in the Moth in the San Francisco Bay area. She’s an Olympic-caliber athlete, but even Scutt is on the same learning curve as every Moth sailor. “I’ve been knocked down so many times,” she says, “but I come out of the water with a grin and say, ‘That was an ­awesome wipeout.’”

Scutt, who is also the US Moth Class president, finished eighth overall in September’s North American Championship in San Diego. She is progressing nicely up the curve. “It was my first real Moth regatta,” she says. “I’m just analyzing where the gains and losses are. Boathandling is low-hanging fruit.”

The Waszp is essentially a production version of the Moth, and groups in the United States have had an easier time attracting females to the fold. Scutt points to a few Moth-specific challenges that favor the Waszp for some sailors. “The expense is a factor,” Scutt says, adding that a lot of other boats are cheaper than a Moth and “almost as much fun.” Experience in high-performance boats, like skiffs, is helpful in foiling but not prevalent among female sailors. Scutt says this has nothing to do with “capability.” It’s a matter of exposure. And being an equipment-based development class also doesn’t play into the current skills of female sailors. She adds that these factors are historical and that Moth sailing “exaggerates these factors.”

Scutt encourages all Moth sailors to reflect on the opportunities that got them into the class, and then spend a little time exposing new sailors, especially women, to the Moth. “Share your knowledge, give them a chance to try it and get hooked.”

Still, Scutt says the Moth is the tip of the spear in performance sailing. “The Moth came out of sailing; now foiling is more ubiquitous,” she says. “When I think of sailing and foiling, it’s a pretty cool time to be around and flying. A couple of years ago, we never would have imagined this.”

Moths are surely the most expensive bit of singlehanded monohull sailing kit you can own, though the price of recreational foilers is getting more reasonable. But in Mission Bay and Key Largo each winter, there will be 20 or 30 Moth sailors of every ability ripping around, tuning up, and helping one another tweak a gearing mechanism for the wand or repair a push rod on their main foil flap. Some will try to play with the likes of Slingsby, while others will simply enjoy their progression.

Flanigan’s last few posts from the worlds speak to the average Moth sailor’s attitude. “Missed tack, flipped at top mark…. When I say I have ‘good pace upwind,’ I understand fully that it is relative only to the bottom half of the fleet.” With his best race in the silver fleet being a seventh of 61 (DNFs starting from 36th), his closing comment is, “This was an awesome event.”

Slingsby, of course, would agree.

The post Moths to the Flame appeared first on Sailing World.

After a successful day of one‑design racing, I’m often asked: “What base numbers do you use?” and “What were your rig settings today?”

These are common and valid inquiries, and like tuning guides, they’re a great place to start when initially setting up your boat. But at the end of the day, your better-than-average speed usually comes down to knowing how to adapt, on the fly, to changing conditions. It sounds pretty simple: First, identify the problem—inability to point, lack of speed—and then look critically at your setup to find a solution. But there’s a lot more to it than that.

Let’s start with a basic ­principle: A boat is either looking for power, in perfect power or overpowered. You must be able to recognize which is the case in order to figure out which changes to settings must be made to improve your speed and VMG. From there, you must understand cause and effect: “If I adjust this, then that happens.”

Make sure you’re clear about what each control does and how it affects the sails, the boat’s balance, and thus, VMG. Remember, for the most part, only slight adjustments are needed to make a change. Following the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) rule, here’s a quick guide we use on our Etchells, but much of it is applicable to other boats.

Traveler: Changes power by adding or reducing heel and changes weather helm. It can add drag to the sail plan if too high.

Mainsheet: Changes power by adding or reducing heel and weather helm. Also tightens the forestay because the mainsail’s leech shares some load with the backstay.

Cunningham: Depowers the mainsail as it pulls the draft forward, thus flattening the sail aft. Generally reduces drag and removes “overbend” wrinkles from excessive backstay.

Outhaul: Changes the mainsail camber down low. Increases or decreases power and drag.

Backstay: Changes the ­mainsail cambers more uniformly. It also changes the twist in the mainsail leech as the mast bends. It can rapidly affect power, which is helpful when increasing or reducing heel. It also tensions the headstay, which controls power in the jib.

Jib sheet: Changes leech ­tension while also slightly changing the cambers. Be careful not to ease the sheet too much, or you can make the top flatter with twist while keeping the bottom to full.

Jib lead: Changes depth and power in the jib, mostly in the bottom two-thirds. It changes twist, so make sure you check the jib leech after adjusting the leads.

Jib halyard: Similar to the ­cunningham, it changes the draft position and overall depth of the sail. Beware that as you tighten the jib halyard, the leech can get tighter, reducing twist.

Inhaul: Changes the proximity of the jib leech to the mainsail while also changing the angle of the jib to the wind, allowing you to point higher when used. If you are overpowered and the mainsail is depowered to the point that it luffs, let off the inhaul until the main settles down.

Jib tack (cunningham): Tightens luff by pulling draft forward, and flattens the back of the sail slightly. It can also ­create a small amount of twist.

Mast ram: Changes the ­cambers of both sails. It bends the mast down low. In the mainsail, it affects fullness in the lower sections, and in the jib, it affects headstay tension. Letting the mast bend farther causes the headstay to sag farther.

Let’s now take a look at these adjustments in action on the course. You’re going upwind shortly after the start in a tight lane, and you need to sail a little higher to hold that lane. Accept that you will go a little slower by sailing higher. If it’s windy and you are overpowered, you can generally sheet a little harder on both sails. That increases power, but by sailing higher to the wind, you are reducing power. Generally it will be a small net loss in VMG as you sail slightly higher and slightly slower, but you will hold your lane, which will ­net-gain you VMG later.

In some cases, such as in flat water where there is little chop or waves to slow you down, you can simply sail higher and flatter to achieve this mode without changing anything. While you decrease power in the sail plan by sailing higher into the wind, you also reduce leeway because the boat will be sailing flatter. If the power is perfect and the boat feels balanced, a tiny pinch in on the jib and either a tad of traveler up or mainsheet tension will do it. Pulling the traveler up or tightening the mainsheet adds power to the back of the sail plan, making it easier for the boat to head up.

In chop or waves, mainsheet on often works well, but when it starts to get bumpy, traveler up is better because you often need twist in the main to help reaccelerate after hitting a wave.

If the boat is underpowered, ease the backstay. This will round up the sail plan in both sails, creating more weather helm, making it easier to head up. As the backstay is eased, the main leach gets tighter and the sail gets fuller. It also adds sag to the headstay, which results in additional shape and power in the jib. Pro sailor, Steve Hunt, a four-time Etchells champion, cautions that the backstay and mainsheet always go hand in hand; if you adjust the backstay, immediately consider adjusting the mainsheet.

Now that you’ve held your lane and are now free to go anywhere. The left side of the course is favored, so you need to sail “fast forward” to the left. This is accomplished by sailing slightly lower but faster through the water. It’s a similar VMG to the mark, but it gets you the positioning farther to the left side of the course. If overpowered, add backstay and let the traveler down. Just “lay” on the jib slightly, making the leeward telltales start to dance. Easing the traveler and pulling on the backstay will reduce power and drag in the back of the sail plan, allowing the boat to bear away slightly without healing over more. That results in a faster lower mode. If the power is perfect, just the smallest change is needed. Ideally, keep the same amount of heel. If the power is perfect, you likely don’t want to change the backstay and negatively affect the jib. In this situation, a little traveler down works well. Simply bear away and reduce the drag in the main ever so slightly.

If you’re underpowered, you can try simply bearing away slightly. Then the boat will heel somewhat and likely accelerate. Make sure that the jib isn’t sheeted too tightly or it might stall. A small ease of the mainsheet can also help; it will help increase headstay sag, thus powering the jib up even more.

Second Opinion

Andrew Palfrey, a two-time Etchells World Champion, Star Olympian and grand-prix coach, offers these tips for better upwind speed.

Balance and power, in harmony, are key. Keep in mind the vertical distribution of power, particularly when overpowered. For example, in higher true windspeeds, keep depth and driving force low in the sail plan to get through waves, while ensuring that the upper part of the sail plan is all about reducing drag.

Develop a tuning guide specific to your boat. Every boat will have a slightly different balance due to the slightest difference in the underwater foils.

Invest time (and even some money) on the basics of accurate foil and mast alignments. This is the building block of consistent performance. This is my primary focus when I am involved in a new build.

It is getting easier these days to quantify fast sails (and even rig to foil alignment) digitally. If you are high and fast, take a photo of both sails and the major controls, such as the backstay, traveler and inhaul. Simple apps to analyze sails such as the SailCloud are available for a fee. It is no longer the realm of only the sailmaker or pro coach. This will really help when you get your next new sail. Compare the two scans, and you are in a much more informed position to make any changes to mast setup or to discuss things with your sailmaker. Get facts and data before opinion.

When moding one way or the other, too often people overreact. If moding fast-forward in a boat like an Etchells, aim for only a 1 to 2 percent increase in forward speed. This is the slightest press into the jib, with the major controls sympathetic to the mode. Otherwise the resultant heel and change in balance will have a negative effect.

Keep asking questions—that is what the best sailors do.

The post Sail-Shape Controls: What Does What appeared first on Sailing World.

Dave and Peter Askew —brothers in their mid-50s, with two years between them—have been distance racing for decades, their accomplishments on the water blossoming in both scale and caliber. Over the past two years, however, the Askew brothers have progressed well beyond the relative comfort and familiarity of the Great Lakes, questing top results in each and every one the premier international offshore races. To do so, the brothers recruited a crew deep in experience, acquired a used Volvo 70, and laid out an ambitious plan to win all the Northern Hemisphere’s greatest races: the Caribbean 600, the Transatlantic Race, the Rolex Fastnet Race and the Rolex Middle Sea Race. They came close, ­winning three of four (a drifter of a Middle Sea Race was not Volvo 70 conditions).

“Winning the Fastnet was—by far—the biggest sailing event of my entire life,” Peter says. “I remember watching it as a kid. It was always a race I paid attention to.” He can now be reminded of the race every time he looks at the inscription on the Rolex timepiece he now wears proudly on his wrist. “It’s a point in my career I will never forget.”

I first met the Askew brothers when we crewed for Bill Martin in the 1984 Canada’s Cup. As youngsters, they’d raced Lasers, Interlakes and Flying Juniors, but that year, they were in college and spent the summer working on Martin’s Two-Tonner, Stars & Stripes. We won a grueling challenger trials but lost in the final match. They were enthusiastic and reliable crewmates, and over the next few summers, they delivered and worked on raceboats ­throughout the Great Lakes.

David Askew considers his experiences with Bill Martin as his true formative years, as well as the stepping-off point for a long-term sailing career. “The next thing I know, I’m racing with all these guys I idolized as a kid,” he says. “I was in the candy store, and I wanted to be the best sailor I could.”

He laughs now, he says, because he never wanted to own his own raceboat. Why would he when had easy access to top boats raced by top-shelf crews?

The Askews had solid sailing backgrounds before launching their business careers. In 1980, their father, Lawrence Askew, founded USALCO, a chemical company that processed aluminum and other materials used to purify the lake waters of the Midwest. The company eventually moved to Baltimore and grew. The brothers each graduated from the University of Michigan, with David earning a mechanical engineering degree and Peter a degree in anthropology. Both married at relatively young ages, ­raising families as they built the company. Competitive-sailing aspirations shifted to the back burner.

They’re now equal partners in their father’s company, which currently employs 250 people and produces more than a million tons of chemical products per year. The company’s move to Baltimore allowed David to settle in Annapolis, closer to the action. Ultimately, it was David’s wife, Sandy, who suggested they get back into sailing.

“We should get a boat because our kids ought to be brought up as sailors,” she suggested.

David agreed, of course, and they bought a J/120. “That’s our humble beginning,” he says. “We just kind of progressed through bigger boats. It was always a family thing.”

They campaigned a J/122 before eventually making the grand-prix leap to the TP52. “My brother had more time to sail with me,” David says. “We had a dream as kids of doing the big ocean races. We knew we needed the right boat.”

They then set their sights on the Transpac Race and acquired Bella Mente, built in 2008 by American yachtsman Hap Fauth. “[He’d] done everything to it to make it a good downwind boat for the Transpac,” David says.

In their first try, they won the Barn Door Trophy, awarded to the first boat to finish. “[At the time] we were building up a pretty good crew who were always keen to do long-distance races, so in fall 2017, we thought we needed to get a Volvo 70,” David says.

They purchased the highly optimized Groupama 4, winning boat of the 2011-2012 Volvo Ocean Race, skippered by Frank Cammas. “Relative to the cost of building a new boat, it was cheap,” David says. “The 70 is the perfect size. The real expense is campaigning the boat and hiring the crew.”

With the exception of ­themselves, they now race with a team of 13 professionals and specialists. “On a boat with so few people, everyone on the boat has to work well together,” David says, “although everyone has their little quirks. It’s like a small military squad. They can all do each other’s jobs, but they specialize in certain areas, like mechanical systems. They can keep a boat going no ­matter what happens.”

Where do the Askew brothers fit into the squad? “Our main job is to make sure the boat gets to the starting line,” David says, with a laugh. “We write checks.”

Kidding aside, he says they both steer, spending about half of each watch on the helm. When they’re not on the helm, they’re grinding winches or trimming sails. Sheets are never cleated. “We work the boat really hard,” David says. “We have to be in some kind of shape to grind winches. If someone is missing from the handles, you are expected to jump in there.”

For Wizard’s 2019 trophy haul, the crew roster included Volvo Ocean Race veterans Charlie Enright and Mark Towill. Will Oxley, of Australia, a highly experienced veteran of the offshore game, is the team’s navigator. Richard Clarke, of Canada, an Olympic Finn sailor and round-the-world veteran as well, is also a key member of the team. Roy Pat Disney and Ralf Steitz joined the Wizard crew for the Fastnet Race.

“The number of people we have sailed with over the years has been absolutely amazing,” Peter says. “It’s special to sail with guys with so much experience, guys who are at the top of their game.”

Naturally, surrounded by such experience, the ride is often thrilling, Peter says. “After three days of going 28 knots, you get a little frazzled, but you never feel out of control,” he says. “We take a reef pretty early in 20 to 22 knots.”

His brother has a different take: “The amount of energy this boat has is amazing. I couldn’t even look up at the top of the mast when we were reaching along in 30 knots of wind because it was moving around like I’ve never seen.”

During the 2018 Rolex Sydney Hobart Race, David recalls the adrenaline of racing in 30 knots: “The sea state was all screwed up, and we were planting the bow into the waves. Our Number 3 [headsail] exploded. Everyone looks around and says, ‘Hmm, maybe that’s telling us something.’ The next thing might be the rig, so we throttled back. To me it seemed like the boat might explode. Literally. I couldn’t understand why the boat did not break; it just kept going.”

David admits it took several more races to finally feel comfortable with the energy in the boat and its ability to withstand punishing conditions. “The guys who race these boats around the world understand this, and that is why they are able to do 600-mile days,” he says. “With this type of sailing, the weakest part of the boat is the crew.”

While the Volvo 70 was essentially a one-design purpose-built boat for the round-the-world race, the Askews have had to adapt it to handicap-rating rules, which is a challenge unto itself, given the different rules used by events. “For different regattas we use different rules,” David says. “We have different modes regarding sail selection. For example, if we are going to be doing windward-leeward courses, we will sail with a masthead code zero; but if we are going into the North Atlantic, then we have a lot of reaching sails. We have a thing called a ‘J zero’ that we put out on a strut to leeward. In ORR, we can’t use it. I wish there were just one handicap-rating rule, but it seems every part of the world has its own rule.”

The Askews and their team have received several ­honors for their achievements. World Sailing presented them with the 2019 Hempel Team of the Year Award; the New York YC awarded the brothers with the Mosbacher Trophy; the Royal Ocean Racing Club named Wizard the RORC Yacht of the Year; the Bayview YC honored them with the R.W. Jeffery Memorial Trophy; and, at this writing, the two brothers together are one of three finalists for US Sailing’s Rolex Yachtsman of the Year award. For these motivated sailors, 2019 was an outstanding year, with many goals accomplished, and they will continue to be in the forefront of racing for the next several years, they say. David will join Sandy on her IC37, while Peter plans to continue campaigning Wizard in the Pacific and Caribbean.

Yes, for the Askew family, the sailing never stops.

The post Askews, Brothers of the Watch appeared first on Sailing World.

“Transformational” is only a word—unless it sticks. Tom Siebel wouldn’t aim lower. He’s had a great run in tech, lately in artificial intelligence, and he’s out to make a difference. Typical of tech-sector folks, Siebel is fond of another word: disruption. Here’s a guy who has sailed all his life, raced MOD70 trimarans, campaigned a J Class yacht, raced whatever because “sailing is magical,” and now, in partnership with US Sailing, he’s launched a nationwide initiative funding quality boats and quality coaching for community sailing venues: the Siebel Sailors Program. Two more words—opportunity and ­diversity—are also in play. Familiar words. Some people hear them too often, to no effect. What we haven’t seen before is what is on tap now—well-funded levels of resource and support. Maybe, just maybe, this has legs.

As skies warm and the ­season kicks off, there will be networks operating around five regional centers, including the Columbia Sailing School in Chicago and DC Sail in Washington, D.C. Two more are in the lineup, South-Central Florida and the Pacific Northwest. The Siebel Sailors Program soft-launched this past fall on San Francisco Bay, where three fleets of new RS Fevas took to the water, and young Anna Novolt, drying off from her first sail, was inspired to declare, “I don’t know when I’ve been more excited about a boat.”

And for once, the boat is key—but there’s much, much more.

Twenty-one years ago, Carisa Harris Adamson founded the Treasure Island Sailing Center, where she and Siebel recently presided over the ceremonial launch of the Siebel Sailors Program. Adamson has nurtured her baby against long odds. In welcoming Siebel as a bolt from heaven, she noted that community sailing efforts “have done the job of growing the base, but we have difficulties keeping kids.” In particular, programs lose tweens when they outgrow their singlehanded trainers and perhaps have the skills for a big-kid boat, but they’re too scrawny to right the boat from a capsize. Then they ­struggle, or disappear. Not only in ­community sailing.

The junior program at my yacht club, St. Francis, has stumbled over this for years. And I’m careful in what I’m about to say, because the longer someone has been in youth sailing, the more likely they are to growl if you suggest a new type of boat. But the Feva—a doublehander with an asymmetric spinnaker for apparent-wind sailing—is going to matter. Scrawny kids can right it from capsize. If that was their only special quality, it would be enough, but Fevas are also a fast, 21st-century answer to how to hold a kid’s attention. Fevas are already big in Europe and growing in the United States. Siebel is taking them national, targeting that vulnerable middle school age, and I’m a believer. More on the boats later.

The Siebel ­program ­developed through brainstorming with leadership at US Sailing. How can it make a difference? Today, the manager for the national initiative is Blair Overman, and coming from a community sailing background herself, she says: “It’s not as though Siebel Sailors will be teaching anything drastically different. Rather, we’re intentionally hiring high-level people to work with kids who may not have had high-level teachers before. Beginners at sailing centers sometimes get the least of the instructors, but our beginners are going to get the best.” Think less chalk talk and more engagement; some coaching to win but a lot of adventure sailing.

“Each region is different,” Overman says. “They have different paths, but the goals are the same: to appeal to more kids, and more kinds of kids, and to keep them coming back and to connect with their families. That won’t come easily. There’s no formula. We’re attuned to training instructors in how to interact with people who are different from them. This is not just about sailing. It’s about recognizing that a kid who shows up lethargic and cranky maybe hasn’t had a meal all day, and until that kid is fueled up, there’s no use trying to teach.”

Situations of that sort are sure to arise, because one of the conditions for a program to be accepted is a promise that at least 50 percent of participants will come from disadvantaged neighborhoods. “Stacey and I invest in new things,” Siebel says. “We don’t give to the opera. We try to create, so what we’re doing in creating the Siebel Sailors Program is consistent with the giving we’ve done before.”

For example: A Siebel-funded campaign educating adolescents about the ugly realities of methamphetamine use ran in eight states and dramatically reduced methamphetamine usage. “It wasn’t about scaring kids straight,” Siebel says. “It was about teaching the consequences of meth as a consumer product, what it does to your body, your life, your looks. Methamphetamine rates in Montana dropped 70 ­percent.”

Siebel-funded stem-cell research has produced its own dramatic results in cure rates for specific cancers, so why not take a shot at a Tom Siebel obsession, the transformative power of time on the water under sail? “You want to know that it can scale,” Siebel says. “We bought 125 boats for five hubs in the first year. In 2020, we want to double down with another five hubs and another 125 boats. And my hope is that in 10 years, this will be transformative nationally. I started sailing on Lake Michigan with my dad when I was 8. When I was a teenager, the other kids and I would look for a buster so we could go out in a gale and get our teeth kicked in—the teamwork, the terror, the joy…yes, nothing short of magical.”

At the Columbia Sailing School, Kurt Thomsen sees the Siebel program as fitting right in. “We have STEM teaching, but it’s always been a problem getting scholarship money to bring in the kids, and we’re hoping this means we can expose more of them, and then pay attention to the kids who take to it. Last year, we had 600 in our field-trip program, and we were able to get them sailing maybe one time. Now we can do more, and for a lot of kids, the Feva is the perfect stepping stone.”

RELATED: So, the Kid Wants to Teach Sailing

Brian McNally, at DC Sailing says: “I can’t overstress how grateful we are to be able to engage kids we’d otherwise have missed. We’ve had just 20 FJs for all our adult and kid programs, including 10-week spring and fall high school sailing for 30 schools—the entire tristate area. With Fevas we can teach advanced skills, and yes, it matters to have ­top-level coaching.”

The format is to equip each Primary Center with Fevas and to equip each Supporting Center with Fevas for adventure sailing, also for racing as opportunity presents. Chris Childers is the Siebel coach for San Francisco Bay, with TISC as the hub and Alameda Community Sailing Center (in the East Bay) and Golden Gate Sailing Foundation (in the West Bay, at Golden Gate YC) in support. Childers believes that “Fevas are the perfect boat to start kids in doublehanded sailing at an age when they’re very social and want to be with other kids. They can begin doublehanded sailing earlier than they would in a boat like an FJ. We can do more to develop them going forward. Imagine the cohort of sailors 20 years from now who have been doing apparent-wind sailing their whole lives.”

The chair of the junior ­program at an establishment not far from Golden Gate YC, also party to the conversation, was heard to mutter something like: “Apparent-wind sailing? Trainer for the 29er? That’s exactly why we’re getting Fevas for ourselves. Bring it on.”

The post Time to Upgrade appeared first on Sailing World.

The spinnaker provides an excellent cue to driving well downwind. With its light material and large projected area, it can tell you a lot. Does it look powered up and smooth? Is it falling out of the sky and wrinkly? Is there a sudden luff curl with no ease? Is the kite trimmer easing with no curl forming? Vince Brun once told me that the spinnaker is designed to have a flying shape, and you always want to keep it powered up enough to maintain that shape. If you’re going really low in lumpy conditions, and the kite’s bobbling all over the place and it looks distorted, you’re not sailing it how it was designed. Conversely, if you’re sailing too hot of an angle, you’re not only sailing extra distance, but the overtrimmed kite is choked and the leech is hooked. It wasn’t designed to be trimmed that tight. Between those two extremes, there’s a sweet spot, and that’s where you want to be.

Here’s the cycle for typical displacement-mode sailing: Let’s assume that you’re sailing with the chute in its proper flying shape, and you’re doing 6 or 6.1 knots. You get a nice puff, you bear away and soak low. At some point, the speed is going to crash. You need to head up before that crash happens.

Better drivers will head up just before the spinnaker trimmer starts getting light on the sheet. The first clue is that the kite starts to lose a little pressure. You can tell because it starts to look slightly less firm, and will eventually start drooping and then wobble. It also might get closer to the boat as it droops. Just like upwind, the speed goes down slowly at first, from 6 knots to maybe 5.9 or 5.8, and then it drops dramatically.

Don’t get fooled into ­thinking that if you wait long enough at this low angle, the speed will come back. The only thing that could potentially save you is a puff or header, but this is rare. You have to be prepared to scallop downwind. Instead of crashing the speed, head up right when you see the speed start to drop rather than waiting until the speed gets low. Or better yet, if you have a keen feel or have noticed the pattern for the day, head up just before the speed drops more than a tenth or two.

The best drivers communicate with the crew about intended driving to get help with crew weight—or they let the spinnaker trimmer’s calls guide the crew. Either way, it’s faster if you have a coordinated effort of steering with your weight.

If you want to steer up, have the crew lean to leeward. If you want to go straight, make sure the boat is flat. If you want to bear away, have a few people move slightly to windward. Make sure your steering and the crew’s weight shift work together. If they’re out of sync, you’ll be working against each other.

As you head up, aim a degree or two higher than the optimal angle to power the kite back up and get the speed back up to 6 or 6.1. Once everyone is hiking, you’ll start soaking again, all the while watching the spinnaker to determine when to come back up to your baseline angle. A well-­coordinated team helping steer the boat at the perfect time is very fast. The crew should be alert and listening to clues and ­conversations between the trimmer and the driver. There’s a tendency on a lot of boats for idle crews to sit on their bottoms downwind, but if the boat’s setup allows, it’s good to have the crew on the balls of their feet, crouched low and clear of the helmsman’s line of sight forward. Being ready to shift and adjust their weight immediately will make a big difference when shifting between different modes. Ideally, with dynamic crew-weight movement, there will be minimal—if any—rudder movement, which we know is fast.

Just like sailing upwind, managing shifts and steering correctly through them also separates good drivers from great ones. For instance, I’m sailing along and suddenly, the spinnaker luff curls, even though the trimmer hasn’t eased the sheet. I just got a header. That wind-angle arrow pointing from the back corner of my boat just went forward. Downwind, that’s good, because I want to sail headers, but I’m now sailing too high with a curl.

Not-so-great ­drivers will allow the trimmer to bring in the sheet, compromising the flying shape and sailing extra distance. Most likely, the speed will increase, but now you’re not sailing the best VMG. Better drivers will bear away, make the curl disappear, and maintain the spinnaker’s flying shape.

It also really helps if the ­spinnaker trimmer communicates with the driver, saying something like, “Nice header here,” which cues the driver to immediately bear off. If the driver is looking at the spinnaker with the same intensity they look at the jib telltales upwind, they will probably detect the shift at the same time the trimmer gets it, and immediately bear off without having to be told or having the trimmer make an ­adjustment in the spinnaker sheet.

Let’s now look at the ­opposite situation. I’m cruising along, everything’s nice, and the spinnaker trimmer has the ease/curl/trim cycle going, as they should. There’s a nice pattern to the puffs, but on the next ease, there’s no curl. The trimmer eases some more, but still no curl. I just got a lift.

That wind arrow shifted back toward the rudder, making me sail closer to dead downwind. It’s as if I bore off with no windshift. Now I’m sailing lower and slower. What to do?

Because the wind shifted back behind the boat, and because the spinnaker sheet has been eased, the spinnaker is no longer at its perfect flying shape (and remember what Vince Brun told us already). This one is a little harder to detect, but if you are dialed in and watching the kite, along with using your peripheral vision to see the trimmer repeat his or her easing cycle, you’ll know you got a lift.

It’s not as obvious as getting a header when the chute luff starts to curl. But another sign to help you decipher the lift is that the boat suddenly feels a bit dead, like you hit a lull. Lulls and lifts actually feel decidedly similar. Both require you to head up to keep moving well. But tactically it’s nice to know the difference in case you want to jibe.

Like getting a header and immediately rolling into a tack upwind, if I’m thinking of jibing downwind and get a lift, it’s the perfect time to roll straight into the jibe. I save degrees in the turning radius, which is fast, and I’m sailing the headers as I’m supposed to be doing downwind. Exiting jibes onto headers feels great, and you can instantly tell you’re doing the right thing because you’ll feel the power in the boat and you’ll be aiming more toward the leeward mark.

I will never forget ­training against Paul Foerster and Bob Merrick in Sydney, Australia, before the 2000 Olympics, where they won a silver medal. Every day we had a long downwind sail to the practice area, and of course we raced the whole way out. We had to make good use of our time.

During the downwind shifty sail, whenever I thought, Did I just get a lift? and I started to head up, I heard their sails popping onto the new jibe. Looking under the boom, I would see them sailing away on a header, having gained a few lengths. A few minutes later, the same thing would happen. They were so in tune with the wind angle, instantly jibing on the lifts and gaining huge. If you are sailing on the super-long tack or happy with where you are going, head up when lifted to keep speed. But if you are thinking of jibing or the lift is huge, jibing immediately is a big gainer.

Upwind and downwind, ­precision driving is the result of the driver thinking about their angle to the wind, heel angle and speed. You’re never going to get it perfect the entire race, but no one else is either. If you can keep the boat in the sweet spot 90 percent of the time, taking into consideration all of the factors discussed above, and everyone else is doing it less of the time, you’re going to beat them.

Next time you steer a boat, pay more attention to the jib telltales upwind and the spinnaker downwind, and let them guide your decisions while feeling the speed and power in the boat. Drive with more precision picturing the wind angle as an arrow pointing at your boat, and try your best to keep the boat in the sweet spot at all times. ν

The post Spinnaker Trim Essentials appeared first on Sailing World.

The wind is howling through Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli Team’s base in Cagliari, Italy, in mid-­January. There will be no sailing today, but they’ve already had plenty of whitecap sessions, validating their sleek, black 75-footer all the way to the top of what is yet to be determined as the raceable wind range for America’s Cup in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2021. “We’ve been pushing pretty hard,” Luna Rossa helmsman Jimmy Spithill says. “Most days, we’re off the dock at 7:30.” A few weeks later, a rigging failure resulted in the team’s entire rig timbering over the front of the boat. It’s a new boat—it happens. Better now than later. “We have to take everything to maximum loads,” Spithill says. “The rig, the foils and the ­hardware—all that takes time. Some things go well; some things need development.”

For Spithill and the Italian Challenger of Record, break-in of their first of two AC75s has ratcheted ever higher since the beginning of the year. In a few months, they’ll host the first of three America’s Cup World Series events, providing themselves, two other challengers and the defender, Emirates Team New Zealand, a taste of what’s to come in Auckland.

All four teams—Luna Rossa, Ineos Team UK, American Magic and Team New Zealand—have each put significant hours into their boats, their bodies and their simulators, and Spithill says he’s happy with the team’s progress. But these are early days yet, and they’re only just coming to grips with their ­flying beast.

Still, no sailing doesn’t mean a day off. The simulator is calling. The simulator, one of which every team has, is a game-changer for this Cup cycle, Spithill says. Emirates Team New Zealand was the only syndicate to employ one in the previous Cup, and several Team New Zealand engineers involved with its development are now in the Italian camp. “We can go through a lot of the sailing data and that sort of thing with it,” Spithill says. “Whether we’re down because we’re doing a modification to the boat or because of the weather, we can keep going, to test the software out or try different appendages and setups. The most powerful thing with the simulator is the ability to get results much quicker than in the past and make sure the behavior of the boat in the simulator is as close to replicating what’s actually happening on the water when we’re sailing.”

There’s a tremendous ­efficiency to the simulator as well. He says: “In the past, you look at just how much time, money and effort goes into getting on the water and sailing in the America’s Cup. It’s no different this time; we need a crane, a heap of people, chase boats. It’s a huge operation, and by the time you get out there, you may get only a few hours of quality sailing. In the simulator, we go until we’re brain-dead. If you make a mistake on the water, you lose so much, but on the simulator, we can just stop and do it again, setting up different scenarios.”

He recalls the first time he walked into the team’s simulator and left feeling sick. Not because of the motions of the platform and the realness of it, but because he “realized how far behind the rest of us were by not having this tool last campaign, and instantly regretted not pushing harder to develop one then.”

Spithill—once the most ­visible personality of the modern Cup era—is enjoying his low-profile role with the Italian team, now able to focus strictly on sailing, while Max Sirena, the team director and skipper, is out front with sponsors and commercial partners. Even on the team’s website, Spithill, a six-time veteran of the Cup and back-to-back winner, has no official title.

“The last few campaigns, I was running the team and I enjoyed that,” he says, “but at the same time, I was involved in the commercial responsibilities and promotion for both the team and event. Max is responsible for this now, so I have more time to focus on sailing and design.”

He’s now in the afterguard with Francesco Bruni, with both sharing the driving. “It actually works pretty well because I have the ability to step off the boat and have a look. I get to see different styles and techniques, which is a great way to develop the boat and grow.”

He won’t say who’s faster between the two of them at the moment, but it doesn’t matter because they’re both on the same steep curve, learning and pushing each other. “Last time, I was really running the team, and I enjoyed that, but I didn’t realize how much I really enjoy the sailing time. You can get dragged away in so many ways, so it really is nice now to really be able to focus on the sailing, especially with a boat like this because we just don’t have much time. Everything’s ­developing at a very fast pace.”

His simple assessment of the AC75 thus far is that it is “awesome.” At first, he says, he expected it to be like the AC50 or AC72, but it’s completely different: “When you’re moving the foil arms up and down, you’re making a significant change in righting moment, and any change in cant angle of the board that’s in the water also changes righting moment, so there are different forces. Just getting used to the heel is quite weird because we have this big force coming from the leeward foil. The touchdowns are quite different too. On a foiling cat, it’s not that big of a deal when you touch down, but a big nosedive on these boats is dramatic because it’s just one big hull, and once this happens and you stop, you don’t have a wide platform for stability, much like a Moth.”

He’s not a fan of the rigs and mainsails, but says he understands the goal of trying to produce a mainsail that has the same characteristics of a wing and being able to raise and lower on the water. “Frankly, the hard wings are faster, work out cheaper, are less loaded and easier to trim.”

The Gulf of Cagliari, on the southeast coast of the stunning island of Sardinia, has been kind to the team’s development, providing a full range of conditions as they’ve gone from their little white missile of a concept boat to the real-deal 75. They can sail year-round, in the ­morning’s mistral or the afternoon sea breeze. “We’ve been out in some good breeze,” Spithill says. “The limit here in Cagliari is the waves; it can get rough.”

The winter training sessions have been focused exclusively on the boat, and as of January, not a single race mark had been set. In due time, and until then, Spithill can only imagine what will happen when four boats occupy the same water. “I’m not sure anyone can really say what it’s going to be like,” he says. “This is a new concept never tried before, with a huge foil arm suspended in the air and sticking out the side of the boat like it is now. In the past, when boats would come together, we’d touch hulls, but now, ­obviously, that’s not an option. It just can’t happen because it would be catastrophic. That’s why April is important for everyone to see what the style of racing will look like and how it will work.”

What we can expect from Spithill, most likely, is a more aggressive approach both on and off the racecourse. Oracle Team USA’s fall to the sword of Emirates Team New Zealand is still fresh. “I don’t ever let any loss go,” he says. “Defeat is nothing but education. We were too conservative [in Bermuda]. Sometimes success can do that to a team. We were going for third win in a row, and it was a trap we fell into that we were not aggressive enough with our approach. Their campaign was anything but conservative. Personally, I didn’t go with my instincts enough, on or off the water, and we made key decisions early on in the campaign that affected the end result.”

With large-scale teams, as it was with Oracle Team USA, it’s easy to end up in that middle ground. This campaign is a big increase in budget and personnel, and all of Luna Rossa’s rivals “lack nothing,” Spithill says. “With less than a year to go and limited cards to play, the decisions that are taken during this summer will determine who will get it right and who won’t. I can’t wait.”

The post Spithill Goes Sailing appeared first on Sailing World.

“Mechatronics engineer.” That’s one job title that never existed back in the America’s Cup’s 12-Metre era. But today, every Cup team has a few on payroll. These are the unknown wizards tasked with ensuring that every adjustment on the AC75 is precise. From micro to macro, from the top of the rig to the tip of the foil flap, when and if someone presses a button or pushes a toggle on these complex flying beasts, something logical better happen, and it better be right. Such is the new high-tech domain of modern America’s Cup ­sailing, one in which software, hardware, electronics, hydraulics and human input interplay through intricate systems.

“It is the crux of performance,” says James Lyne, head coach of the New York YC’s American Magic challenge. “The Cup can be won or lost in these control systems.” Lyne, who analyzes every move and every adjustment the American Magic sailing team makes on board its AC75 Defiant, can see through 14 onboard cameras and a deluge of data streamed from the boat just how important this business of mechatronics is to getting up to speed and around the race track.

Let’s start with the big picture: Who does what on the boat?

We’ve split up the tasks of controlling the boat. Dean [Barker], the helmsman, has control of the wheel and various things, but his primary role is to steer the boat around the course. Paul [Goodison], as the mainsail trimmer, controls the shape of the mast and the [twin-skinned] mainsail. He also has some control of the jib. Andrew Campbell is then, ­effectively, in control of flight. From his position, he controls the foil cant, foil flap and ­rudder rake. Other people can also control those functions, but 99 percent of the time, three people effectively have control of the boat.

That leaves eight grinders, and one of those is a tactician. The tactician is talking about the course and the options, so in that sense, we’re set up a bit like a traditional boat. All the grinders are doing is, as they say, “We grind forward and then we grind backward.” It’s an oversimplification, of course, because these guys are electronically changing gears and choosing functions depending on the task at hand.

The grinders are ­essentially running who’s in what and how much power to put in at any moment. If they choose the wrong function at the wrong time and let oil pressure get too low, the boat will get unbalanced quite quickly, and the flight controller and the helmsman can’t do anything about it. Nothing ­happens on these boats without hydraulic pressure.

How many control buttons do the grinders have to manage while also hammering away at the handles?

It’s traditional in that they’re using foot buttons, but they’re electronic rather than mechanical. When you look down into the cockpit, into all the grinding stations, you’ll see there’s an array of buttons. The jib trimmer has at least six [foot] buttons just to himself, from the engaging of the winch, to the jib cars and the up-down systems that affect his sail shape. It’s like a dance/game for them because they can’t be off the handles for any lengthy period of time. We need a certain amount of watts, on average, to power the boat.

The grinders are producing almost what a professional cyclist would produce, over a relatively short period of time. We’re asking these guys for more than 200 watts on average, with spikes of nearly 1,000 watts on special occasions where they need to dig deep.

So, what’s happening, systems-wise, when a foot ­button is engaged?

When they press a button, an electronic signal is passing to a programmable logic controller, which is programmed to control the opening and closing of hydraulic valves or ­mechanical mechanisms to achieve a given function. For example, are they straight into a winch, or switching to fill an accumulator tank or drive a hydraulically controlled sail function? Are they behind in how much oil they’re producing? When they’re coming to the boundary and they have to jibe, if they’re low on oil, it’s not going to be pretty. Paul, Dean and the trimmer are the primary consumers of the energy, and the grinders are choosing how that energy is allocated around the boat.

I can imagine there is quite a ­complex web of hoses, pumps and rams below deck.

When you look inside the boat, it looks way more like the inside of a plane than it does the inside of a boat. It’s impressive. You’ve got a lot of electronics, a series of pumps and hoses to produce and supply pressure, and tanks to store high- and low-pressure oil. Without the high-pressure tank/accumulator, there are moments around the racecourse where it’s impossible to generate enough grinding power to meet the demands of the boat, so we’re always asking the hydraulic system to be more and more efficient.

When people look at the boat, it looks sort of traditional in that there’s an outhaul, a mainsheet and jib sheets, but the big difference is the forces this boat generates are so big that the whole boat would have to be one big purchase system just to do something as basic as trimming on the mainsheet. We have to handle tons of mainsheet load, so that’s why the systems are dominated by hydraulics. These boats produce so much righting moment that the loads on all the sail-control systems—never mind the foil-control systems—are more similar to a 120-foot multihull, in terms of righting moment.

How much of all of this can be automated with software?

The class rule is pretty ­stringent on how we can use feedback loops in our software systems, but everything has to have logic. For example, when Paul pushes a button or a lever on his control box, there is logic running in the background to translate his input into a valve command, or series of ­commands that perform ­multiple functions at a time.

Let’s put the boat in motion. What’s the sequence of ­mechatronic events to get the boat flying?

The AC75 is unique because the boat has no effective initial stability. It gains stability only when it gets flow across the foils. In light air, we can hip-tow the AC75 [with the tender] up to a speed of around 7 knots, where they have steerage and some semblance of righting-moment flow out of the foil. Then we spike the side tow off and they fall off onto whichever tack, ease the sails, and then slowly accelerate the boat.

As they accelerate to about 10 knots, the boat starts generating quite a lot of righting moment from the leeward foil. At this point, they can start sheeting on the sails. They’re always trying to balance the righting moment generated by the foil versus the aero load of the sails to allow us to get to takeoff speed. Where takeoffs can go bad is when they’re either producing too much righting moment versus aero lift or vice versa.

Takeoff, in other words, is a delicate balance between the forces, so one moment they’re sort of sailing in displacement mode at 12 knots or so, and there’s not a lot of load on anything. Once they’ve taken off and they’re doing more than 20 knots, all of a sudden, the loads on the boat increase by a factor of 10.

Explain what’s happening when we see the massive foil arms set in motion.

Andrew, as the foil trimmer, has control of the cant system, so as soon as they’re off the tow and at a decent wind angle, he brings the windward board up, which increases righting moment and gives them the ability to take aero load very early on, while they don’t have a lot of foil load. Then, he effectively puts the leeward board to a target cant angle, which at that time will be set up to provide the right amount of lift and side force for the acceleration. The foil-cant system is one-design; it is run by a battery, so the grinders don’t need to power it. All we have control over is when it moves and how much it moves. The rams are big gears, and as you would imagine, the amount of load the foil arm and the cant system sees is incredible.

How much control then do you have of the active leeward foil when it’s loaded?

We use it dynamically, though the adjustments are relatively small. Think of the foil cant as a gross adjustment and foil flap as the ride-height control.

The accumulator tank volume is one-design as well?

Yes. It’s about a liter and a half, which is hardly any, so that’s why you see the grinding team working the whole time, from the moment they come off the tow to the moment they’re back on tow.

One challenge of the catamarans of San Francisco and Bermuda is the transfer of crew during maneuvers, which is less of a factor with the AC75, right?

There are all sorts of things that must go right with every maneuver. The rates of the maneuvers are very similar to the boats in Bermuda, so for most people, it’ll appear to be a pretty fast rate of turn. There’s a big onus on producing aero lift into and out of the tacks and jibes. They can turn too fast and skid out, which means all of sudden there’s no flow over the foils. So, there is a limit as to how fast they can maneuver.

As far as crew moving from side to side, some teams send people across, while other teams don’t. We’re still working on who goes where, but compared with the AC50, there are fewer people moving through the tack. The people who are moving, however, are the most important, so that makes it relatively tricky, and that’s where the efficiency of every system has to be right.

The post Mechatronics in the America’s Cup appeared first on Sailing World.

As we stand outside the doors of the Pewaukee YC bar, a voice booms over the loudspeakers. “And now…the moment you’ve all been waiting for…the infamous E Scow Blue Chip bar walk.”

As per tradition, the last-place team going into Sunday of the regatta must walk across the club’s bar in their underwear. Unfortunately for my crew and me, no races Friday and a horrific Saturday means we’re the night’s entertainment.

Anyone who’s been in the game long enough knows that sometimes things just go wrong out there on the racecourse, but I’ve never had more go wrong than my first day at the Blue Chip. On the first beat of the first race, our outhaul shackle snapped, and one of our crewmembers sliced open his thumb trying to repair it. Blood trails ran thick enough to make our boat look like a Jackson Pollock painting. We retired and sent our crewmember ashore to get patched up before Race 2. By then the wind was cranking from the southwest, an unfavorable direction for Pewaukee Lake, which at just under 4 square miles of surface area, feels more like a puddle than a lake at times. The race committee posted a five-leg race with the breeze blowing anywhere from 10 to 20 knots with 25-degree shifts. Halfway through the race, we were midfleet before we capsized on a downwind leg, going into lunch without finishing a single race. A 12th in the third race wasn’t enough to get us out of last place, and as we derigged for the day, the text messages were coming in hot.

“Can’t wait to see some action tonight!”

“I hope you brought something sexy!”

“Make sure you practice your dance moves!”

Being in last place wasn’t bad enough. Now we had to humiliate ourselves in front of the entire event. But this would be no half-assed effort. If we had to put on a show, we’d give them a show they would never forget.

As the emcee introduces our team, I take a deep breath, compose myself, and push through the doors of the club, where more than a hundred drunken sailors stand waiting.

“To be clear,” one of the regatta organizers says in my ear. “You don’t have to do this. It’s all at your discretion.”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “If we can’t win the regatta, we’ll win the party.”

And with that, we are fully committed.

The key to a Blue Chip bar walk is layering. As we hop onto the bar, we strip our slacks to reveal radical neon-pink ­joggers with the words “Unicorn Dreams” stitched into the waistbands. “It’s Raining Men” booms out of the speakers, and everywhere I look, I see smartphones capturing every moment. The crowd throws cocktail straws and shouts obscenities from the top of their lungs.

As I reach the middle of the bar, I strip down to my second layer—a pair of multicolored swimming trunks. Any nerves I had before are long gone. Chris Farley comes to mind, and I attempt my best Chippendales impersonation.

Our third layer is a pair of standard tighty-whities, and needless to say, the crowd loves it.

My final layer is the toughest to reveal—a pair of boy’s jockey shorts with a Batman cartoon print. After all that had gone wrong today, the last thing I need is another blowout. This is where we unleash our grand finale—a series of bananas and cucumbers hidden beneath everything. The crowd dodges them as we throw them out to the masses.

By the time we hop down, we are showered with praise.

“Best bar walk I’ve seen,” one of them says. “I did it 15 years ago.”

“You guys killed it. Have a drink on me.”

“Way to go. That banana hit my girlfriend in the face. It was hilarious.”

“Plenty of good sailors have walked that bar. Don’t feel bad!”

And that is where it finally hits home. The E Scow Blue Chip is one of the toughest regattas on the planet. Because it’s an invitational, the best of the best in scow sailing are present. Add that to tight racecourses, massive windshifts, and the tricky nature of sailing on Pewaukee Lake, and you are in for a battle.

Moreover, event organizers invite a “Mystery Guest” each year: pro sailors, Olympians, and America’s Cup legends alike. This year’s Mystery Guest is Malcolm Page, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in the 470. Unlike our team, he had a stellar day, winning two races to lead the regatta. Believe it or not, this is a rarity for most Mystery Guests, some of whom have gotten beaten up by the lake and the E Scow, a few of them having walked the bar themselves.

“These boats are ­something special,” Page says. “They have the tactics of a ­keelboat upwind; downhill, they drive like an 18-foot skiff. This event has been a blast. It’s lived up to everything I had heard beforehand.”

He first learned of the E Scow and Pewaukee Lake from Australia’s John Bertrand, who lived in the area for three years in the 1970s and served as Mystery Guest in 1974. “The people are the best part of the event,” Page says. “We fight as hard as we can on the water; afterward, we’re all good mates.”

The Blue Chip has grown into a cult classic over the years, with the fierce competition nearly outdone by the Midwestern hospitality of Pewaukee. Perhaps the best insight of the Blue Chip experience comes from Gary Jobson, who was the Mystery Guest in 1991. “You’ll do great,” he says. “Just don’t let them overserve you.”

Locals often regale visitors with their Blue Chip memories: how one year Morgan Reeser became so inebriated that he fell down the stairs of his host family’s house with his silver medal still hanging around his neck. Or how Peter Harken took Russell Coutts on a midnight romp through Chicago on Saturday night of the regatta and somehow made it back for the final day’s racing. One year the bar walk got so unruly that a Pewaukee YC board member had to hose down the crowd to get them to disperse.

Yet the heart of the Blue Chip has always been E Scow racing. Dennis Connor calls the E Scow “one of the most refined one-design classes in the world.” He was the Mystery Guest in 1972; though he didn’t win that year, he borrowed a boat in 1977 and qualified the old-fashioned way. That time around, he went home a winner.

Fellow San Diegan Andrew Campbell says: “To judge the quality of E Scow sailors is to index the very best that American sailing has to offer. National, international, world, and Olympic champions and legends are scattered across the historic records.”

In 2011, he became only the second Mystery Guest to win the event, behind 1969’s Gordon Lindeman. Page eventually goes out and captures the regatta, becoming the third Mystery Guest to win in 54 years of competition.

“It’s a tremendous honor to win this event,” he tells the crowd. “I’ll have to shout a challenge to Andrew Campbell to come back and try to recapture his title. It would be a great time—if he’s man enough.”

And the saga continues.

The post Walking the Blue Chip appeared first on Sailing World.